Murder Story of Besskorbnaya Jews on the Armavir Road (Gas Van)

One day in late September 1942, at 11 AM, two Germans entered an orphanage that housed children evacuated from the local Krayevo Orphanage # 42 and from Orphanage # 6 in Odessa. Those German Gestapo officers and the interpreter demanded that the director of the orphanage give them forty Jewish children. One of the Gestapo officers had a list of those children. All of them were taken into a room, and [the Germans] questioned them in an attempt to determine which of them had Jewish parents. The Germans identified eleven children as Jews, while the rest of the children were forced out of the room. Then, a covered black vehicle, known as a "soul killer", drove up in front of the building. All eleven children were loaded into that vehicle. When the children began to cry, a Gestapo officer told them: "Do not cry; you are going to another orphanage. It is bad here, but everything will be fine over there." There already was a Jewish family in the vehicle: Zinaida Borisovna Ribkina, the former deputy director of the evacuated Orphanage # 6 from Odessa; her brother David Borisovitch Ribkin, their mother Ribkina, and another Jew whose last name is unknown. After the children had been loaded into the vehicle, the Gestapo officer began to close the door. Ribkina asked him to leave the door open, since it was impossible to breathe, and he left it open a crack. However, after starting the engine he locked the door. The vehicle then set out in the direction of Armavir. On this day, the following Jewish children from Orphanage # 6 in Odessa were taken away in the vehicle: Masha Kushnirova, 14 years old; Hanna Margulis, 17 years old; Hay Lerner, 16 years old; Adelya Fridman, 14 years old; Zina Lev, 11 years old; Misha Furman, 12 years old; Eva (last name unknown), 12 years old; Fania Halkovskaya, 10 years old; Shura Vais, 10 years old; Abram Shtofman, 14 years old; and Goldshtein, 12 years old. By the time of the liberation of the village and the county from the German-Fascist occupiers by the Red Army on January 22, 1943, the abovementioned children and the Ribkin family were no longer among the living. Therefore, we may conclude that all of them were suffocated to death in the “soul killer” vehicle.