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y the German police. Many children, 10-12
years old, had been sadistically tortured before
being murdered. The older people were led in
groups of 20 to the open mass graves, where they
were made to stand along its edge with linked
arms, so that those who were shot fell into the
grave, pulling along the others who were yet
alive. Only one murderer with white gloves was
shooting at a time. In five minutes, a murderer
was able to shoot down 20 people, while the
victims were surrounded by a dense chain of
vicious Ukrainian police guards. Nobody was
able to escape. They told us that when a Jew
managed to climb out of the grave, he was immediately
murdered.
A few Jewish children, whose parents had
been slaughtered, were accepted by peasants,
who brought them up in the Christian faith after
telling them that Jews were being killed everywhere
and only those who accepted Christ would
be allowed to live. After the liberation, when Jews
wanted to retrieve these children from the gentiles,
the children did not want to go, saying they
believed only in Christ. One time, two Jewish girls,
sisters, were taken secretly from the village of
Masheve and brought to town by surviving Jews
who planned to take them to Poland. But in the
middle of the night the children climbed out
through a window and ran back to the village.
At the same time, the few Jews left alive decided
to build a barbed-wire fence around the
newest and largest cemetery of our town for the
mass graves of the murdered kdoyshim [holy martyrs].
This was done with the help of an engineer.
After fencing in the mass graves, I and two of my
THE ANNIHILATION 253
friends (Shneyer Vishnits and Moyshe Blumen)
decided not to leave the place but to build a nasip
(raised mound of earth) as a memorial. All three
of us worked till nighttime without stop and
erected a mound 20 feet long, 13 feet wide and 10
feet high. And we seeded it with grass.
I began to engrave a tombstone to put atop the
hill, but because most Jews had left Libivne for
Poland I could not finish my task.
While I lived under the Soviets who were in
Libivne, I helped the Russians seek out the
murderers of the Jews, and I was there long
enough to see some revenge. After that, I left for
Poland and later reached France in 1945. I left
France with the first group of 43 children who
were going on aliyah, and in 1946 I reached the
land of Palestine, later Israel, and settled there.
[Subsequently, in the fall of 1952, I left Israel
to come to the United States, where I had a
grandmother, two aunts, and two uncles since
the early 1920s. I later married and have two sons,
Andrew and Barton.
A few words about my immediate family: My
father's entire family perished in the Holocaust.
My uncle Zelig Sobel was the only one to survive
in Siberia, because he was in the Soviet army.
Aunt Malke (Sobel) Gitelis arrived in Israel in
1935. My mother's family was scattered all over;
my grandmother Hinde Faigen, Uncle Irving
Faigen, and Aunt Anna (Faigen) Haber were in
the United States (1920); Uncle Zelig Faigen
emigrated in 1929 to Argentina and Uncle
Shloyme Faigen survived in Russia. His son Ben-
Tsiyon died in World War II as a pilot.]