Vysotsk was a little town on the river Horyn in Rovne province: “a shtetl so tiny that it doesn't even exist on the map. Yet it is etched in the hearts of those who were born and lived there.”

Nearby villages belonging to Vysotsk are Ozery, Udrytsk, Milyach, Zhaden, Yelno and Vilka Klusovska.

Jews were “involved in trade, picking blackberries and cranberries and also the mushrooms which grow in great quantities in the forests. Every year they send several baydaks [flat-bottomed boats] full of this produce to Kiev and Odessa.” “Each family has a house of its own, a low wooden house, a small patch of land, a vegetable garden and even a milk cow in the cowshed.”

In 1901 there were about 250 Jews in the town. “Our shtetl witnessed the great migration to countries on the other side of the ocean; afterwards came the suffering and hardship of the First World War and the horror of pogroms and hunger after the war.”

Under the Nazis, a ghetto was set up in July 1942. “Rumors of horrors began to reach us from the nearby shtetls. … A week before the mass slaughter in Vysotsk a refugee arrived, a young man from Sarny. He told us about the slaughter there. We could not believe it. … The German authorities began to collect ornaments and jewelry from the Jews. Decree after decree rained down. To begin with they demanded candlesticks, samovars, forks, spoons. After that silver and gold objects. Two days before the slaughter they walked into the Jewish homes and demanded silver, gold, fur coats etc.”

The book includes names of those killed in the slaughter in Vysotsk, and residents of the village of Ozery who perished. There is a list of people from Vysotsk who settled in Israel.

“Let this book about our shtetl Vysotsk be an eternal tombstone to one of the remote shtetls in the diaspora, where we were born, where we were raised and grew up and whose memory has been branded in our hearts ever since we left and arrived in Eretz Israel, to work and to make a new life.”

Vysotsk [Rus], Wysock [Pol], Visotzk [Yid], Vysots'k [Ukr], Visotsk, Vysoc'k