Murder story of Tarnopol Jews in the Mayka House in Tarnopol

…A[n]…event took place at Maly Rynek, the well known house of Majka, where about 150 people were murdered…

… The following describes the experiences of a young Jewish man who was about 22 years old at the time of the German entrance [into Tarnopol]. "On…July 4 [1941] we learned about the crime of the torture of [German] pilots. The Soviets left behind them in prison three bodies of German pilots, one of whom had his eyes gauged out, another - his tongue cut off, and the third had been burned with hydrochloric acid. Moreover, the cellar full of bodies of those murdered by the NKVD was discovered…; the number of bodies amounted to 200 - the bodies of people who had mysteriously disappeared, men and women, Poles, Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians… The Jews… were accused of being responsible for all of this…. Since such a crime calls for revenge, the first pogrom was begun on July 4, 1941… They took Jewish men out of their apartments and either shot them on the spot or took them to collection points, one of which was at the market [square], in a large building which had belonged to the Ukrainian Maykos [Mayka] brothers. There they were lined up in groups of ten, beaten cruelly, and [then] shot. [Their] bodies were thrown into the cellar…. The "Aryan" population, mostly Ukrainians of both sexes and all ages, including children as young as six, accompanied the [German] soldiers, pointing out every passing Jew and Jewish apartment. They found a common language with the Germans using merely two words: "Hier Jude" (Here is a Jew). At that time those words constituted a death sentence….