Murder Story of Stary Kermenchik Jews at the Stary Kermenchik Airfield

The Germans shot innocent civilians at three sites: at the airfield, in the orchard, and in the village itself, near the financial department building. A total of fifty or sixty people were shot, I do not remember the exact number. Among the victims, there were children, elderly people, women, and men. I did not see the actual shootings; I only heard about them from a woman who had seen them.

In February–March 1942, the German executioners systematically carried out an inhuman massacre of […] and of civilians of Jewish origin, residents of the Novozlatopol County, the Zaporozhye District. [The killings took place] in the area of the Kalinin collective farm, in the Stary Kermenchik rural county, and in the airfield area. The German cannibals systematically transported whole families – including elderly people, women, and children – to the abovementioned site in carts. There, they committed inhuman, medieval atrocities against the miserable people. They beat, tortured, and shot them systematically in groups of several people, or else threw them alive into the pit and covered them with a thin layer of soil. The pits are located one kilometer [in the original: meter] southeast of the village of Stary Kermenchik. The size of the abovementioned pits is 7x10 meters. Into them, the executioners threw 100 people, Soviet civilians of various ages. Some of them were still alive, while others had been shot dead. Most of them were elderly people, women, and children.… It has been impossible to determine the last names, first names, and ages of the people shot in the area of […] and in the area of the Kalinin collective farm, since most of the victims were not residents of our county, and were not included in the lists of victims.

I live in the village of Stary Kermenchik, at the very end of its main street, and I could see everything. I saw the German occupying authorities methodically transport our Soviet civilians in trucks to the airfield area, where a very large pit had been dug. They brutally tortured the Soviet civilians, shot them next to the pit, and threw them into it. I saw it with my own eyes, since all the trucks passed by my house, and the pit lay one kilometer from the house.… A total of about 100–110 people – men, women, and children – were taken [to the site] and shot dead. Some of them were from the Jewish community. I do not know the last names of any of them.… I did not see the shootings of the Soviet civilians, nor do I know where they had come from. However, they were not residents of our county.