Murder story of Kolodyanka Jews in the Railway Station Area in Kolodyanka

The police was organized headed by a German. The police forced the people, the Jews, from other villages as well. There was a ware house there, they were put in it. In the field the pits were dug, I do not know who dug, there they were shot. The soil moved afterwards, as some were still alive. There was a fence over there, about one kilometer away from it. We stood here and watched them falling, we saw them being shot. …The shooting lasted for two days.

The Spas [Orthodox Christian holiday celebrated in mid-August] holiday came, when Ukrainians bring fruit to church. My sister in-law did not go to work. She used water to take off some of the warehouse dust and told me to go to her former garden to get some vegetables, potatoes, and cucumbers. We came back in the early evening and suddenly saw a truck full of armed Germans. …Olga, the maid of the house owner, came and said that the village was full of Germans. Without thinking very much, I jumped through the open window into the corn field, and waited there. My younger son began calling me: "Mummy, Mummy, where are you?" That is why I left the field and went to see what was happening. A Ukrainian policemen ran toward us and ordered us to come out and stand there, each mother with her children. We stood and waited. A non-Jewish woman from the village came and told us that pits were being dug next to the station. Some of us said the pits were meant for us; others guessed that those pits were for toilets. We did not know who was right. My sister-in-law thought that we would be taken to do this job. Then she asked one of the Germans what was going to happen to us. He pointed toward the ground, meaning that we would be killed! … The Germans took all the women with older children and left those with younger children….A Ukrainian policeman came and said that they were calling for me. I said they could not call for me because I was not a local resident and was not registered here. I asked him for permission to leave. He said that it was a pity but that it was too late, and that I had to go to the station with him. We were marching through the village. The non-Jews were staring at us. They already knew that the pits had remained uncovered and were waiting for us. At the station we were lined up: next to each mother her children were standing…. We were lucky that the Germans had sobered up after their previous drinking and shooting, and that they had not had time to get drunk again. That is why they said they would let us go if we would show up the next day in order to sweep the floors. That day the Germans did not kill anybody.