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IN THE GHETTO, IN THE FOREST, AND WITH THE
PARTISANS
By Wolf Sheynwald
The German-Soviet war in Libivne started on
Sunday, June 22, 1941. It began in the morning
as the Germans bombarded our shtetl. We believed
the Russians were very strong and that
they would chase out the Germans very soon.
We Jews were very sure of that.
When several days passed and the situation
did not change, we decided to run away. I
bought a wagon and a pair of horses, took my wife,
my son and daughter, packed some of our most
necessary possessions, and we started out for
Russia.
When we reached Kovel we could not go any
further, because German troops had cut all communication
along the roads to Russia. We barely
made it back home.
We found most of Libivne burned down,
except for the market and some houses on
Golden and Kusnishtcher Streets that were still
untouched.
Our troubles began very soon, as the first
victims of the Germans fell.
The Germans ordered all the Jews to gather
in the marketplace. Some of the Jews hid, but the
majority went to the marketplace. The Germans
lined up the Jews and told them someone had cut
the telephone lines and it was the fault of the Jews.
They began then to pick out Jews, counting off
every twenty-first man. Among those chosen
were Shmuel Vayngarten, Chayim Shuster, and
Mayer Tseylingold. The Germans took them to
the hill opposite the town market and shot them.
A few weeks later, the Germans ordered us to
elect a committee that would represent the shtetl
Jews to the German authorities. They appointed
Kalman Kopelzon,the former head of the kehila,
323
as chairman of the Judenrat. He called on some
important Jews of the shtetl to form the Judenrat.
Some did not want to be on the Judenrat but were
afraid to decline membership. The members were
Dovid Veyner, Nachum Baran, Motl Privner,
Leyzer Finkelshteyn, etc.-12 all together. Later
a Jewish police force was created consisting of
10 men. They did not generally harm their Jewish
brethren.
During that time, every few days new "contributions"
of huge sums of, gold, furs, and furniture
were exacted from the Jews. Jews were
afraid to hide these things and handed them over
to the Germans.
Six weeks after the German occupation and
two weeks after the formation of the Judenrat,
the Gestapo entered the shtetl and began to seize
Jews in the street. At that time they caught 30
Jews, took them to the new cemetery behind the
town, and shot them.
Not everyone was sure they had been shot.
There was a theory they had been sent to work,
until R. Avrom Sheyner went at night to the pits
that had been dug by the Jews earlier and extracted
a coat that had been worn by one of the
murdered Jews. Thus the rest of the doubting Jews
were finally convinced of the awful truth.
Another extermination action took place in
September of 1941. The Gestapo came again and
demanded 300 Jews for forced labor. The
Judenrat did not want to give them the Jews and
ran to the district commissar to intervene, but it
was of no avail. The Gestapo men again seized
Jews in the street, supposedly for labor, and took
them into the Skiber Woods, which had trenches
left over from World War I. There the 300 Jews