Murder Story of Salnitsa Jews at the Ulanov Polish Cemetery

…On June 10, 1942 at 8 a.m. the entire [Jewish] population of the county seat Ulanov and of the village Salnitsa was collected for the fourth time. In Salnitsa even two people ill with typhus were taken away and also those sick people who could not walk - they were put onto carts and taken to the shooting place. On that day the people went without resistance, assuming that they were going to be sent to work, while the rest, the sick, would be released [home]. At 9 a.m. the mass shooting of the people at the Polish cemetery started. The people were forced to strip near the grave, to enter the grave that had been prepared the night before, and then were ordered to lie face down in a row. The executioners shot the people in the back of the head with submachine-guns. When the row was full, people were ordered to lie down in a second row. The shooting lasted until 2 p.m. and more than 900 people were murdered on that day. After the shooting I saw three carts carrying the clothes of the murder victims. The grave was a large, deep, 30- meter long "kagat" [vegetable storage pit] …

…In December 1941 county gendarmes, commanded by gendarmerie chief German Rikkel [sic] and county [auxiliary] police chief Ivan Goncharenko, arrived at the village of Salnitsa. In the village of Salnitsa they selected 8 [auxiliary] policemen: Pyotr Sobchuk, Aleksei Medinskiy, Ivan Marbevich, Kirill Kiz, and others… After arriving, they surrounded the village, collected about 300 peaceful civilians, including small children and old men and women, and took them to Ulanovo [Ulanov]. An 80-year old woman named Shpolberg, died [on the way]. None of these people returned to the village. In the spring of 1942 the same gendarmerie [unit] arrived and again collected and took to Ulanovo [Ulanov] about 150 people. Not one of these returned either… Afterwards, several more times, individuals and small groups [of people] were taken and sent to Ulanov. In mid-June 1942 I arrived at the Ulanov hospital for dental treatment and was told by the nurse Nadezhda Ivanovna Sobchuk, by the midwife Maria Fyodorovna Zakharzhevskaya, and by junior nurse Polyak that they had seen the entire [Jewish] population of Ulanov and people who had been brought from Salnitsa being collected near the Polish cemetery; some of them were separated and sent to the Kalinovka camp, while the rest were forced to strip and enter a pit, where they were shot with submachine-guns. Together with the nurse Sobchuk, I went to the Polish cemetery to see the grave and saw the large pit that had been dug there, with bodies only lightly covered with earth…