The Germans laughed and kept taking photos of the scene. All the Jews wept. We saw how capable they were [58] of stripping people of their godliness.
Finally, when the Jew lay on the ground bloodied and battered, barely alive, with blood flowing from every part of his body, the officers ordered the beating to stop. The Jew lay on the ground for a long time, unable to stand up. We were afraid to help him. Then an officer went up to him and ordered him to dress. He did so with great difficulty. As he was dressing, the officernoticed that he had no shoes, because his shoes had been taken from him at the outset and given to a Christian. He found a Jew who was wearing a pair of boots and ordered him to give them to the Jew who had been beaten. The ten Jews had saved themselves from certain death by beating the man. They were released after the beating.
After we had fasted for two days, on the third day the Germans distributed to each a piece of hardtack weighing 50 grams. Hunger was a great torment. We were so exhausted and weakened that we were unable to move [58a] a limb.
We would surely have died of hunger, but a miracle occurred when an officer ordered that all the dead and shot horses be collected and made into soup for the Jews. That soup literally revived us.
It began to rain. All the Jews were without clothes. We were in the square under the open sky, without a roof over our heads to protect us from the rain. And thus we “slept” at night, out in the open, in the rain.
A Soviet partisan group penetrated Jeziornica and opened fire on the German troops in the town. After a brief struggle, the whole group was taken prisoner. They then arrested all the Jews of Jeziornica, men, women, and chil-dren, and brought them to our camp.
The next day they took them into the woods near the camp and shotthem all, the men, their wives, and their children.
[59] Then they led us into the wood, where we buried our martyrs in a sin-gle communal grave. However hardened we might have been, we all wept at the sight of the dead bodies of those who had been shot, among them many mothers still clutching their children. We had the impression that, in the final moment, the mothers had still tried to protect their children’s little bod-ies with their own.
One night a large group of Red Army partisans attacked the camp. The Germans repelled them and vacated the camp in the morning. They released
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