Parafianov

With the coming of the Hitlarian army to the area in 1941, the town became a nightmare. The first thing the Germans did when they entered the town was hang Aharon Levitan, the local council chief. The Jews were, in fact, allowed to remain in their homes but the Germans took some of them to work and forced the Jews to pay them different sums of money every once in a while. In October the Germans concentrated all the Jews in a ghetto, which was a side street in town, and put seven, even ten families into a small house. The Jews worked communally and lived in atrocious conditions. They youth was drafted to do cleaning and field work. The Nazis began to persecute the children and demanded they be employed doing manual labour, nitting and doing needle work for the Germans. Thanks to this, the children stayed with their parents. The guarding of the ghetto was put in the hands of local youth. They organized a head count every day. Making false promises and lying, the Germans demanded more and more produce and moneies, as a condition to the Jews' remaining in town.

On May 31, 1942, at 4 a.m.. the Germans, with the help of the local police and dogs, surrounded the ghetto. The Jews were ordered to dress in their finest clothes and to take all their money as they were being transferred to a nearby town for work. On the way they were taken to the fire department building, where they were undressed and beaten to shock them. In their underclothes they were led along the long main street, the gentiles looking from all sides. Thus they were taken close to a small village, where a big pit, destined to be their grave, was dug. They were lined up in a row and shot mercilessly. The pit was covered with earth and plaster and eyewitnesses told that for a long time the earth would rise from the river of blood flooding the surrounding area. A number of young men managed to escape in different ways from the murderers and ran to the nearby forest. Some joined the partisans, and some were handed to the police by the local farmeres and were killed by the Nazis. The slaughterer's daughter, Haya Markman, visited the town coming back from Russia, and saw the unknown common grave. Only the fact that the place is higher than it's surroundings led to the discovery of the grave in the wide field. The Jewish possessions were taken by the local populace. Some of the houses are in the hands of the Russian authorities. There once was a small town, Jews had inhabited it for generations, made a living, and led an extensively developped cultural life in it, until the Nazi murderers arrived. Now there is not one Jew left.