Murder story of Skorodnoye Jews in the Skorodnoye Forest

It was a sunny summer morning in 1941, when the Germans were already with us. Suddenly, we heard shots coming from the end of the village, at the edge of the forest. It was about 300 meters from my house. People ran there. I went along with them. There, policemen from the village of Uzda were shooting three residents of the Nagoreloye railway station. They were a respected Jewish family named Kizin. Prior to the war, the head of the family had operated a small beer parlor at the former Nagoreloye border crossing. He lived near the railway station, and his house still stands there at the beginning of the street that leads to the water pump (the present-say Shkolnaya Street). I knew the proprietor very well, and he was known to everybody, since people would come to him to drink beer – it was fresh, tasty, and clear. He was a good man. When the war broke out, he and his family suddenly vanished somewhere. People in our village said that the Germans had started searching for Jews and shooting them all over the occupied territory. It turned out that the Kizin family had gone into hiding from the German occupiers in a forest tract near our village, the so-called Yosavshchina, where the village of Yosavka used to be. Vasil Churyla, a resident of the village of Raskashichi, which was already part of the Uzda County, agreed to shelter the Kizins from the Germans. He provided them with a dugout shelter, and this was where they stayed. We, the village residents, were completely unaware of the fact that they were hiding a stone's throw from here. The dugout shelter lay right across the field at the edge of the forest, about a kilometer away. I think that their rescuer, Vasil Churyla, took money in exchange for this service. Sometime later, Vasil Churyla attended a baptism celebration. There, having drunk a little, he "confidentially" told a friend of his that he was sheltering a Jewish family from Nagoreloye in the forest near the village of Skorodnoye. That "confidential" conversation was overheard by someone whose brother served the Germans as a policeman in Uzda. On the following day, this person went to Uzda and told his brother everything he had heard from Vasil Churyla. In the morning, policemen suddenly showed up at Vasil Churyla's home and ordered him to show them where the hidden Jews were, threatening to massacre him and his family should he refuse. He led them to the dugout shelter in the woods. The policemen arrested the Jews, took them to the edge of the forest, and shot them. Residents of the village of Skorodnoye were ordered to dig a pit and bury the Jews, which was done very quickly. The police shot the shopkeeper G.M. Kizin, his pregnant wife M.E. Kizina, and their little son S.G. Kizin.