Murder Story of Kislovodsk Jews in the Mt. Koltso Area

... One day, early in the morning, School No. 16 was surrounded by the police. Half an hour later four vehicles arrived and took away only the men. After some time the same vehicles returned: the women were taken while the children were grabbed by their hair or by the scruff of the neck and thrown into the vehicles like puppies. They were taken across the Podkumok River and then shot with submachine-guns. Some women were holding babies in their arms. The children were of different ages - from infants to 15 – 16 year olds. Altogether there were 47 children. Some Jews fell into the ravine while still alive. The Germans blew up the edge of the ravine to cover the people with earth. Even after that the arms of some of the unfortunates were sticking out from under the earth. In their death throes they [some victims] tried to break free from under the earth, but the Germans kept walking along the edge [of the ravine] and shooting them to death....

... From August 24, 1942 Isaak Moiseevich Gertsberg, born in 1900 in Berdichev, a Jew by origin, was mobilized to work in his trade in a Gestapo workshop together with some others – the Jewish shoemakers Lipman and Khaykin and the Jewish tailors Geller, Gorodetskiy, and Gordon - to supply their services to the Gestapo staff. On January 7, 1942, at midnight, the Gestapo people came. They ordered people to get dressed, supposedly to go to Pyatigorsk to do some urgent work. His [Isaak Moiseevich's] wife Chaya Yakovlevna Gertsberg, who was born in 1896, his daughter Yulia, who was born in 1937, and his adopted daughter Raisa Tsiris, who was born in 1936, were ordered to go with him. On January 11, 1943 their bodies were found, together with the body of Geller and his daughter, and Gorodetskiy and his wife, in the area of Koltso Mountain....

... Around September 6, 1942, in the morning, four more policemen arrived from the Gestapo. The guard, which numbered a total of eight people [the policemen] rounded up those in the building and began to prepare to transport the people from the school. First a group of men was loaded onto a truck and driven away…. When we returned, we did not find anyone at the school. The neighbors told me that all the people had been taken from the school by truck across the Podkumok River toward Koltso Mountain. That morning I heard shots and the sound of an explosion. I figured that the shooting was taking place in the ravine, but I myself did not see the shooting.… One German who spoke good Russian asked me where the two remaining Jews were. Then they took a [Jewish] girl and put her onto the truck…. The truck set off toward Koltso Mountain....

... In the area of the gardens of the Kirov kolkhoz were discovered 26 corpses washed down [after a heavy rain] from a ravine near the Podkumok River. Two of them were those of men, fifteen - of women, and nine - of children from 2 to 12 years old…. Taking that into consideration, a trench, located 250 meters from the road leading from Kislovodsk to Pervomayskiy village, in the vicinity of Koltso Mountain, was examined. On June 26-29, 1943 excavations were carried out in the location mentioned [above]. As a result 130 corpses were discovered. Thirty five of them belonged to children from four months to fifteen years old…. On July 2, 1943, in the course of the excavation of some trenches close to the first one … a trench was found located four hundred meters to the west of the site of the initial excavations and a hundred meters from the Kislovodsk – Pervomayskiy Village road, in the vicinity of Koltso Mountain. During further excavation of that place, carried out between July 2 and 7, 1943, 166 corpses were discovered. Of them 35 bodies were those of children of four months old and above, ninety – of women, and forty one - of men. In the course of an examination of the clothes [of the victims] some documents were found: 1. the [internal] passport … of Fanya Chaimovana Ovseevich, born in 1900, evacuated from the Krasnodar District; 2. the passport ... of Moyshe Avrumovich Guralnik, born in 1886, resident of Birobidzhan; 3. the passport … of Isaak Moiseevich Ovseevich, born in 1895 in Zagory (Lithania); 4. the passport … of Ilya Solomonovich Vagner, born in 1897 in Pavlograd, registered [also] in the passport is his dependant daughter Sofiya, born in 1929; 5. the passport … of Ella Mendelevna Stiskina, born in 1896 in the Chernigov District, an evacuee….; Thus, as the result of the excavation that lasted from June 26 to July 7, 1943 and on the basis of the witness testimonies, the conclusion was drawn that the 322 corpses exhumed from the two ravines were of Soviet civilians who had been shot in the area of Koltso Mountain in September 1942, following the order of Pool [sic], the German military commandant in Kislovodsk, and Velben, the Gestapo head. [Later] ... the corpses were buried in a mass grave near the ravines mentioned above....