Murder Story of Motol Jews in Osownica

…When I [a non-Jewish witness who had told A.L. Polick some of the details of the mass murder of the Jewish men] arrived in the town, the German guards let me through. But a great fear gripped me when I saw the guards wandering through the streets and houses. They kept firing in the air, trying to frighten the people in hiding, and they rounded up all the men and herded them toward the marketplace. I was seized by trembling as I approached the marketplace.… I watched them force Yisrael Valodavski (Havigodar) to sing and dance. Of course, his singing was not to their liking (we can all remember what kind of singer he was), so they beat and whipped him into a dance. Yishayahu Portnoy was ordered to fill a water tank on which people were standing and watching; when the tank was emptied, he had to bring more. At the same time, another group of non-Jews, acting under German supervision, were selecting people. They assembled a group of thirty young men and led them away, apparently in the direction of Mołodów.… Afterward, they [the Jews] were all ordered to arrange themselves in rows, four people in a row, and start singing. Rebbe Lib Mintz tottered and fainted. But the executioners showed him no mercy and ordered a refugee from Łódź who had wandered into our poor town to carry him on his shoulders. In the second row marched the doctor Kamintski and Dalogin the druggist. They were accompanied by Germans wielding heavy clubs, who kept beating those two for their refusal to sing. The wife of Avraham Nun, the barber, was among those being carried, and she bled all the way to the killing site – because, when the Germans searched through the town house by house, looking for any remaining men, they had found her in her home taking care of herself after a late miscarriage induced by fear. Certainly, in such a condition she was unable to comply with the order to get out. They immediately shot her and ordered her body to be carried out. The locals took advantage of this opportunity, murdering the people whom they had been living with for generations, sharing their joys and sorrows. One of them — Pinchuk — was unable to wait until the Jews were out of town, and he immediately ran to their attics to grab the loot. In one of these attics, he found Menachem Tubianski hiding. He immediately attacked him and forced him to go down to the cowshed in the yard, where he killed him with a wooden beam that he was carrying. Another local found Yitzchak Bagon, the haberdasher, hiding with his wife and their four children. Yitzchak begged him not to reveal their hiding place, promising to pay him with the few dollars he had in his possession. But the local hardened his heart and went to call some Germans, who lined them [the Jews] against the wall of the house and took all their money and dollars from them. After that, they pronounced the sentence, saying: "We sentence you to death for not obeying the order to show up in the market square," and shot them on the spot. The thirty young men who had been chosen were taken to Fritz Skirmonc’s estate in Mołodów, where they were forced to dig a huge pit that was 20 meters long, 3 meters wide, and 2 meters deep. This was to the left of the path from Motol to Mołodów, next to the Jasiołda River that flows from Motol to Pińsk. While the men were busy digging the pit, 800 Jews were brought in and held in the shacks in the estate area. When the pit had been dug, the thirty young men were ordered to enter it and lie face down along its width, whereupon two of the killers began their murderous work. When the doors of the shacks were opened and the order to go out was given, the Jews refused to leave. The Nazis began to strike them on the heads with whips. Then the first group began to move. They went into the pit on their own and lay down in an orderly fashion, four in a row. For a moment, the awful sound of the machine guns was heard, and then there was silence. The first row was full. They placed boards over them with German thoroughness and precision. Immediately, the rest of the people were brought to the pit. Whereas, initially, some of the victims had been reluctant to go into the pit, now everyone was eager to get over the ignominy of being sent like sheep to the slaughter and leave this evil world. In this way, 800 men from our town were wiped off the face of the Earth. The soil kept trembling and heaving for hours and hours, because of the agonized writhing of those who had been only lightly wounded in the shooting. A Russian investigator who had exhumed the pits after the liberation told me [A.L. Polick] that more than half of the people in them had died from suffocation. He determined this based on the well-known fact that a person who is suffocating will grab onto anything with his/her hand; the hands of more than half of the martyrs were clutching bits of the clothing of those lying next to them, while others clutched torn pieces of flesh. The victims were difficult to recognize. The murderers had shot them with expanding bullets. Such a bullet leaves only a small hole where it enters the body, but it tears a hole twenty centimeters in diameter when it explodes inside. Persons wounded by such bullets are torn to shreds.

At the same time [on August 3, 1941, as the Jewish women and children were being shot in the Gaich Ravine], a group of German soldiers rounded up some children aged 6-10, all of them from Nishtut, and forced them to walk toward the windmill, to the pit that had remained unfilled since Saturday [August 2, 1941]. Avigdor Chernomortz told all that to me. He had been hiding in a cornfield at a distance of 150 paces from the killing pit, and could see everything with his own eyes, witnessing the fate of the martyrs and the innocent children. Three of his own children were among them. A soon as the group of children was brought to the pit, they were ordered to arrange themselves in two rows and told that they were going to be photographed. As the attention of the children was focused on the photographers, the machine gun opened fire on them. The poor children hugged and kissed each other and ran in various directions. The Germans shot them one by one, like frightened rabbits, and threw them into the pit. They then ordered some locals from the crowd of onlookers to fill the pit with dirt.