HOLOCAUST

 

Testimony by Uri Finkel ,Translation by Sonia Kovitz

Ostensibly, the sibe [reason, cause] for this occurrence was as follows.  A large group of Red Army prisoners had arrived and was quartered in the batei-medroshim and the shulhoif.  The Jews soon went to work as gelt-collectors, helping the prisoners by bringing them bread and other products for gelt three times a day.  The woman Helen Leshke and her husband Aleksandr Nestorovich told me about this, that the prisoners were close to death when they arrived—starving, naked, barefoot, beaten and abused. The first day they picked grass in the shulhoif and tore up bark and flowers for food.  That week and for the next several weeks the Jews secretly sold the prisoners food.  The Jewish women cooked and baked for the prisoners.  Also the Jews helped the prisoners escape into the surrounding villages, where the peasants took them in and registered them as their son or son-in-law.  One day it turned out that not a single prisoner was left, so the Germans turned to the Jews and that’s how the 55 became the first victims.

Their remains were left uncovered in the forest.  That day there was a great broch [cursing] by our brothers and sisters.  The best, the healthiest, the finest of them decided to take action.  This branch of the tree became bigger [they were joined by others].  The dead bodies had been scattered around and despoiled by the sonim [enemy] and khayev [wild animals] [another word here I just cannot make out, with a kometz-aleph marked as such], wolves and dogs.  This group set as their goal the burial of the dead in the Jewish besoylem [cemetery].  The Hitlerists were keeping an increasingly vigilant watch and allowed no one in the shtetl to set foot in the street after 7 o’clock at night.  Although many were afraid to go out after 7 o’clock, the threat of death did not extinguish the flame of love [in this group] for those who had been murdered.  Determination to overcome the shame of these events burned in them and would not allow them to stay inside their houses.

The next day the head of staff called for the police and the swindlers, scum, troublemakers, and unsavory characters from the fascists among the peasants.  He had a wagon from the harvest brought to the cemetery [in this context Finkel refers to it with the non-Jewish expression heylike ort (“holy place”) rather than the Hebrew besoylem] for their use.