Murder Story of Brześć nad Bugiem Jews on Dolgaya Street in Brześć nad Bugiem

During the night between the 14th and 15th of October 1942, we were awakened by shooting in the city. …Moskovskaya Street was littered with corpses. When we reached Karbyshev Street, human bodies had already been piled up there. After we dug huge pits, at the gun point of the Hitlerites, we and some policemen began to bring there [the bodies of] people who had been shot to death. At this time a drunken non-commissioned officer began to shoot children, Jewish children whom their parents had hidden, hoping to save them. Being tired and scared, I dropped one dead old woman. The non-commissioned officer saw this and beat me on the back. I fell down into the pit on top of the corpses. …When they noticed that the Hitlerites had lost sight of them, the children began to run away. ….At that moment there appeared a Gestapo man and a policeman. They called me and two other prisoners and took us to the so-called small ghetto. There they were looking for Jews in hiding. Next to one of the houses we heard a baby crying. The Gestapo man dashed into the house and brought out of there a woman and the baby and, then, an old woman. Outside of the house they were put against the wall of a house on Karbyshev Street…. At that time some wounded German soldiers approached and began to watch what the Gestapo man was doing. He turned to them and asked: …"Who wants to shoot the Jews?" None of them replied. Only one Ukrainian policeman asked the Gestapo man for his pistol to shoot the unfortunates. The policeman shot the mother and the baby on his third attempt since the gun repeatedly misfired. … In the course of several months the Fascists found Jews in hiding and shot them in the area between Karbyshev and Kuybyshev Streets. We were forced to bury them. When we returned, we looked as if we had bathed in pools of human blood.

The main thing is that we were witnesses to the horrors. That is, we did not see anything, but every day we could hear 70-100 people being brought to the neighboring yard, ordered to strip. They were shot, and buried on the spot. Earlier in the morning the workers would come to dig the graves. Once we heard a child shout: "Mama, I hope the bullet comes soon; I'm so cold." This was in November, and the people had to strip naked. Mothers undressed their children and then undressed themselves. There are approximately 5,000 people buried across the fence from our house on 126 Kuybyshev Street.