Murder Story of Raduń Jews at the Raduń Jewish Cemetery

... A new day dawned, the first day of the week, 23 Iyar (10 May), 1942. In the early hours of the morning, the Germans and the police burst into the houses of the ghetto, and, according to some criteria of their own, chose some hundred hearty men, among them Father, handed them shovels, and led them away westward, towards Grodno.... The moving stream of people pushing and shoving like a whirlpool drove me forward.... Families and more families, assembled together and separated, around a father or a mother, women and men, the elderly and the little ones, babies in arms and still suckling, hordes of people pushing and marching toward the market square. While we were walking, my brother told me that the Germans had discovered them in their hiding place and had beaten them violently. Mother walked with bowed head, suffering and pain stamped on her face, while her lips were repeating: 'Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is one God'. From time to time she would turn to us, saying: 'Children, say "Hear, O Israel!" and we shall die like Jews, as martyrs'.... We had been led for a distance of some two kilometers on the highway leading to Grodno, until we digressed leftward on to a dirt road, and we came to the town's cemetery... Line after line and group after group moved forward: the old people and the little ones, men and women were led to the edge of the pit and stripped of their clothing…. A round of shots rang out, and the ring of naked Jews standing at the edge of the pit fell into it while they were still breathing, before they surrendered their souls to their Maker. Here a father holding his child's hand, and there a mother clasping her infant to her breast – all fell upon one another into the dug-out hole. On top of the mounded earth, the heaps of clothing piled up, while below, the heap of warm and pulsating bodies grew higher. All this was happening in broad daylight, with the sun setting in the west, as it does each day....