Murder Story of Maryinka Jews in the Maryinka Area

On February 23, 1942, 50 people were shot in the county center of Maryinka, in the Stalino District of the Ukrainian SSR. The testimonies submitted by residents of the village of Maryinka – Ivan Gurtovoy, Petr Issatov, Afanasiy Usenko, and many others – indicate that, on February 21, 1942, the German commandant […], the German chief of the local administration […], together with the traitors to the Motherland – the village headman […], the county police chief […], and the deputy police chief […] – rounded up the abovementioned 50 individuals and locked them in a basement. Most of them were Jews, some of whom were refugees from Western Ukraine. The group included 13 men, 15 women (three of whom had nursing infants), and 22 children under the age of fifteen. During the night, all of them were detained and subjected to horrific abuse; according to the locals' testimonies, their [the victims'] moans and shouts – especially the cries of the children begging for mercy – could be heard coming from the basement. On February 23, 1942, all of the abovementioned detainees were taken outside the village of Maryinka, under a reinforced guard of Gestapo men who had arrived from Stalino. They [the Gestapo men] began to carry out the shootings in pits that had been prepared in advance. The children fell at the executioners' feet, begging for mercy. The butchers taking part in the shootings impaled the children on their bayonets and threw them into the pits alive. The fiends forced some of the women into the pits, and then shot them.… In one of the pits, the body of a woman holding a child has been found. It is clear that she was forced into the pit, and then shot while lying there. A partially dressed body has been exhumed from the same pit. A document found in one of the pockets identifies the victim as Inna Bertovna Farber, born in 1905 in the village of Zanosnaya in the Lublin Province.