Murder story of Derazhnya Jews in the Germanovo Ravine

…. in July [sic for September] 1942 a labor force comprised of [the members of] Ukrainian population, was organized by the German-Fascist authority collaborators [Ukrainian auxiliary policemen] to dig pits in order to prepare [the site] for the shooting of the Jewish residents [of Derazhnya]. Before the murder operation of the Jewish population [two] Soviet civilians Samuil Tsipris and Isaak - I don't remember his last name, got out through the wire of the ghetto in order to check if pits had been prepared for the shooting of the [Jewish] civilians; at that time they were caught by [Ukrainian auxiliary] policemen Podnevich [and] Richenskyi who took them … and shot them to death near the brick factory of the town of Derazhnya. Three months later [sic, in the same month] a murder operation of the Jewish residents in which several Germans and over 200 German-Fascist collaborators participated began…. These persons themselves beat, forced to strip naked, robbed, and shot to death these [Jewish] Soviet civilians. I can confirm several facts, for example: 1. The policeman Rechenskyi [during the murder operation] took a child from a women, her name was Tsilya Basin and killed the child, [then] took money and gold from her and afterwards killed her.… The murder operation was carried out [as follows:] the abovementioned Ukrainian policemen took Jewish men, women and children in columns from the ghetto … [and brought them] near the brick factory of the town of Derazhnya, where they forced them to strip naked and shot them to death totally naked; in most cases the children were thrown alive [into the pit].… After the murder operation all [the Jewish] property that had been left, namely: valuables, furniture, food products, money in gold, was taken by the local [Ukrainian] authority to the German authorities. Most of the property was taken by the German Fascist authorities to an unknown destination, while the rest was divided between their collaborators…. All [the remaining] [Jewish] houses and furniture were allocated by the German authorities for disposal by the local authority….

… During the temporary occupation of the town of Derazhnya and the County, on July 1941 the German-Fascist authorities … registered the Jewish population [of the town], first of all the skilled workers:… As can be seen from the list, the first time the occupation authorities registered 1,848 [Jews] - 579 from 1 month to 14 years old, 715 work-capable people of both sexes, and 554 people considered unfit for work, including paraplegics. Afterwards the Jewish population was driven into a place referred to as a "ghetto". … On the orders of Deutchman and Scholtz, the heads of the Gendarmerie, in the second half of September 1942 that place, the so-called ghetto where the Soviet citizens were being held, was surrounded. On the first day over 1,500 civilians [Jews] of both sexes, including elderly people and infants, were shot to death. Residents of the town of Derazhnya said that the people were naked when they were shot; for many days after the shooting blood seeped through the ground, the cries [of victims who were still alive] were heard, and the earth was heaving. In February 1943 the snow that covered the blood-soaked earth at the site of the graves was crimson, even though the shooting had taken place in autumn. A total of 3,810 victims were shot to death… . When it visited the site where the Soviet civilians were shot, the commission carried out an excavation at the atrocity site, [the site of] the barbaric reprisal by the German-Fascist bandits and their accomplices against the Soviet civilians of the town of Derazhnya and the County, [and] found that 4 graves of Soviet civilians who had been shot to death were located in the north-east area of Derazhnya town, … at the foot of so-called Germanovo ravine…. After the graves (pits of about 1 x 1.5 meters) were opened, bodies were found lying accurately in rows, face down, with their arms bent at the elbows. All the bodies were found facing eastward with a gun-shot wounds in the head. This indicates that the victims were forced to lie on top of each other and were shot to death in that position. Broken rifle butts were found in the pits, indicating the use of force with a blunt weapon.…