Murder Story of Lubieszów Jews in Sudcze

… On July 24-25, 1941 a Gestapo [unit, sic] that had… arrived in Lubieszów arrested 60 Jewish men, former Soviet officials, and also [some] religious Jews – rabbis and others, [and] abused them. [This was done] by all possible methods – thus … they [Germans] cut off the hair from the heads and beards [of Jews] and made these helpless Jews eat this hair; after the abuse the arrested [Jews] were taken to the village of Sudcze, … where they were shot to death. … The committee also established that the main perpetrators of the mass annihilation of the [Jewish] residents of Lubieszów County were the Gebietskommissar of Kamień Koszyrski Michaelis and his accomplices Ukrainian auxiliary policemen….

We, the undersigned… established [the following]: 2. …that… the annihilation of civilians on the territory of the Lubieszów County was carried out under the leadership of the Gebietskommissar of Kamień Koszyrski [Fritz] Michaelis and his accomplices…. 3. …the mass annihilation of civilians on the territory of the Lubieszów County was carried out by the German Fascist occupiers and their accomplices at different times and in different locations, namely: … July 24-25, 1941 near the village of Sudcze....

… Beyond the village of Sudcze, … in August [July] 1941 as many as 80 Jews were shot to death....Pavel Lyudishevskyi, a resident of the village of Lubeszów, showed [me?] those graves. At that time Pavel was … a driver. …

...At the end of July 1941, as many as 50 Gestapo [sic] - cavalry men who arrived in Lubieszów began to arrest Soviet officials of Jewish nationality, thus they arrested up to 60 [men], among them … Rabbi Vein [i.e. Weingarten] and his two sons, who worked [under the Soviets] as accountants, and also people who held positions in the Jewish community, who had to clean the horses [of the Germans], afterwards the Gestapo men cut off - shaved off their beards and made them eat the hair from their beards. After a day, under the pretext that they [Jews] were going to be sent for work, they were ordered to take shovels and to go to the village of Sudcze, where they were forced to dig a pit and as many as 60 people were shot to death.…

… On August 5 [15], 1941 the Gebietskommissar [Fritz Michaelis] arrived with up to 85 Cossacks [i.e. Ukrainian auxiliary] policemen from Kamień Koszyrski, surrounded the ghetto, and ordered all [the inmates] to assemble at the square … where all of them were called according to a list. Artisans without children [were put] to one side, the remaining Jews -- to the other side. The artisans were sent separately [to the workshop], while the others began to suffer abuse.… These remaining 1,100 people were taken to the synagogue [sic], where they were forced to strip naked. Some Jews, as many as 230, escaped, but the other 870 were taken to pits [apparently near the village of Sudcze] that they themselves had been forced to dig and were shot to death by the Cossacks [Ukrainian auxiliary policemen, sic]….