Murder Story of Bogdanovka Jews at the Old Well in Bogdanovka

... On September 24, 1942, 5 trucks arrived in the Bogdanovka village; they came from Kurskaya village. On the same day German soldiers cordoned off the village. No one was permitted to enter or to leave the village; those who tried to leave the village were arrested and taken to the German headquarters. At 12 noon of September 24, 1942, all the men who were fit to work were ordered by the local German commander to appear at the German headquarters. He ordered them to reconstruct a destroyed well, which had been constructed in 1937. The well was approximately half a kilometer east of the village. Afterward, armed soldiers guarded some of the arrested men in the area of the well. After the commander of the Germans arrived at the well with the [forced] laborers, he ordered the collaborator forces, under the direction of the local police chief, that traitor to the homeland of the village of Bogdanovka, to inform the rest of the civilian population to prepare their best possessions ,up to 40 kilograms per person, to prepare food for 5 days, to put on their best clothes, and to gather at eight o’clock. All of them were collected and forced into the building of the middle school. At the same the authorities told to the civilians that they were going to be resettled in Ukraine, where they would continue to live. The civilians had to stay there for a night under heavy armed guard. On the morning of September 25, 1942, the commander of the murder squad arrived and gave the order to the head of the police, the traitor to our the homeland P.I.Rybalka to collect all the men and put them onto army trucks, and to deliver them to a newly rebuild old well. At the moment they arrived at the well,[of the machine-gun] shots fire] were heard from the school, where those Jews -- the old men, old women, women, and children -- still at the school began to scream and to faint. Then the Hitlerite butchers put the remaining elderly men and women who could not walk onto trucks, while the others had to walk to their place of execution. The civilians from the village were shot at the murder site. At first the German-fascist executioners shot the men with machine-gus, then they shot the women; a strange ointment applied to the lips was used to poison the rest of the people. The remaining children were thrown alive into the pit. The German-fascist executioners forced the victims to undress to their underwear before their execution. The Hitlerite bandits took all their belongings and even the clothes which had been taken from the victims....