2 Execution site(s)
Grygoriy B., born in 1934, remembers the shooting: « A large number of Jews was brought here. They had been assembled for while in different places. I don’t know how many there were in all. They shot one group and then…Not far from here there was a slaughterhouse where animals were slaughtered. Behind the slaughter house, there was a paved path. That is where the Jews were shot. With other children, we watched the shooting from another side. We were curious to know how the people would be killed. After the shooting, local boys, older then me, who were born in 1925 or 1926 were requisitioned to load the corpses onto the sleigh and to transport them to the place called Stinka, where a ditch had been dug. All the corpses were thrown into this ditch, some of the victims were still alive. The ground was moving for a while. All the Jews living in the village were killed. I don’t know how many there were but they were numerous.” (Eyewitness n°2048, interviewed in Hrabove, on May 20, 2016)
Hrabove is a village in the district of Kodyma, located close to the border to Moldova, 270km northwest from Odessa. According to the witness, there were 15 Jewish families living in the village on the eve of the war. Some of them rented rooms from the local villagers, others had their own houses. They owned small shops. There were also artisans among them, such as shoemakers, tailors. There was no synagogue, but they still prayed in the house. For the big religious holidays, they went to Kodyma. The village was occupied by the Germans in early August 1941 and then it was put under Romanian rule.
othing was known from the archives about the shootings in Grabove. All the Jews are believed to have been relocated to Moldova where they were most probably killed or sent to other places. Thanks to the accounts of local witnesses interviewed by Yahad, we could identify the names of the Jews who were killed and the mass graves. The executions were conducted in late August 1941 by Romanians. There were several places in the villages where the Jews were killed on the spot. Their corpses were buried in the silo pit nearby, called Stinka. There is no memorial at that place. Another execution of several Jewish families (Savronky, Kogan, Ianovsky, Zilberman, Mil) was conducted at the same period, close to the forest. According to a local witness, the Jews were taken there in groups of 4-5 people. Several columns of Jews from Moldova passed through the village in the direction of Kodyma where they were executed shortly after.
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