Murder story of Pogrebishche Jews in the Rzhevusskaya Forest

On October 18, 1941 almost all of the Jews of Pogrebishche, about 1,300 people of all ages and both sexes, were forcefully driven out of their houses and taken to the building that before the war had been a county recruiting office, from which they were taken by truck to the vicinity of the Rzhevusskaya railway station, about 2 kilometers from Pogrebishche. There, in a pine forest, the Jews were shot in the back of the head at several pits. The perpetrators of this massacre were members of a detachment of Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C and local auxiliary policemen. In the course of the days following the massacre about 400 Jews from Pogrebishche and from surrounding localities who had tried unsuccessfully to escape were also taken to the forest near Rzhevusskaya station and shot. An unknown number of Jews from Pogrebishche and the surrounding area, including the town of Dzyunkov, who had been incarcerated in the Pogrebishche ghetto after the October 1941 massacre, were murdered in the forest near Rzhevusskaya in June 1942. The perpetrators of this massacre were probably German rural and local auxiliary policemen.