Murder Story of Druzhkovka Jews at the Druzhkovka Slag Waste Deposit

Have you ever heard of Druzhkovka? It is located in the Stalino District.… A week before their retreat [sic], the Germans shot all the Jewish women and children. The [Jewish] men had been shot back in the beginning, shortly after the arrival of the Germans. Then [after the liberation], people began to uncover the pits where the German fiends had thrown all the victims of the shootings. Many of the pits were identified, [some of them] in the hospital courtyard, on the outskirts of the town, in the deserted lot behind the former glass factory and hardware factory. It was no longer possible to identify the bodies, since they had been defaced by torture.

All the Jews of Druzhkovka, infants included, were arrested, and then shot at the waste deposit of the hardware factory…. The eyewitness V. Babayev recalls: In 1942, I was only 8 years old. I heard the sounds of gunfire and other noises from our street. My mother hid me in the basement. She did not allow me to go outside, but I could still watch, through a narrow window, our Jewish neighbors being driven out of their homes. These were mostly elderly people, women, and children. The Jewish factory workers had been evacuated to the Urals. In the evening, shots were heard from the industrial area. Our houses had shuttered windows. The houses where the Jews had lived were left with open shutters. It was horrible to pass them by.