Murder Story of Dywin Jews at the Dywin Ghetto Carpentry Workshop

From the first days of the temporary occupation of the county by the German–Fascist occupiers and their collaborators occasional shootings of Jews were carried out. Later, i.e. in 1942, mass abuse of the Jewish population began. …After committing outrages in the ghetto, the German-Fascist occupiers began the mass annihilation of the Jewish population. The German-Fascist invaders forced the innocent civilians of Dywin village to dig large pits. After that the Jewish population of the ghetto was forced to strip naked and to lie facedown in the pits. A German executioner kept walking over the still alive people [in the pit] and shooting them in the head with a sub-machinegun. He shot them to death and then proceeded to the next layer [of victims], repeating the procedure mentioned above until the pit was full. During the shooting the German executioner did not count how many Soviet civilians he shot to death, but he did count the number of bullets he had used when the pit was filled with half-dead Jews; that German cannibal ordered that the pit be covered with sand. When the layer of sand had reached 30 meters it was possible to see the earth heaving since [some of] the Soviet people [civilians] were still breathing.

On August 12, 1942 many Germans arrived in Dywin by car. They surrounded the Jewish ghetto where there were Jews from all of Dywiń County. They had been brought from the villages of the county to join the Jews from Dywiń village. Altogether, there were over a thousand Jews in the ghetto. The Jewish carpenters were collected and ordered to nail shut the windows of the ghetto carpentry workshop that was located near the old cemetery on Ratnenskaya Street. As soon as the windows had been nailed shut, the Germans collected all the men from the ghetto and put them in the above-mentioned workshop. The women and the children were forced into the Jewish synagogue. After that, the Germans mobilized some Dywin peasants and forced them to dig a pit 60-70 meters from the workshop. The peasants were busy digging the pit the whole night until 8 a.m. There were about thirty peasants. As soon as the pit had been dug, the Germans ordered the peasants to go home. As soon as the peasants left, the Germans stationed guards around the pit and two rows of German soldiers between the workshop and the pit. Then they made the Jews strip naked and forced them, absolutely naked, from the workshop towards the pit, where they were shot with sub-machineguns. The Jewish men were shot until midday, and then the women and the children were brought from the synagogue. When the women and the children were put into the building and they saw the men's clothes inside , wild, heart-breaking screams could be heard. The Germans also forced the women and children to strip and took them to the pit naked. The 5-6 year-old children did not go to the pit since they saw people being shot there in the pit. The Germans pushed them [the children] or threw them into the pit. The murder of the Jews lasted the whole day of August 13, 1942. After the Jews were shot, the Germans took nine Poles, whom they also forced to strip naked, and shot them to death in the same pit where the Jews had been shot.