Murder Story of Sarny Jews at the Sarny Poleska Camp

At the time when the first groups of Jews were being taken from the Poleska camp to the shooting site in the nearby forest, Tendler and Yosef Gendelman, two members of the resistance groups, cut a hole in the barbed wire fence that surrounded the camp, and people began to run away. As they fled through the opening in the fence, the German gendarmes and Ukrainian auxiliary policemen who were guarding the camp fired on them with machine guns and threw hand grenades at them. Some inmates were trampled underfoot near the fence. Most probably, some 2,500 people were shot in the rush to the fence. In the meantime, 1,000-2,000 inmates who were held in two or three wooden barracks in the camp area refused to go out to be shot. As a result, these barracks were set on fire. People tried to jump out of the burning buildings, but the German and Ukrainian guards threw hand grenades at them and shot them with rifles and machine guns. Some 1,000 people perished in these barracks. Afterward, peasants with carts were mobilized to transport the bodies of the victims, under German supervision, to the mass grave in the Tutowicze forest, where they were buried.