Murder Story of Selidovka Jews at the Former Military Registration Office in Selidovka

The pits in the courtyard of the former military registration office of the village of Selidovka were the first burial site to be exhumed. They are located on Tsentralnaya Street, in the area of the "Za Sutsilnu Kollectivizatsiyu" (For Complete Collectivization) collective farm. This burial site dates to the winter of 1941.… One of the bodies found there was that of a child; residents of Selodivka who were present at the exhumation identified it, based on the remnants of the clothing, as the child of Abram Iosifovich Kovalevskiy, an employee of the Selidovka County consumers cooperative.

I lived near the post office, in the vicinity of the military registration office. There was a large pit in its courtyard, a bomb shelter of some sort. From the post office, as well as from my house, one could see this pit, where the Fascist fiends and their collaborators shot whole families of civilians. Thus, in late 1942, in the fall, I saw two policemen [who were] local residents (I do not know their last names) take the family of a resident of Selidovka to the pit to be shot. [The victims were] Abram Iosifovich Kovalevskiy, an employee of the Selidovka County consumers cooperative, of Jewish origin; his wife Fenya Yefimovna with their three children; and the sister of F. Y. Kovalevskaya, Etya Yefimovna, with her child. They were brought to the edge of the pit, and an SS soldier ordered them to strip naked and take the children into their arms. He then climbed down into the pit and shot the women, and the children they held, with a submachine gun. Kovalevskiy and the other two children were shot last.