Report USSR No. 28, July 20, 1941, in Yitzhak Arad, Shmuel Krakowski, and
Shmuel Spector, The Einsatzgruppen Reports: Selections from the Dispatches of
the Nazi Death Squads' Campaign Against the Jews July 1941-January 1943,
Holocaust Library, New York, 1989, p.38-40)
F. Fedorenko
MY TESTIMONY
When the bolsheviks retreated before the German onslaught in the Second
World War they took care in advance not to leave any prisoners behind when the
Germans arrived.
The prisoners were driven, en masse, under heavy NKVD guard deep into
Russia or Siberia, day and night. Many of them were so tired that they could
go no further. These were shot without compunction where they fell. Terrible
things happened then. Sometimes, wives recognized their husbands among the
evacuees, as the prisoners were being driven through the villages. There was
great despair when they saw their loved ones taken under the muzzles of
automatic guns, to far, unknown places.
The villagers took care of those who did not die at once from the NKVD
bullets, but this was a very dangerous thing to do before all the bolsheviks
cleared out.
But the NKVD could not evacuate all the prisoners, there were so many arrests,
and jails were replenished constantly. In such a case the NKVD, before making
a hasty retreat, would murder the prisoners in their cells.
I recall that when the Germans came, in the fall of 1941, to a little town,
Chornobil, on the Prypyat River, 62 miles west of Kiev, 52 corpses of recently
murdered people, slightly covered with earth, were found in the prison yeard.
These corpses had their hands tied at the back with wire; some had their backs
flayed, others had gouged eyes or nails driven into their heels; still others
had their noses, ears, tongues and even genitals cut away. Instruments of
torture which the communists used were found in the dungeon of the prison.
Many of the tortured people were identified because they were mostly farmers
from the local collectives who had been arrested by the NKVD for some unknown
reason.
For instance, one girl (whose name I cannot recall now) from the village of
Zallissya, a mile and a quarter from Chornobil, was arrested because one day
she failed to go to dig trenches. All were compelled at that time, to dig
anti-tank trenches. The girl was sick but there was no doctor to examine her
and the NKVD arrested her, never to return.
Two days later, when the Germans arrived, she was found among the fifty-two
corpses. (F. Fedorenko, My Testimony, in The Black Deeds of the Kremlin: A
White Book, Ukrainian Association of Victims of Russian Communist Terror,
Toronto, 1953, pp. 97-98)
Andriy Vodopyan
CRIME IN STALINE
In this ciy in the NKVD prison factory the communists executed 180 persons
and buried them in two holes dug in the prison yard. The corpses were
liberally treated with unslaked lime, especially the faces.
My brother was sentenced to three months in jail for coming late to work.
After serving 18 days in the factory prison he was set free, and a month later
was drafted to the Red Army because this was in July 1941.