Murder story of Klesow Jews in the Forest in Tutowicze Area

On August 26, 1942, at about 3-4 AM, the town of Klesów was surrounded by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The Germans ordered the ghetto inmates to assemble in the square near the town's railway station, on the pretext of a registration. After the registration, the Jews were ordered to hand over their valuables. The Ukrainian police (under the command of Vasiliy Kryzhanovskiy) and the German Gendarmerie (under the command of Karl Begermann) held the Jews in the square for about 12 hours. In the afternoon, at about 4 PM, the Jews – including women, children, and elderly people – were loaded onto a train that, according to a testimony, had just arrived from Rokitno, carrying other Jews. The train left Klesów under a heavy guard and took these 580 Jews to the Poleska camp in Sarny. On August 28, 1942, the Jews of Klesów were taken in groups from the Poleska camp to several pits that had been dug 1.5 kilometers northwest of the town of Sarny, at the edge of the forest near the road leading to the village of Tutowicze. Upon reaching the shooting site, the victims were forced to strip naked and empty their pockets into a specially prepared box. They were then forced into the pits in groups. Members of the Security Police and SD squad from Równe (which was reinforced with men of the German Police Battalion 323) would order the victims in the pit to lie face down in rows, whereupon they would shoot them in the head with machine guns. According to a testimony, Karl Begermann also took part in the shooting. Little children were thrown alive into a separate pit. In this way, several rows of bodies were stacked in each mass grave. Afterward, the pits were covered with chlorinated lime and buried with earth. According to a testimony, several Jews were kept alive during the massacre, and they were ordered to search for valuables in the victims' clothes afterward. This done, they were annihilated, as well. Among the victims killed at this site, there were some 100 Roma people, who died protesting that they were not Jews. The Gebietskommissar of the Sarny County, Kameradschaftsfuhrer Huala, was in charge of this murder operation. Immediately after the deportation of the Jews of Klesów to Sarny, their homes were looted by Germans, Ukrainian auxiliary policemen, and certain employees of the Klesów local administration, who took the choicest items for themselves. The less valuable property was sold off to the residents of the town, and the proceeds from these sales were handed over to the Germans.