Murder Story of Lwów Jews in Kajserwald

It was autumn 1941. The Germans then organized a Jewish district (ghetto) in Lwów. According to an order, the Jews were required to move into the district by 14 December 1941. During the three weeks before then the Jews had to find themselves an apartment to move to in the ghetto. Jews were allowed to enter the ghetto only via Peltewna Street, which at one place passed under a railway bridge. At that place Gestapo-men, SS-men, and Ukrainian Schupo men organized the so-called “bridge operation,” which lasted several weeks, of which the most bloody were the first two weeks. The Hitlerites personally examined the belongings of Jews who were moving in. The “customs” control consisted of confiscating valuables and killing their owners. Before that, they [the Jews] had to run a gaunlet, where they were beaten with sticks. After more people were collected, they were taken to Piaskowa Skala (Sandy Bluff) behind the Lyczakowski cemetery and shot there. They were mostly elderly men and women, the ill and the disabled. Several thousand Jews of Lwów were murdered in this operation....

...The elderly Jews, those first victims of organized legal terror, humbly and calmly parted with their lives and their loved ones. Their grown children, those who still remained alive, bid good-bye to their parents without crying or complaining. The few instances in which children did not want to part with their parents and shared their fate were rare and truly exceptional. That was how Jews went to their death, like cattle to slaughter. The belief prevailed that the elderly were to be sacrificed if the core of the community was to be saved. Children looked on with chilly resignation and dull mute pain while their parents were being taken away for slaughter. Trucks manned by a Gestapo man and two Ukrainian SS wearing black uniforms and helmets, stopped in front of houses in order to seize anyone who looked old or was shabbily dressed, [or otherwise stood out]. In the conditions in which they lived, Jews still in their thirties looked prematurely old and thus became victims. Whoever summoned the courage to protest, to declare that things should change, was shot dead on the spot, on the street, at home, or in bed. The sick and the paralytics were carried outside to the trucks by their nearest and dearest under the threat of a gun. Those on the street who hesitated entering a truck were thrown into it like logs. They were driven to the site of execution in Lyczakow, a suburb of Lwow, on the so-called Piaski or "sands" after first being taken to collection points where they had to undress and were subjected to cruel tortures. Next, they were driven in open trucks to the execution site... At the site of execution, the procedure was brief. The naked condemned were driven with whips, shot down en masse with machine-guns, and buried on the spot in mass graves...

…The urban police posts were located at Lemberg's [Lwów's] bridges, in connection with the establishment of a ghetto, to control the movement between the city and the ghetto. The young people detained there … were sent to camps, while the elderly, mostly old men, were shot in the Lemberg [Lwów] suburb of Ljazahow [sic, for Lyczakow], [at] Piaski [Piaskownia]….