Murder Story of Gorval Jews in the Collective Farm Courtyard in Gorval

In September 1941 a German SS punitive squad unexpectedly arrived at our village. The German fiends armed with machine guns and submachine guns forced 33 people of the Jewish origin to the kolkhoz yard and shot there everybody to death: the German fiends shot with explosive bullets from the submachine guns. The head of a victim Shmuel Itskovich Levin, born in 1874, was all burst into pieces. The German fiends hunted for the peaceful Soviet civilians and wherever they found an unwitting Soviet peasant they shot him. A local peasant Khonya Abramovich Vilenskiy, born in 1877, was going with his bag and rake to gather his harvest of buckwheat at his field. The German dogs [sic] caught him and shot him. Among the 33 shot Jews there were old people and children: Avram Leibovich Kotlyar, born in 1867; Mikhlya Sheptulovna Kunina, born in 1860; Mariya Berkovna Khaytovich, born in 1862; Yakov Yankelevich Babitskiy, born in 1934; Yasha Zalmover born in 1937; Itsyk Zalmover, born in 1940. [The bodies of] All the shot Soviet women, old people and children were left by the German beasts at the Kolkhoz yard until the next day. The following day the German authorities ordered to bury all the corpses of the shot people in four pits at the shooting site. I had to witness all these atrocities of the German executioners in person as I was forced to dig the pits and to bury the corpses of the shot Soviet people.