Murder story of Złoczów Jews at the Złoczów Castle

…July 6, 1941 Our cellar is full of groundwater. Therefore, my father decided to climb down there in the morning and stay there until nightfall. I helped him to the slightly more elevated side, where there was no water. At midday, I brought him a meal, and he told me what he had gone through. His monotonous tone of voice was unfamiliar to me, but I had a feeling that he was seeing everything again in the darkness of the cellar. Well, first he worked near the fortress, burying the horse cadavers. Afterward, he was transferred to the fortress itself. At the entrance, he was asked for his papers, but he lied that he had none. “The person is merely an appendage to the identity papers,” he told me, sounding for once like the father I used to know. They were working in two places: the inner prison courtyard and the garden. They had to exhume the bodies of the Ukrainians and Poles murdered by the NKVD [NKGB] (there were also Jews [among the victims], like Dr. Grosskopf and his son-in-law). The bodies were laid out in rows, to enable their identification. The Ukrainians used this opportunity to beat the Jews, whom they accused of perpetrating this murder. Of course, the Germans and SS-men were also beating [the Jews] mercilessly. A short butcher… harried my father, beating him with a thick fence pole, while a tall, blond SS-man was beating my father with a braided rope. At midday, two officers approached my father and asked him what his profession was. The father said that [he was] “a lawyer.” Apparently, they deduced from his accent that he had studied in Vienna. In any case, they inquired whether he had studied there. When he answered in the affirmative, the German asked, “You are not Jewish, are you?” The father answered that he was Jewish, and the German shouted angrily, “I can do nothing for you!” And they went away. Shortly afterward, the shooting began. The first to be murdered was Herman the Mister, known as a madman. He had gotten this nickname because of his habit of repeating “Poor Herman, Mr. Herman.” They kept shooting everyone except for the women, some of whom were released. Father saw my friend Monek Spikulitzer there. At about 3 PM, my father was shot, but, because he was in the ditch, all four bullets aimed at him hit the embankment. My father dropped down and played dead. After about an hour, it began to rain. This was his salvation, because the Ukrainians and Germans had to stop the shooting and seek a roofed shelter. At 9 PM, Kuba Sznap [?] and Frayman pulled my father out of the pit, and the three of them escaped….

…As the German army was approaching our town, the Soviet army, before leaving Złoczów, executed those suspected of being German spies in the fortress, and this led to a pogrom in our town immediately after the arrival of the Nazis. It was provoked by the Ukrainians, who claimed that the Jews were responsible for the executions…. On the third day after the Germans' arrival, the Gestapo, assisted by the Ukrainians, carried out a terrible pogrom, shouting that the Jews were communists, that they had murdered their [the Ukrainians'] brothers at the fortress, and that the Jews bore the blame for the war. The terrible, unforgettable day of July 3, 1941 began at 7 AM.… Our house was surrounded, and the rest [of the people] in it were dragged outside. My turn came; I, too, was driven out under a hail of blows, and I beheld a terrible picture: SS soldiers were lined up along the street, and they were driving the gathered Jews toward the fortress in a violent rage. All the way, the Jews were accompanied by a mob of Ukrainians, who chased after them and beat them relentlessly with iron rods, sticks, and other tools suitable for beating. I survived the beating on the way to the fortress, while many others did not make it there, and they dropped in the streets under the terrible blows. To this day, there are graves of the fallen in the streets. Only when we reached the castle did we see real hell, with increasingly horrible scenes playing out before our eyes. A friend of mine lost her mind when she saw her father and two brothers being shot dead right in front of her. My neighbor, Sani Wagner, was shot dead; there was Mrs. Ofer, respected by the whole town, dead, beaten to death. Dr. Ayzen, a Zionist functionary, who was about to depart for the Land of Israel, is lying before my eyes, his belly torn open. Mrs. Gruber embracing her child, and both are dead…. An SS soldier turns the head of a sixteen-year-old Chassidic boy, [the son] of the landlord Monish Margulis, fires a bullet through his neck, and throws him away like a slaughtered chicken. Those were only a few of the incidents that I was able to register in my semi-conscious state. All in all, there were various categories of Jews herded together in [that] large fortress square. They stood in several large groups, and each group was killed in a different way. One of them was placed before a machine gun and murdered with it. Another group was approached by an SS man with a pistol, who shot every fifth person. Still others had to exhume the graves of the Ukrainians who had been shot there by the Soviet army. Afterward, they themselves were shot and thrown into the exhumed graves. I, together with a group of other women, had to kneel down and flatten the soil over the already buried graves with our bare hands. I was waiting for my turn to be thrown into such a grave, dead or alive. Toward nightfall, it became wet, and a heavy rain, accompanied by terrible thunder and lightning, began. The murderers were already tired, and, having had their fill of bloodshed, they permitted the women to leave the fortress, while the men were to stay. Even today, I do not know where I found the strength to run home, stepping over dead bodies at every turn. The whole path was strewn with torn pieces of clothing, such as sailor suits, some shoes, and hats soaked in blood….

…July 1, 1941… The situation deteriorated; the Einsatzgruppe was active; the raid and pogrom against the Jews began. All sorts of rumors were spreading among the Ukrainian population. Jews were responsible for everything that had happened in 1939-1941. In the fortress, where the notorious Złoczów prison was located, a mass grave was unearthed, from which the bodies of several hundred former prisoners – mostly Ukrainians who had been arrested in the days of panic, and probably murdered at the last moment before the evacuation of the prison guards – were exhumed. The anti-Jewish propaganda was working. The wives and mothers went there to identify their husbands and sons; there were cries, weeping, threats. And the propaganda did its job: The Jews were to blame for all of this. It did not matter that there were Jews among the exhumed victims – a professor of mathematics from Bielsk, the lawyer Dr. Grossman, his brother-in-law Gruder – and many, many more. The retaliation and the pursuit of Jews began. Peasants from Złoczów and the surrounding localities came to the town with bags, looting Jewish property. Furious SS men ran through the houses, their hair disheveled, their faces hateful, their eyes wild – beasts in human shape. Any Jew who fell into their hands would be taken to the castle, murdered, and thrown into the mass grave. Some of the Ukrainians took part in the excesses, smashing Jewish shops and apartments, plundering the wares from the former and the property from the latter, beating the escorted Jews with poles and spades, and shouting: “For our husbands and sons!” More than one Jew fell to the blows of the enraged peasant men and women. The news reached us…. The Ratner brothers, both of them high-school teachers, were escorted and beaten on the way with poles; they were covered in blood…. The teacher Lifschutz was escorted and beaten with spades and poles. He was pale, and blood was streaming from him; he dropped dead in the street. Prof. Schlesinger was escorted and beaten by Ukrainian policemen; blood was dripping from his mouth; his hair was disheveled, and his vision blurry. He was reportedly caught wandering alone in the Sasów Forest. He has survived, and is living now in Jerusalem. I've heard about the people who were killed. According to estimates, more than 1,000 people were murdered. The execution took place in the fortress. Those taken there were murdered and thrown into the mass grave. At night, the people living near the fortress heard the moans of those not yet dead. It was also said that two of those still alive managed to get out of the grave under cover of darkness. After learning that the two had escaped, the Ukrainian police set guards over the grave, to make sure that no more "dead" would get back from the other world….

During the German occupation, I was in Złoczów, near Lemberg [Lwów]. The chief of the criminal police of the town and of the Złoczów County was Siegmund (I can no longer recall his first name). Siegmund also presided over the prison in Złoczów, the so-called “Zamek” [fortress]. He wielded the power of life and death over all those who fell into the criminal police’s clutches. Siegmund ordered that those Jews who were hiding under Aryan names, but were uncovered or betrayed, be brought to the prison and shot out of hand, without any trial. Among those who fell victim to his orders in this manner were a girl I knew named Peperle, a woman and her daughter named Szatko, and a five-year-old boy named Heicher….

…Two weeks later, the Germans entered Złoczów [and] organized a pogrom against the Jews, murdering 5,000 people at the Złoczów fortress. They did it in the following manner: They herded all the people to the Złoczów fortress, ordered them to dig pits, and shot at those bending over the pits, causing them to fall inside. On the way to the fortress, the Ukrainians hit the unfortunates on the head and neck with axes – so that, by the time we arrived, we were already half-dead. 3,000 people hid away in Złoczów, and survived in this way. During this massacre, I passed out from fear. Dead bodies fell on top of me, and this saved my life. They did not bother to check for any survivors under the dead bodies. I waited for the end of the pogrom, and then got away….

The chief of the criminal police in the Złoczów County and warden of the prison in the town of Złoczów was Siegmund…. Upon his orders, Jewish children living undercover with the Aryans were discovered and taken to the prison, where they were beaten inhumanly, and then shot dead. Two examples of this are the child of Suzy Gutfreund [and] Reicher….

…On the third day, the Ukrainians spread the rumor that the Jews had murdered Ukrainians in the fortress, and that their deaths must be avenged. They began to drag men, women, and children to the fortress, ordered them to exhume the graves, and then shot them all dead. In the course of three bloody days – July 4, 5 and 6, 1941 – 3,700 Jews were murdered in Złoczów….

…On Wednesday, July 2, 1941, the leaders of the nationalistically-minded Ukrainian intelligentsia gathered in the hall of the Ukrainian Casino. A thirty-strong committee was set up there, and its members included the merchants Antoniak, Mudry, Alyszkewicz, and Dzwonnik; the lawyers Wanio and Joiko; the physician Gilewicz; the teachers Symczyszyn, Sobolewa, Wanio's wife, and his daughter; the public officials Lewicki and Krawczuk; the priest Mykietyn; Hupalowski, Pawlyszyn, and others. The committee decided that one of its first tasks was to organize and carry out an anti-Jewish pogrom. This pogrom was to be a political act on the part of the Ukrainian nationalists, and therefore it needed to be a mass action – both in terms of the number of participants, and in terms of its outcome. It also had to be “legally” sanctioned. A legal pretext, which would make the pogrom popular among the broad Ukrainian masses, was promptly found. On the very first day of the war, the Ukrainian nationalists had carried out acts of sabotage against the Russian authorities. The Russians retaliated with mass arrests, and they shot all the arrestees before retreating. The execution took place in the municipal prison, which was then located in the fortress, and the victims were buried there, as well. The Ukrainian committee issued a proclamation declaring that they held the Jews of Złoczów responsible for the deaths of the nationalists. This lie spread quickly, creating a fertile soil for a pogrom. The committee, in its proclamation, called upon all the people to take revenge against the Jews for the shed “innocent” blood… The Germans greeted this Ukrainian initiative with pleasure, accepted their plan, and promised to give them all manner of assistance in this regard. The pogrom was scheduled for July 3, 1941. It was a Thursday. The Jews of Złoczów, who had weathered the calamities of the first two days, comforted themselves with the thought that everything would settle down and return to normal. The people stayed indoors, waiting for the heated mood to cool off. Nobody (or very few, at most), knew what their enemies had in store for them. On that day, at 7 AM, the Ukrainians, wearing yellow-blue armbands and armed to the teeth, descended upon the Jewish residences. By carrot or stick, they lured everyone outside, telling them that they would go to work. Since everyone was eager to work, no matter where, many got out readily on their own. They all had to bring out the tools of their trade. To a certain degree, this quieted the people down and inspired them with confidence. However, this feeling evaporated as soon as they left their homes. The enraged mob was rampaging through the streets. It surrounded the Jews and began to herd them to the fortress, which the murderers had selected as the assembly point.… Gruesome scenes played out at the fortress. The Jews herded together were forced to exhume the grave in which the Soviets had buried the Ukrainian nationalists. Upon the occupiers' orders, the bodies were to be exhumed and photographed. (These photographs were subsequently published in all the newspapers, with the caption “The victims of Jewish terror”). It was a hot day in Tammuz [July]. The sun beat down savagely. The exhumed bodies stank horribly. The people vomited and fainted from the stench. The Germans and Ukrainians covered their noses with handkerchiefs, not daring to come closer. Few could endure the work. People were dropping like flies. The Ukrainian victims exhumed from the grave were taken outside the fortress area. A few of those gathered at the fortress used this opportunity and managed to sneak outside and escape. Few of the escapees survived, however, since the murderers were lurking everywhere. After the graves had been emptied of the Ukrainian dead, the order was given to fill them with Jews. The half-dead people were hurriedly thrown into the grave. When the grave was full, the murderers threw a couple of hand grenades inside and fired dumdum bullets into it. The Jews were forced to count their own dead. One of the Germans, who was apparently new to the job, and still had a spark of humanity left in him, told one of the Jews to exaggerate the number of counted bodies (i.e., to cheat). The Jews did not trust him, however, seeing this as another ruse. At 3 PM, a German general arrived at the execution site, and, after being told the number of victims, he decided that this was enough and ordered to end the massacre by 4 PM. The pogromists still had about an hour at their disposal. They made every effort to use this time as best they could. The general stood with a watch in his hand, counting the minutes. When it was four o'clock, he halted the massacre. He ordered the Jews who were still alive at this time to run home "quickly". The murderers fired after them. The terrified people trampled one another. A pandemonium broke out. Most of the people were so exhausted that they could not run. They paid with their lives for this. On that day, very few managed to survive the hell. Toward nightfall, it began to rain. In the mass graves, there were many unconscious people, whom the murderers had taken for dead. The rain revived them, and they came back to their senses. They waited until it became dark, and then, with a great deal of effort, they crawled out of the pile of bodies covering them. To pass unnoticed, they entered the river that flowed not far from the fortress, and returned to the town along the stream. 3,500 Jews were murdered on the day of the pogrom…. The majority of them found their eternal rest at the fortress….

…I remember very clearly how, on July 3, 1941, at about 7 AM, the Ukrainians and Poles drove the Jews out of their apartments, beating them murderously, and dragged them to the fortress (former prison) garden, where the SS carried out an execution of the Jews….

The Jews of Złoczów, a town near Tarnopol, arrived, bringing terrible news. On June [sic for July] 3, 1941, the second day after the arrival of the Germans in the town, the Ukrainians, together with the German soldiers, took three thousand Jews – men, women, and children, including the refugees from Western Galicia – out of their homes, rounded them up, and locked them in the synagogue courtyard. For three days, the Jews sat crowded in the synagogue and its courtyard, without food or water. On Saturday, the Germans and Ukrainians took them out of the synagogue and led them to the fortress outside of town. They torched the synagogue. Jews leaving the burning synagogue took out the Torah scrolls. There was, among them, a renowned Kabbalist from the old Chassidic Dzikow [Tarnobrzeg] dynasty, Rabbi Meir Ofen, a refugee from the town of Rzeszów. He marched at the head of hundreds of Jews, wrapped in their prayer shawls and with Torah scrolls in their hands, toward a mass grave that had been dug during their three-day captivity. All along the way, they recited the Ranenu Tsadikim be-Adonai (“Rejoice, you Righteous, in God”), word by word. When they arrived at the grave…, the men stood petrified; the women wept, while the children whined in the shadow of death. Rabbi Meir stood among them, with a Torah scroll in one hand and a shofar [ritual Jewish musical horn] in the other, his face like that of an angel in heaven, and he began to preach to the holy congregation about the sanctification of God’s name, [the destiny] of the Jewish people in every generation, the eternity of Israel, and the God of vengeance, who would avenge the blood of his holy martyrs, whose innocent blood would not be covered by the earth. And, with this, their souls rose to heaven.…

…The true scale of the pogrom of the first day began to emerge. The SS and the Ukrainians took three thousand Jews to the castle and machine-gunned them to death. Many others had been shot in the streets and in their homes. The figure of three thousand was calculated by the Judenrat, following a census of the Jewish population of Złoczów, which had been ordered by the Gestapo. There was hardly a Jewish family in the town that had not lost a member. Some families had lost all their menfolk…. The majority of the Jewish lawyers and doctors, as well as the pharmacists and engineers, had perished in the massacre. The Ukrainians were responsible for the selection of the victims, and the intelligentsia was singled out. Only three men survived the slaughter at the castle…. From them, as well as from some Ukrainians, we were able to reconstruct the events of those days. The NKVD had executed all the inmates at the castle before running away. They left them buried in the cellars and courtyard of the prison. The Jews were ordered to dig up the bodies. Afterward, they were lined up and machine-gunned by the SS. Their bodies were left unburied. The three who survived did so by playing dead. Covered in blood and motionless, they were indistinguishable from the dead. The Germans stomped on the bodies and finished off anyone who showed a sign of life. After nightfall, when the SS had left the castle, the survivors managed to flee to safety.

…Two days after the occupation of the town [of Złoczów], very large posters went up everywhere, instructing all the Jews living in the town to report for work at 8 AM next morning. Many of the Jews came to the appointed place. I did not go, and neither did my uncle. We stayed home. At about 9 AM, Germans and Ukrainians began to roam the town, searching the Jewish houses for those who had stayed behind, and they showed up at our house, too. My uncle happened not to be at home…. When that group of policemen entered, they found me and my aunt with her baby in her arms in the same room. They picked us, along with the other tenants of the same building, and took us to the Złoczów prison, which lay a short distance from the town. As we were climbing up to the prison, SS men lined up both sides of the steps, beating everyone bloody. They would not allow anyone to pass until they saw blood. To this day, I do not know how I was able to get through. Like all the others, I stopped in front of them. They looked at me, but did not raise their hands. One of them screamed at me: “Keep moving!” – and I moved on, without receiving the blows that all my predecessors had gotten. As we entered the prison courtyard, a horrible picture unfolded before our eyes. When the Russians had escaped, they were unable to take the political prisoners along with them, and so they apparently decided to liquidate them. The entire prison courtyard was one huge grave, filled with bodies. Now, it was our task, as I perceived right away, to exhume the bodies, while groups of Ukrainians, assisted by Jews, took them in carts to the Christian cemetery. I jumped into this pit like everyone else, and we spent the whole day exhuming the bodies out of it. All day, they kept bringing in more and more Jews – until, despite the enormous size of the pit, there was no room anymore, and we were forced to stand atop each other and walk over each other. Toward nightfall, at about 5 or 6 PM…. Yes, the whole day the SS men walked around the pit and looked for persons whom they “liked”, who were not working, not doing anything, etc. If they discovered someone they did not like, they would take him out. They did not shoot him…, but, rather, cut him to pieces. During the entire war, I did not see anything comparable to what I had experienced in that prison courtyard in Złoczów. When the bearded Jews were brought in, they were taken to the side right away and beaten to death – i.e., the people had to endure such agony…. This method of killing was the cruelest one…. Well, the day passed by somehow with all this, and toward nightfall they brought in the machine guns and a squad of SS men. Prior to that, there had been a number of guards and Ukrainian policemen who walked around the pit. Afterward, a group of some ten… SS men arrived, and the order to open fire was suddenly given. By this time, almost all the bodies of the prisoners massacred by the Russians had been exhumed. And heavy fire was opened into the pit. I do not know whether by instinct or not, but I began to pull my head down somehow. After about half a minute of shooting, I heard an order in German, or maybe it was something else. In any case, they stopped shooting. I raised my head and saw from afar some tall officer. I do not know what his rank was, but he had a retinue around him. He looked around and asked some questions. They explained the situation to him, and he then ordered to take the women out of the grave. There were few women in the grave, several dozen in all. Most of the Jews brought in were men, but there were several dozen women among them, including my aunt, who survived. Anyway, I saw him point with his hand to the women, in the direction where the women stood. By the way, the women had not worked during the whole day. They had stood to one side of the grave and waited, while the men were busy with the process of exhuming the dead. I understood that they were about to release the women, and hence I began to run toward my aunt, whom I saw from afar in the grave. I got to her; she was standing next to a young girl who… lived in the same house, in another apartment. I wandered around them a bit and told them: "You can probably give me some headkerchief." I had a raincoat, which could also pass for a female one…. "You can probably give me some headkerchief, and I would try to leave together with you." So, my aunt began to hand it to me. She put down her headkerchief, and then I noticed that one of the Germans was looking at me. I got scared, left the headkerchief, and somehow began to run. I could not run…. I started crawling on all fours back toward the middle of the pit, and I found some spot.… The ground was very swampy, because of what had happened before, because of all the bodies that were there. So, everything was like a swamp; it was something peculiar. I waited for a few more minutes. The people were taken out, and then it became clear to me that they had been released, because my aunt returned home, as well. The shooting resumed, and they kept shooting for about half an hour, or more. The whole pit was sprayed with bullets…. After approximately half an hour, or probably less, it suddenly began to rain very heavily…. It was an extraordinary downpour, with lots of thunder. The weather caused them to flee – apparently, into the prison. The windows, two walls of the prison building with windows in them, bordered that courtyard with the grave. Afterward, I kept hearing their cries and single shots, and I had a feeling that they were shooting from the windows upon anyone who seemed to be still alive, etc. Anyway, the shooting around the grave stopped, and the area became quiet. Slowly, it became dark. I was certain that I had been wounded. Actually, I was in a "bath" of blood, and I stayed under the bodies – because, immediately when the shooting began, someone had fallen on top of me, and this body pressed me down; then, someone else fell on top of the first one, and so I was covered, and stayed on the bottom. I was sure that I had been wounded, and that I would be left there to die in agony and be buried. Using all my strength, I made several attempts to raise myself, hoping to get hit by one more bullet and die quickly, instead of remaining in this half-dead state. Because of the effort it took to rise and overcome the weight of the bodies, I passed out two or three times, and remained in this state. Actually, it was this heavy rain that saved me; I think today that it saved me…. I remember the raindrops penetrating inside, some water moistening my lips and tongue…. I felt a terrible heat all over my body, yet I somehow caught a few drops of rain and wetted my mouth with them. And then night fell with its usual signs. A total silence descended over the area, and I thought that, if I was merely wounded and still alive, I had to get out of there. And yet I decided to do nothing and wait for an hour or two (or three), until around midnight, before I acted. I remained lying there for several hours, I do not know for how long, for about two or three hours. Anyway, during the night, at midnight, I escaped. I began to slowly make space for myself, to get out of this pit. It took much time. When I got up, I saw three-four more people crawling over the bodies, and together with them I reached the slope. The prison was in some old, historical Polish fortress, on top of a very high hill with a stream underneath it. That was how they used to build defensive castles, with a stream around them. This was the place of the prison. There was a very steep path down from the courtyard above, running between the pine trees to the stream. Because of the recent very heavy rainfall, we glided our way down the path. When I got down, I wanted to stand up, but could not walk. I thought that my feet were paralyzed, or that I was wounded elsewhere. I was completely covered in blood. I could not do anything but crawl on all fours. The four people who were with me were able to walk, and each of them pointed out his wounds – i.e., everyone said where he felt wounded. One had been hit by two bullets, another by three bullets, etc. I could not identify the body part that had been wounded. We reached a fence, which we could not pass, as it was too high, so we began to follow it, looking for a way to cross. Eventually, we found a crack, some open spot. We passed over to the other side and reached the stream, which flowed 100 meters from the fence. We tried to cross it. Slowly, we made it to the other bank, and started walking toward the town center….