Murder Story of Gomel Jews in Davydovka

...Initially, the trucks that came for the people slated for shooting would stop in the street near the prison gates where the loading took place. At that time, many Gomel residents would gather around the trucks. Afterward, to avoid drawing a crowd, the Germans started bringing the trucks into the prison courtyard. From a talk with one of my acquaintances in the police, Shmiger, who frequently accompanied these trucks, I learned how the shootings of these people took place: after being unloaded from the truck, they were ordered to strip naked, and then forced to lie down in pits that had been prepared for this purpose. These people would lie face-down on top of each other, in two or three rows. Thereupon, they would be shot with submachine guns and buried. In some cases, Jewish mothers with small children were taken from the prison to be included among the victims. The small children were thrown into the pits and buried alive... The shooting site was in a small forest near the village of Davydovka, in Gomel County, about 3-4 kilometers from the city of Gomel, on the road to Rechitsa, 250-300 meters from the right side of the road... The bodies were not buried very deeply, so that, in spring and summer 1943, there was a terrible smell...

...The exhumation has revealed two graves six meters in length, four meters in width, and three meters in depth. There must have been a fire lit there, since there were... ashes at the bottom of the grave. Among the ashes at the bottom of the graves, there were human bones, jaws with teeth still attached – and, in other places, human skulls, too. From the first day of the occupation, the German-Fascist authorities took Soviet civilians to this area and killed them in mass shootings. After the shooting, in order to erase all trace of the crimes, the bodies of the Soviet civilians were placed in a pit and burned...

... They [the Jews] were taken out of the city and shot. As I heard from Gomel residents, many of them had been shot near Davydovka, i.e. in a forest clearing that begins near the village of Davydovka.... Those Soviet civilians who underwent capital punishment [sic] by shooting had to strip naked. Afterward, they were forced to lie down at the bottom of a pit or ditch, and shot with machine and submachine guns. Those who were seriously wounded had to remain in the pit or ditch, and were buried alive, covered with earth.... ... Once, when I happened to be passing through the abovementioned forest clearing (near Davydovka), I was forced to witness a very terrible scene. I was riding a bicycle. Suddenly, two passenger cars rushed by and then stopped not far from me in the clearing. There were several Germans in them, I recognized that they were SD men (they had black collars on their military uniforms and death's-head badges on their caps; most of them were of officer rank). They were armed with submachine guns and pistols.... Afterward, three trucks and another car followed. The trucks, which carried the Germans' victims, stopped near the cars. Immediately, some Russian auxiliary policemen and Russian SD members jumped out of them.... My way would take me past this group of vehicles, and so, full of foreboding, I got off my bicycle and went toward the vehicles on foot. Suddenly, I saw Shmiger waving at me. I thought he was calling to me to come over, and I began to approach him. But then, I saw the barrel of a submachine gun pointed at me, and heard the loud yelling of a German telling me to leave. I got on my bicycle and started riding away from this miserable spot, but then I looked back, against my will, as I heard the heartbreaking screams of the women and children who were being dragged out of the first truck. I also saw a woman of about 40-45; a young woman, probably her daughter, of about 20; two children, most likely the children of the [young] woman, and several other people whom I could not see well – all of them being prodded with rifle and submachine-gun butts and forced into the forest by Germans and policemen. They fell to their knees and kissed the Germans' boots, begging for mercy. But the automatic fire and rifle volleys that followed quickly put an end to the anguish of these poor people.... I met two old women walking toward the forest clearing and told them what I had seen. They began to pray, and told me that similar scenes were taking place there on a daily basis....