1 Execution site(s)
Yefrosynia P., born in 1931: “One week after the execution I went together with my grandmother to see her daughter, my aunt, who lived in the village of Vesele. In order to go there we had to pass by the Jewish area. That is when I saw the pit. It was located about 10m from the right side of the road. The pit was dug in the already existing anti-tank ditch. You know that before our village was occupied the Soviets made all the population dig ditches. My mother was among those who were requisitioned to dig the anti-tank trenches. The mass grave was about 6m long, 2m large and 2m in depth.
When I saw the pit, it was already fully covered. We could see nothing, although the ground was still moving. All the Jews who lived in the area were shot there. People said that Yosko, a Jewish boy, first managed to hide in the Russian stove inside a house, but then, he was found by the Romanians and taken to be shot with others.” (Witness n°2475U, interviewed in Kateryno-Platonivka, on September 12, 2018)
“We, the undersigned, members of the commission […] drafted the present act after having opened a mass grave of the residents of the village of Netgedaiget, the Oktiabrskiy district, in the kolkhoz named after Klara Tsetkin. The mass grave, in which we discovered 28 people who were savagely shot, was located in the anti-tank ditch. Among the 28 bodies, four were males, eighteen females, three teenagers and three infants. The age of the male victims vary from 30 to 95 years old, of the female – from 25 to 55 years old, the teenagers were between 11 and 18 years old and infants between one and ten years old. The corpses didn’t have any rags of clothing. 21 victims had the traces of the bullet wounds in the head, two corpses had their skulls smashed by a blunt instrument. The examination of the bodies allowed identifying the following residents of the village of Netgaiget: Khana Gurovich, 25 year old; Khana Vitek, 55 and who before the war worked at the Klara Tsetkin kolkhoz.” [Act n°1 drawn up by Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on April 22, 1944; RG 22.002M, Reel 6 (32), pp. 9-10/ GARF : Fond 7021, Opis 6, Delo 80]
The village of Khoroshylivka, as well as the Jewish agricultural settlement Net Gedaiget, doesn’t exist anymore. They were located not far away from the today’s village of Kateryno-Platonivka, 89km (55mi) north of Odesa. The Jewish agricultural settlement of Net Gedaiget was established in the 1920s when the Jews from other territories of the Soviet Ukraine and Belarus moved here to do farming. The newcomers were helped financially by the American association JOINT. Their main activity was agriculture. They had a kolkhoz named after Klara Tsetkin. The head of the kolkhoz was a Jewish man called Akhmetcheta. The local non- Jewish population also worked at the kolkhoz. There was a cemetery and a prayer house, according to the locals. All the children, Jewish and non-Jewish, went to the same school. On the eve of the war about 30 Jews lived in the colony.
Khoroshylivka was occupied in early August 1941, by the Germans, followed by the Romanians. Under the Romanian rule, it became part of Transnistria. With the help of the local population, Yahad-In Unum managed to fill some gaps regarding the execution of Jews in Net Gedaiget. According to the witness n°YIU/2477U, the shooting was conducted in the fall of 1942, and was carried out by the Romanians who arrived for this purpose. Before being taken to the execution site, there is no exact information about how much time in advance that happened, all the Jews, 28-30 people, were gathered at the kolkhoz building. Allegedly, the Jewish families were accompanied by the local non Jewish families. Once on the site, the victims were forced to undress and were shot on the edge of the pit. The infants were either beaten with a blunt instrument or stabbed with bayonets. After the execution, the mass grave was filled in by the requisitioned people from Kateryno-Platonivka. After the war, in 1944, the corpses were exhumed, examined and reburied at about 100m away from the initial mass grave. Today, there is no marker at the site.
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