the Jews. All the Hitlerites were well-fed, healthy young men. One of them
in particular stood out, an SS man who looked like a real executioner: bigbuilt,
tall, broad-shouldered, with a huge pair of paws. He ran through the
crowd with his sleeves rolled up and a big whip in his hand and, wherever he
appeared, you could hear wailing and screaming and see the bloody faces of
Jews. His whip worked non-stop. He flailed away with it, hitting heads indiscriminately, and wherever a big clamour arose he simply shot to kill. His
comrades did likewise, so that the square resounded continuously with shots,
screams, and more shots. I saw no expression on the faces of the executioners,
except the [12] preoccupied concentration of people hard at work. Sweaty,
dull faces. In this way, dozens of Jews were killed in the space of some 3 hours.
I was able to speak to a Jew who had escaped from the hell in the square and
was now standing on the other side of the fence. With a mad look in his quivering
eyes, he told me – taking me for a Christian – where the mass of Jews
came from. They were Jews from Werbkowice, villages and German labour
sites. Two days before, they had been ordered to assemble quickly and to go to
Grabowiec with their entire families. The Jews thought it was about registration.
They had taken a lot of things with them, loaded on the peasant carts.
Now he was standing there in terror, because his dear ones were in the square.
The bodies of the murdered Jews were buried on the spot. For this purpose,
the executioners had selected several healthy Jewish youths, who had
to accompany each executioner and, immediately after an execution was carried
out, [they had to] carry the corpse to the grave. On the edge of the square,
a large pit had been dug, and the murdered Jews were flung into it. If one of the
Jewish youths [13] failed to carry out his task quickly and diligently enough,
the Hitlerite beat him half to death. And so the bodies of the martyrs were
collected quickly. The Jews had to fetch shovels from the nearby village to dig
the martyrs’ graves.
In the meantime, a representative of the German labour sites arrived in
the square in Miączyn to release his Jewish workers from this deadly dance.
The manager of the Werbkowice estate (a German), for whom the comrades
from our Werbkowice kibbutz worked, also arrived. The comrades from the
kibbutz were called out from a list approved beforehand by the labour office
and, when they were all assembled, the SS men released them. They had to
return to Werbkowice immediately on the same peasant carts on which the
Jews had arrived in Miączyn at dawn. The manager had no patience to wait
