Murder story of Raygorod Jews in the Raygorod Forest

…We did not stay long in this camp [Nizhnyaya Krapivnaya]. On May 26 [1942] we were hurriedly registered and everyone had to write down his age. It was written there and everyone wrote it down truthfully, we did not know what would be better [if we told the truth or lied]. We were told we were going to be taken home. My mother was then in her 46th year and I in my 14th year [sic]. We wrote down how old we really were. On May 27 [1942] names were called out: who was staying in the camp, who was going to work. I stayed in the camp with my mother. At that moment two covered trucks drove up. QUESTION: Only the young and old people stayed in the camp? ANSWER: Yes. The middle-aged ones went, the younger and older ones stayed in the camp. When [the trucks] arrived and SS-men in black uniforms got out, it became clear that death had come for us. They began to take us from the camp. I was quite a tall girl, I was in my 15th year [sic], I was quite tall and strong and the Germans apparently thought that I could work so they pushed me out of this column. Thus, I remained in the camp, while the rest…I was already literally squeezed into the truck, but he [a German] jerked me out. I had braids, so that I flew backwards hitting my head against the wall of the camp. They were taken away. My mother managed to shout to me: "Dear daughter, you do not have a mother anymore! God bless you." QUESTION: And your father? ANSWER: My father was in Teplik. That is another story. They [those taken from the Nizhnyaya Krapivnaya camp] were taken (as we found out later, this was on May 26) to Raygorod and brought to the camp where I had been, where they were joined by people like themselves - children and elderly people, and on the 27th, but this was in June, not in May, on the 27th she [her mother] was shot in the Raygorod forest…

…The next day, June 27, we were lined up and the selection started: older people and those of an even more advanced age, the ill, and small children [were put] to one side, and the healthy, able-bodied adults - to the other. I, a 15-year old girl, thin, and of short stature, tried to go with [my] elderly parents and with [my] sisters, who had managed to hide behind our parents, but a German soldier approached, looked at me, took me by the arm and pulled me toward the other column despite my desperate protests and the cries and tears of my mother, to which he paid no attention. As paradoxical as it sounds, in that way he saved my life, without intending to do so. Our column was taken out of the camp to a stone quarry, while the other column, in which my entire family was, was led through the entire village to the forest, guarded by Germans and [local] policemen. Later I learned from Liza, a Russian woman whose family lived on the village's outskirts near the forest, that my father had tried to escape in order to find me but, when he left the column, he was shot by a guard. Wounded, he was thrown onto a cart with ill old people and, when they were brought to the forest, all of them were thrown into a pit prepared in advance and shot while they were lying there in the pit. The whole column that my family was in was taken to the same pit and [the people] were forced to strip naked and then shot. The next day in the village the [local] policemen sold the clothes of those who had been murdered. For five days after the pogrom blood rose to the surface of the ground, the earth was heaving, and moans were heard from time to time from the huge pit…