Murder story of Janow Jews in the Rudsk Forest

On September 21–23, 1942, the ghetto was surrounded by policemen and Germans, and the inmates were prevented from going outside. Several hundred Jews (numbering 300-500, according to various sources), mostly persons capable of physical labor and professionals, were rounded up at the sawmill outside the ghetto. On September 26 (or 24, according to other sources), 1942, the inmates of the Janów Ghetto were assembled in the market square. They were divided into groups and taken to the murder site, which lay at the edge of the forest 2 kilometers west of the village of Rudsk, 200 meters from the Janów-Rudsk-Mokhro railway line. Several testimonies mention a Jewish woman, Chana Gorodetskiy, who attacked the policemen as she approached the pits, throwing sand into their eyes and grabbing one of their rifles. Her act of resistance enabled some Jews, including one of her three sons, to escape from the murder site. According to some sources, the victims were stripped naked prior to the shooting. Soviet documents indicate that the victims were forced to climb down into the pits, and were then shot with submachine guns. The pits had been dug 1-2 days before the killing operation, by residents of the village of Rudsk who had been told that the pits would be used for gasoline storage. The shooting went on from midday until late in the evening. A total of 1,500-2,000 Jews were shot on that day. The group of Jewish workers (numbering from 200 to 400, depending on the source) were locked in the sawmill outside the ghetto during the roundup of the other inmates. Two days later, most of them were taken to the same location and shot. Several dozen Jews managed to escape from the ghetto and the sawmill to the nearby forests, where they joined partisan units.