Historical Background and Interviews
II. The War The War
The Mass Murders and Our Escape Into the Forest In the fall of 1941, mass murders of Jews were initiated in Volhynia as part of the first phase of Germany’s Final Solution of the Jewish Question in Europe, but they stopped between December and Au- gust. The reasons for the temporary halt are not clear. It is known that Jewish slave labor was needed for the German war machine, and it is conjectured, even by well-known Jewish scholars, that Germany was having trouble finding murderers to conduct the up- close mass shootings, which resumed in mid August 1942; 17,500 Jews in Lutsk, home to Jews since at least the eleventh century, were marched out of town and shot alongside pits that served as mass graves. But again, the inhabitants of the Ludvipol ghetto were aware neither of the extent of the killings nor of their temporary halt. 1 When Norgall informed the Judenrat that unproductive Jews would be killed, the community worked even harder and made sure that their children accompanied them to work every day. On Sunday, August 23, 1942, Norgall met with non-Jewish lead- ers of the villages near Ludvipol and told them that the Jews were not sufficiently productive and were not contributing enough to the German war effort: They would all be killed soon Some villagers managed to sneak word of the Nazi plan into the ghetto, but the warning was perceived as unreliable and was not believed. The night of Monday, August 24 there was an especially strict curfew. Early the next morning (Yud Bet Elul in the Hebrew year), German soldiers and about 120 Ukrainian police surrounded the ghetto. The Jews were told that their labor was no longer needed and they were forbidden from leaving their homes. A half-hour lat- er, they were ordered into the ghetto square. Commissar Norgall stood in the square and said the soldiers would be taking them to the barracks, where their record books would be examined to ascertain their productivity. They were marched out of the ghetto in groups to the edge of town and over the River Slusch to the kasharan, about one kilometer away. Nor- gall rode ahead on horseback. Some people collapsed along the .
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