Murder Story of Buda Koshelevo Jews at Krasnyi Kurgan

I was born in Buda-Koshelevo in the same house I live in today. Before the war I was attending school. There were many Jews in town before the war. They had fled here before the war. In general, such families were not alone, but one family with many children rented a place next to us. They had five children. We became very close. At first they spoke in Polish but soon they shifted to Russian. They had a daughter named Chaya, who became our friend. Her mother was young but her father was old. The mother said: "Let's evacuate further" but the father didn't want to: it was already hard for him. When the war began, they, along with all the other Jews were put into the school building. Chaya always came to us from the school. They were allowed to come during the daytime but had to return at a set time. Everyone was cold and hungry, Chaya came to us poorly dressed, wearing socks instead of shoes. We always sat on the stove. We ate what we had and gave her some.What we had for ourselves was potatoes so we gave her some, along with something else.... She came the last time, intending to leave already. We said: "Chaya, stay. Spend the night with us!" (She would spend the night with us sometimes.) "No, I didn't tell Mama that I wouldn't come home and she will be very worried." She knocked at every window and said: "Good-bye!{or "Until we meet again!]" Papa was cutting wood in the yard. She also went up to him and said: "Good-bye." The next morning they [the Jews] were taken to be shot. We didn't see or even know how they were taken. They had a long way ahead of them. They probably knew that they were going to be shot and tore their collars or sleeves or shoes.... A constant stream of SS-men, probably those who did the shooting, came to us from that murder site. They also had death-heads on their caps. Perhaps two, I don't rememeber. They were smiling, saying: 'Jud - kaput!' ["The end of the Jews!"], pointing at the sky.... We arrived and it was terrible there. Such a large anti-tank trench. And deep! I believe that the Jews were forced to their knees there and were shot in the back, along the lrngth of the trench. We saw that the pit had not been coverrf but was somewhat powdered with snow. There were no policemen there. The people [i.e., bodies] in the pit were clothed.Tthey lay in rows; at the end there lay my classmate Sima Reinlib. She and her grandfather were not covered at all. A woman came there to take their clothing off them. She had a shovel. With the shovel she cleared away the snow in order to see what was best.... It was possible to look at this. One of our overshoes fell into the pit. It would have been terrible to climb down into the pit so we asked her: "Throw us up the overshoe so we can go home!" But she was not willing to do so. Finally, she tossed it up to us and we went home. At home we were given hell for going there. Afterward, for two years, that pit and the people shot there were constantly before my eyes. Dasha Chernyak and some of the boys in my class also perished in that pit.