Murder story of Czernawczyce Jews in the Dichka Grazing Area

I lived in Czarnawczyce [then]. Around October 1943, Rachkovskiy, the soltys [headman] of Czarnawczyce, came up to me, informed me that I had been assigned a job, and told me to bring along a shovel. I was one of a team of twelve workers assembled and taken beyond Czarnawczyce, in the direction of the Kamenetskoye road, to a place in the fields known as "Dichka". This soltys, Rachkovskiy, ordered us to dig a pit 6 meters long, 3 meters wide, and 2 meters deep. We set to our task. Sometime later, a car arrived [and stopped] next to us. Some Gestapo Germans with armbands, accompanied by an interpreter (an ethnic German from the Volga German Republic [The Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic]), got out of the car. They asked us how soon our job would be done. When we told them that it would take some time, since the soil was rocky, they informed us via the interpreter that we had only an hour and a half to finish the job, and that, if we were not done by then, we would be shot in the pit. Therefore, we started working as hard as we could. Exactly an hour and a half later, a tractor with a large deck arrived. It was loaded with Jewish women, with one child – a boy of 7-8 years – among them. The tractor was followed by that same car, with those same Germans in it. They ordered all the women to strip naked, and even took something out of their hair. They tossed all the clothes, underwear, and everything else into a pile. In the corner of the pit, there was a slope. The Germans, those from the Volga region, ordered the women (in Russian) to lie down with their feet toward the walls of the pit and their heads toward its center, forming regular rows. This way, everybody went along quietly, and the submachine gunners carried out the order of that beast – that scoundrel. From above, two Gestapo men shot them calmly, changing the cartridges. The mother, holding the child by the hand, went into the grave together with the others. Thus, everyone was shot, and the squad of approximately five policemen who had surrounded the grave during the shooting left the area. The Germans stayed next to the pit, while we, the twelve of us, were lying in another small pit about fifteen meters from there. The Germans were sitting near the pit, smoking and laughing about something. One of us could not bear watching this horrible scene of brutality and atrocity and the serenity of these beasts. That person walked about 200 meters away, lay face down on the ground, and wept. Half an hour later, the tractor returned. This time, there were about seven men on it, as well as women. Some of the men were residents of Czarnawczyce: Goldberg, I do not remember his first name; Yudel Iyerusalimskiy, and Leyzer Tyshlik. This group was shot in the same way, and the last three men were forced to load the clothes of their murdered fellows onto the deck and add their own clothes to the pile. They were then shot. The last victim, Iyerusalimskiy, closed his eyes and jumped into the pit. He was shot together with the others, but he [his body] did not lie in the proper way, and one of the Gestapo men who had not taken part in the shooting shouted in Russian that everybody must lie properly. When the horrible slaughter of the innocents was over, the Germans called us over and ordered us to cover the pit, so that nobody would notice. We complied. Altogether, at least 120 people were shot then.… The Jews whom I saw being shot had lived in the Czarnawczyce "Jewish ghetto" and worked in road [construction] since 1942. Those were the Jews from Domaczewo. Furthermore, I know that, in 1942, 60 Jewish men were taken from Czarnawczyce to a field not far from the spot where we would dig the pit, and were also shot there.