No More Jews in Nazi-held Ukraine, Eye-Witness Reports; Tells of Massacres

"Toward the end of 1942 I no longer met Jews in the sections of the Nazi-occupied Ukraine through which I passed," a Kiev gunsmith, Leonid Lebed, writes in an eye-witness report of the fate that befell the Jews in that area from the time of the Nazi invasion until February of this year when Lebed succeeded in reaching Soviet territory.

During the twenty months he spent in the occupied Ukraine, always on the run in order to avoid seizure by the Germans, Lebed saw the Nazis torture and murder Jews in Kharkov, Soumi, Konstantinovka, Poltava, Mirgorod and numerous other cities, large and small. Russians and Ukrainians were threatened with death if they helped the Jews, he said.

Every Nazi soldier represented an imminent threat of death to the Jews, Lebed reports, telling how he saw a woman and two old men shot down in the market place of one town because they had come there five minutes after the designated shopping hour for Jews had passed. Two children-a boy and a girl-of the woman, who ran to her screaming when they saw her fall, were also killed on the spot by the same Nazi who has shot their mother.

In Konstantinovka, Lebed saw the last 150 Jews in the city driven to the shores of a lake on a bitterly cold day, stripped of all their clothes and left to freeze. Those who attempted to flee were shot. The next day Soviet guerrillas blew up the commander’s headquarters, killing him. In Soumi, he saw a Dr. Kretzman, the only Jew remaining in the city, executed in front of the city hospital. In Poltava the Germans lured Jews hiding in the homes of Russian neighbors to their death by circulating the rumor that Jews would not be persecuted any longer and would be given work. When several old men and women came out of hiding they were immediately shot.

Before the end of last year-when he no longer found any Jews left-Lebed says he met many roaming the forests and steppes, hungry and demented, constantly fleeing to escape death.