Memorial at the site of mass shootings near Lyubuzh (2)
From the memoirs of Vera Raikova, born in 1916, Mogilev:
"Oh, I saw Jews being shot in Lyubuzh. It was in autumn. At the beginning of the war.
In the morning we were going to dig potatoes in Borovtsy and saw that a wide, wide square hole had been dug. We saw a car coming - a box with a tent body. One, another, another, another, six cars in all. We hadn't even started digging yet. We thought that cars were coming to us for potatoes and we needed to load them. And we heard from the cars: "Schnell, schnell!". The Germans signalled us to get out of there. We ran away from there, but we watched from afar.
And then they started letting the kids out of the cars. And these kids were 15-16 years old, and they were small, holding on to the dresses, fighting and crying. Lots of people, wearing red caps, and blue caps, and green caps. Dressed differently. Some wearing blouses. And everyone was thrown out of cars. There were adults. But I remember children. We were standing dumbfounded. They were led down. There were hundreds of them. And then, I couldn't see, but I heard gunshots. Probably a machine gun: tra-ta-ta. We remembered that.
There was a huge pit. But there were other pits. My father said he saw another shooting. He went to the forest in Borovtsy to get some dried wood. Barely had he found a suitable tree when he saw motorbikes with trailers: "Tick, tick, tick, tick." Dad pressed his shoulders against the tree. He thought they'd see him and that would have been his end. He stood there not breathing. The motorbikes stopped. Prisoners, who were brought to dig holes, came out. The Germans didn't bury the dead themselves; instead, they forced our prisoners to bury them. Papa heard the conversations there. Dad didn't talk about the shooting itself, but everyone said that Jews were killed there. It's all not far apart in different directions. It's dark there in the forest."
These facts are confirmed by the testimonies recorded by the Extraordinary Commission during the interrogation of witnesses Sofia Yasyutina from the village of Novopashkovo and Maria Polyakova in 1944 (GAMA, f.306, op.1, d.10, s.42-43).