Murder Story of Teplik Jews at the Former Soap-Boiling Facility in the Teplik Area

…Until May 1942 the able-bodied [inmates of the Teplik ghetto] were driven daily to construct roads, and in May the first large pogrom occurred in the ghetto during which women, elderly people, [and] children were brutally murdered. Especially brutal were the Ukrainian police, headed by Kotyar, the former director of studies of my school. I too was among those shot, but since I was [only] wounded I was able to crawl out of the pit containing the bodies and to reach the ghetto, where I was helped by the Jews who had survived [i.e., had not been murdered] because they were artisans…

…On May 27, 1942, at dawn, everyone was driven out of their houses in the ghetto and taken to a pit. On that ill-fated morning approximately 1,000 people - adults and children - were murdered only because they were Jews. Only those who carried out this murder operation knew the precise number of the murdered… In August 1941 a concentration camp was set up in buildings (where before the revolution there were study houses and synagogues and after the revolution a cinema and a club with a library). Soon captured Red Army soldiers were forced into it; at that time it served as a transit point before the prisoners of war were sent to Germany. It was they who were forced to dig a pit behind our old park but, after they were taken away, local Ukrainians continued to dig the pit. The place where the pit was dug was considered a foul one that was referred to as "the fat boiler": there are the bones of dead cattle and of dogs that had been rounded up were processed into fat to make soap. This pit was intended to be (and, indeed, became) the mass grave of almost all of Teplik's Jews…