Murder Story of Szack Jews at Lake Chernoye

…I know that the German authorities shot Soviet civilians and [Soviet] activists from the town of Szack in the summer of 1942. I don't know the total number of victims of the shootings, but I do know that they included all the families of the Jewish civilians. I [also] know that the Germans shot the [Ukrainian] family of Vasilii Teret, including a 5-year-old child and a woman past the age of 60. The [mass] shooting was carried out outside the town, near Lake Chernoye….

…In 1942, in June [sic, for July], the Jews of the entire Szack region, including Szack itself, were arrested [and] shot, beginning on the morning of June [July] 22; [the shooting] was over by evening, with the total number of Jewish victims exceeding 500. There were many infants and little children among them, and many elderly people, too. Prior to the shooting, the doomed civilians were forced to strip naked, then called up to a table to be registered. I don't know what that registration was for, but I saw it with my own eyes, since I was then staying in an apartment in a two-story building, from which I could observe them [the Germans] shooting [the Jews].

…During the German occupation of our Szack region in 1942, I was working as a receiver of shipments of potatoes; we would receive the deliveries near Lake Chernoye, in the Brovary Forest, approximately 1 kilometer west of the town [of Szack]. During one such delivery, I was an eyewitness to the mass shooting of Soviet civilians. The Germans did the actual shooting, while our own Ukrainian [auxiliary policemen] guarded [the civilians]. Before the shooting, all [the victims] were forced to strip naked; they even had to remove their underwear. The shooting was carried out mostly with pistols, but occasionally machine guns were used. There was a great number of women with nursing infants among the victims; the little children were shot separately, and the elderly and infirm were not spared, either.… [To give one example] out of many, Feodora Zabrodskaya was shot together with her baby; her father-in-law, Safron Zabrodskyi, who was over 65, was also [shot], as were many others. In the [first two mass] graves, Jewish civilians alone were buried; there were approximately 500 of them. The other graves were used to bury Ukrainians and Russians, who numbered as many as 200.… The shooting was carried out by the Gestapo….

The Commission… has supervised the exhumation of 28 [mass] graves located outside the town of Szack… southwest of the town, 600 meters from Lake Chernoye. Those exhumed graves contained [the remains of] Soviet civilians who had been brutally tortured to death by the German beasts in July 1942. Furthermore, the first grave – which is 6 meters long, 4.5 meters wide, and 1.5 meters deep – contains the bodies of as many as 300 Jewish civilians.… In the second grave, which lies parallel to the first (this one is 5.5 meters long, 4.5 meters wide, and 1.5 meters deep), the Commission has found the bodies of as many as 200 Jewish civilians. Three meters to the right of this grave, there is a third exhumed pit… which was used to [bury] as many as 200 Ukrainian civilians, who had [also] been shot. West of it, there is a fourth exhumed grave… containing the bodies of 100 shot Ukrainians.… The bodies in the graves are piled up in 2-3 and 4 layers.… Some of the bodies are naked. One may conclude that the only [possible] cause of death was gunshot wounds….