terrible. The people said it was like hell. The camp was run by the SS and the Jews were guarded by Ukrainian auxiliary police, so they were doubly tormented. The Jews were employed on road works, in field labour, and in cleaning a “pond”. They were made to perform all these tasks by themselves, without tools. For example, in order to roll a road, Jews were forced to drag a road roller that would normally have been pulled by two pairs of horses. In this case, the roller had to be pulled by two men. The two men pulling it buckled under the heavy burden but were spurred on by blows from the Ukrainian guards. The pond, which had been neglected and polluted for years and was simply one big bagno,775 [21] was cleaned by the Jews in the following way: the SS forced a large group of Jews to go into the pond in their clothes and shoes and pull up the stalks with their bare hands, without any tools whatsoever. Any Jew who couldn’t keep up or didn’t work well enough was shot in the back. Their clothes and shoes were ruined by the work in the pond. The little bit of food which the Germans gave the Jews, as well as the food sent by the Judenrat, was taken by the Ukrainians, so people were really starving, and more and more desperate cries for help from the camp workers were reaching the Judenrat. The Judenrat managed to bribe the Ukrainian auxiliary police for permission to supply a fresh group of workers once a fortnight. The Ukrainian police got a double payoff: on the one hand, they got the bribe from the Judenrat; on the other, they were able to rob more Jews of everything they had. In that way, the Jews in Sokolniki were saved from certain death. Here it must be said that by that time [22] there was already corruption in the ranks of the Jewish Ordnungsdienst.776 For example, some members of the Ordnungsdienst would seize people in order to extort money for their release, or release the rich and healthy and take poor and weak workers in their place.
At the end of August 1941 the German authorities set up the Arbeitsamt für Judeneinsatz.777 Obligatory registration was imposed for all Jews aged 15 to 60. Whereas the Judenrat had previously been supplying 2,000 workers on a daily basis to individual German institutions, the workers were now summoned directly by the Arbeitsamt. In October 1941 the first groups of several hundred men were sent in the direction of Tarnopol to an
