1 Execution site(s)
Ivan S., born in 1932: “While I was grazing my cow, I saw a column of Jews being led away. They were being taken from Skhidnytsia to the riverbank where the pits had been dug. I don’t know who dug them there, maybe the Jews themselves, but I can’t tell you this for sure. In the column there were about two hundred people or so. There were women, men, children, and elderly people in the group. They were all shot here, in Dovhe. I didn’t see the shooting myself.” (Testimony n°2998U, interviewed in Dovhe, on November 20, 2021)
Dovhe is located about 100 km (68mi) southwest of Lviv. Part of Eastern Galicia, the village was under control of different powers, from Austro Hungarian Empire to Poland. In September 1939, Dovhe was taken over by the Soviet Union as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Little is known about the local Jewish community. According to the only testimony recorded by Yahad - In Unum, there were at least a couple of Jewish families living in the village before the war. The witness lived next to the Jews, whose names were Zaika and Simyk. Both Jews lived off farming and the land. Simyk also had a shop where he sold tobacco. The Jewish children went to the same school as the non-Jews. There was neither a synagogue nor a cemetery in the village. The nearest town with a big Jewish community was Skhidnytsia.
Dovhe was occupied first by Hungarian Army in July 1941, followed by German troops. Yahad field research managed to confirm the information from the archives regarding the shooting of 127 Jews next to the river. The Jews murdered in Dovhe were not local, but brought in from the direction of Skhidnytsia. The column of Jews, including women, men, elderly people, was escorted by men in civilian clothes with armbands. The pit where the victims were shot was located 1 km away from the grazing fields, next to the church and the river. The shooting lasted for several hours. It was impossible to establish the exact time of the execution, but it might have taken place in the summer of 1941. Today, there is no memorial at the site.
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