Murder story of Stolin Jews in the Stasino Ravine

In Stolin, there was one single [mass] liquidation, on September 11, 1942. Our house [where the two of them were hiding both before and after the shooting operation] was near the marketplace. In the morning, we saw everyone crying and shouting, and heard the sounds of gunfire. We saw that they were all assembled and taken to the marketplace. A German battalion had arrived in Stolin a month before. The battalion soldiers took part in the liquidation. They loaded the assembled people onto trucks and took them to the Dolino Radziwiłł estate. There, all the Jews were finished off. The number of the executed Jews was as high as 8,420, including both locals and Jews from Poland. The Judenrat police used to guard the ghetto. They [the Nazis] had removed the Judenrat members the night before [the mass liquidation], and put Germans and Ukrainians around the ghetto.

The ghetto liquidation was carried out on the following day [after the murder of the Judenrat members]. The German gendarmes went from house to house and forced everyone to come out to the market square. A large crowd of 8,000 people assembled there, almost the entire ghetto population. Baskets were placed at the entrance to the ghetto, and the Jews had to take off their outer garments and pile them up. Everything was carried out thoroughly and methodically…. In the market square, the Jews were divided into groups and taken out of the town, to an area some 4 kilometers away, where Soviet soldiers had built an airfield. There, the victims were ordered to lie down in pits that had been prepared in advance, and shot dead. Each group was forced to lie down atop the bodies of the previous one. Those unable to reach the murder site were shot on the way. Their bodies were later loaded onto trucks and taken away. Only a small group of Stolin Jews did not come to the market square. They had either concealed themselves in hideouts that had been prepared in advance or fled into the forest. Many of the escapees did not survive, being shot by local peasants who hoped to lay their hands on the Jews' money and gold.