Murder Story of Khmelevoye Jews at the Khmelevoye Machine Tractor Station

Thus, it was stated that in November 1941 137 people of Jewish origin - women, men, and children - were collected by the police. They were kept starving for five days under reinforced guard. On the sixth day they were taken to the Khmelevoye Machine Tractor Station. There from midnight until 3 a.m. they were tormented and shot, [some were] raped or had their eyes gauged out or their ears and noses cut off; some of them had their bellies ripped open. After these brutal deeds all the corpses were thrown into a 35-meter-deep well that was later closed with stones. In order to intimidate the population of Khmelevoye County with their brutal deeds, in December 1941 the following police members: […]deputy head of the county [police] Gapon, senior investigator Ivan Ryabets, police inspector Nikolay Bespalov, the policemen Pavel Yurchenko and Menchenko, and others summoned the Jew Lenetskiy from where he was being held to the office of Police Chief Sokurenko. Ryabets and Gapon knocked his teeth out, cut his nose off, and later wrote on a board: "This Jew was hanged for provocation and connections with the Bolsheviks." After that, at 1 a.m., he was hanged on a telegraph pole in the center of Khmelevoye, where he remained hanging for three days.