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Murder Story of Horodziej Jews at the Horodziej Cemetery

Murder Story of Horodziej Jews at the Horodziej Cemetery

Murder Site

Horodziej Cemetery

Poland

The assembly point of the Jews of Horodziej prior to the shooting. Photographer: Alexander Litin, 2018.

YVA, Photo Collection, 14615676

Horodziej Cemetery Related Communities

Horodziej

On July 17 (or July 16, according to other sources), 1942, a SiPo (German Security Police) squad, reinforced by a Lithuanian auxiliary police unit, arrived in Horodziej and ordered the local police to surround the ghetto. The next morning, the Germans, together with the Lithuanians and local collaborators, assembled the ghetto inmates in the square in front of the railway station. Some Jews had tried to hide, but the police found them and hauled them to the square. There, the victims were ordered to lie face down on the ground. Many Jews were killed on the spot – thus, children who cried loudly were clubbed to death by the perpetrators. After much beating and random killing of the victims, the Jewish men were taken in trucks to a pit near the local cemetery. There are testimonies according to which the shooting was carried out near the local church. Near the pit, the men were ordered to undress, and then shot with machine guns. The women and children who had survived the killings in the square were then taken to the same place and murdered in the same fashion as the men. According to the Soviet documents, 1,137 Jews were murdered on that day.

Related Resources

ChGK Soviet Reports

Chernia Tsurko, who was born in 1888 in Horodziej and lived there during the war yeras, testified:

…The entire Jewish population, regardless of age, was ordered to assemble in the market square. Then, German punitive squads and police surrounded the square and forced everyone to lie face down. The young adults were then separated from the rest and taken in cars to the cemetery, where a large pit had been prepared. The rest were marched there, and all those unable to walk were shot on the spot. When everyone had been brought to the pit, they [the perpetrators] undressed all [the victims] and drove them into the pit alive, forcing them to lie down side by side. I, too, lay in the pit together with the others. When the shooting was over, I remained alive, albeit drenched in the blood of those who lay around me. When the Germans and the policemen had gone away to bring the others, I got out of the pit and went into the forest....

GARF, MOSCOW R-7021-81-103 copy YVA M.33 / JM/19998

Sabin Novakovskiy, who was born in 1890 in Horodziej and lived there during the war years, testified:

...And afterward, in 1942, all the Jews were herded into a ghetto and shot at a site near the church, in a pit that had been dug by the Jews three months previously. A total of 1137 persons appeared in the list.