HOLOCAUST
Testimony by Uri Finkel ,Translation by Sonia Kovitz
“Tonight there will be a meal for all the policemen. During the day you can rob and beat the Jews,” he told them.
At one point that day, the townspeople heard through their doors and windows a loud commotion followed by cries of grief. The woman Noima Feldman had been murdered. Her daughters were told to bury her in the yard.
That night in the tavern on Domenicaner Street everyone was dancing, carousing, getting drunk, and sharing Jewish clothing and other belongings with each other. The Germans made merry by bringing accusations against the ones who had been beaten by the police. The poorer ones in the general population sympathized with the misery of the Jews and did not take part in the robberies and shkhites [massacres].
That night the Jews, around 200, sneaked out of their houses to the gardens and from the gardens to the fields and from the fields into the forest, a couple kilometers from the shtetl, directly to the place where the dead bodies of our brothers and sisters were scattered. Restraining their pain they quietly set about removing the corpses, with every three persons carrying a body. On their shoulders the dead, under their feet the spilled human blood; and paroes [pogroms], shkhites [massacres], hariges [killings]; and dark was the night; and for them, the eydes [witness], there was no longer heaven or earth. The process continued through the night until they arrived at the Jewish besoylem [cemetery]. There they buried the first 55 victims in a mass grave.
The next day the police were ordered by the S.S. commander to drive out and bring back to the shtetl the bodies of the ones who had been shot in order to hang the bodies from telegraph poles. They didn’t discover until they got to the forest that the bodies had been retrieved by the Jews. The 200 Jews were taken away to another forest. There they dug graves for themselves and were shot. This is how in the course of three days the active ones of the Jewish population of Rakov were murdered.
