Murder Story of Wołożyn Jews at the Wołożyn Old Jewish Cemetery

"On the 23rd day of the month of Iyar in the year tsh"b (May 10, 1942), at 5 a.m., the SS men and Polish and Belorussian policemen surrounded the ghetto. They began by killing Yohanan Klein and Yitzhak Naroshevich, two Jewish policemen who were sta tioned at the ghetto entrance. Then they shot at other Jews, many of whom fell dead. They took the inmates [of the ghetto] to a smithy that had been built by the Soviets on Mościcki Street, not far from the synagogue. Many Jews were locked up in that building. Outside the murderers placed chairs and a table with a choice of liquors. Around them policemen and SS men, satisfied, even cheerful, were sitting, holding machine-guns. Between drinks, they shot into the building to silence the crying of the children and the screams of the adults. […] The Gendarmerie chief called Aharon Kamenetskii, who was a Judenrat member, and ordered him to polish his boots. But as soon as Kamenetskii bent down, the chief shot him. When those imprisoned there saw this murder, a commotion began and some people tried to escape by breaking out through the roof. The murderers shot at them. However, some Jews, including Mordecai Mlot, managed to escape. On that very hot day they kept those imprisoned crowded together from five in the morning until five in the afternoon. Then they took them out in groups, children separately and men with women separately. Some Jews went on their last way wrapped in prayer shawls and wearing phylacteries. The Jews were led on purpose via streets where Christians lived in order to entertain the non-Jews with the view of the final fall of their Jewish 'enemies.' A group of young men and girls went out onto the streets with accordions, playing, enthusiastically singing happy songs, and dancing. They surrounded us and made fun of us. Those doomed to death were taken to the house that had belonged to Buława, close to the Jewish cemetery. There the murderers killed the Jews with automatic weapons. After the massacre they set the house on fire. Thus, so the Jews of Volozhin ascended to heaven in flames."