Murder story of Volodarsk Volynskiy Jews in the Volodarsk Volynskiy Area

…September 1941 proved to be the bloodiest month of the entire occupation period.… The Jewish population was indiscriminately slaughtered in the northwestern suburbs of the county center, to the left of the road to the village of Dashinka. Here, the Hitlerites and their loyal henchmen, the mercenary policemen, committed yet another atrocity against the innocent civilians. Picture this terrible image of the occupation days: From the village center, where the unfortunates had been assembled, along the streets of Volodarsk stretched a mournful column of elderly people, children, and women with infants in their arms. These wretches were walking submissively to the place where they would be brutally slaughtered. From time to time, the desperate screams of a teenage girl could be heard. They may have issued from the throat of the ten-year-old Riva Bronsteing, who guessed where the executioners were taking them. The young mothers hugged their babies more tightly to their chests. The policemen stabbed them [the babies] with the bayonets of their rifles. Then, the babies - bleeding and crying from the terrible pain, but still alive - were thrown into the hell pits right in front of their mothers and grandmothers, who went insane with horror. Remember the site of the Holocaust in Goroshki. It is the left side of the road to Dashinka, straight across from the shooting site of [Soviet] activists and local Communists. From the testimony of the 84-year-old Olga Yakovlevna Shevchuk, who was born in Volodarsk Volynskiy: "The men were forced to dig a deep grave pit. During one of the shootings, a young black-haired woman begged the killers to spare her, since she was a teacher, and had not done anything wrong. To prevent panic among the doomed people, the policemen killed her first. To save bullets, the sick and elderly people and the children were stabbed and thrown into the pit alive, on top of the mass of bodies. Residents of the village and the county claimed that the ground over the mass grave had been heaving for several days and nights afterward. Nartsiza Ivanovna Gusakovskaya, who lived in the village of Kruk, would carry the memory of the Fascist atrocities for the rest of her life. On that September day in 1941, she (a five-year-old girl) went with her mother, Leontiniya Burikovskaya, from the village of Ivanovka to the county center, to visit her aunt Antonina. On the outskirts of Volodarsk Volinskiy, they beheld a terrible scene: the head of a shot woman with long black hair was sticking out of the ground, and she held a dead baby in her arms. Pieces of clothing, shoes, and toys were scattered about. People said that the ground over the pit had subsequently been flattened with a tractor. In those autumn days, the following innocent children from the village, aged 6-10, died as martyrs: Misha Istor, Chaya Vainblat, Ushar Birma from Rizhany.… According to the most recent data, several hundred civilians of Jewish origin were murdered at that site.

We are now 3 kilometers west of Volodarsk Volynskiy, at the site where the shooting took place. The road goes on westward, to the village of Barashi. The Jews were shot on the left side [of the road], while the communists and Soviet activists were shot on its right side. The shootings peaked in the spring of 1942. Most of them [the Jews] were elderly people, women, and children. As many as 350 people were shot. I think these Jews were not only from Volodarsk Volynskiy, but also from other settlements in the county. Some of them may have been reburied later at the Jewish cemetery. The shooting was carried out by the local police, headed by Otto Iling …In the 1950s, before the reburial of the remains, there was an exhumation that turned up numerous children's shoes, women's accessories, and toys. This proved that there had been a premeditated extermination of the Jews.