Below you can find an excert from Fund report and a full story - by the link http://www.yahadinunum.org/. Fund investigators confirmed previous reports about 50 Jewish hostages, murdered in Kupel.
In 2004, Yahud-In Unum was created to facilitate understanding and collaboration between Catholics and Jews. “Yahad-In Unum” is derived from the word “unity” in both Hebrew and Latin. The founders of YIU were Cardinal-Jean Marie Lustiger, former archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, archbishop of Lyon, Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard, archbishop of Bordeaux, Rabbi Israel Singer, former President of the World Jewish Congress, Mr. Serge Cwajgenbaum, secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress and Mr. Pinchas Shapiro. Yahud-In Unum’s largest initiative is an ambitious, multi-year effort to systematically identify and document every single site of Jewish mass execution by Nazi mobile killing units in Eastern Europe during the World War II. The objective of the work is three-fold: to substantiate this “Holocaust by bullets,” to discount Holocaust deniers of today and tomorrow and to give the fallen a respectful burial.
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Research trip, January 2010
Remains of a barn located in the old kolkhoz of Teofipol. (photo © Yahad In Unum / Nicolas Tkatchouk) Staff Patrice Bensimon (interviewer) Svetlana Birioulova (interpreter) Oleksii Kosarevskyi (interpreter) Denis Mouravitski (investigator) Vera Savtchak (interpreter) Thierry Soval (cameraman) Mikhaïl Stroutinski (ballistics expert) Nicolas Tkatchouk (photographer) Manuel Valls-Vicente (report editor) A Yahad-In Unum team completed a research investigation of 17 days in the northern region of Khmelnitski (formerly the Kamenets-Podolsk region), in 12 towns and villages: Pavlikovtsi, Pisarevka, Volotchisk, Kupil, Staraya Siniava, Starokonstantinov, Orlintsi, Manevtsi, Gritsev, Iziaslav, Slavuta and Teofipol. Chmelnitski is part of Podolia, the largest region of modern Ukraine and a region with among the highest numbers of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Ukraine (over 115,000 deaths). The major points resulting from the trip are discussed below. Starokonstantinov, Violida : "The Jews were lined up ten by ten in front of the ditch, there was only one shooter, he was drunk. " (photo © Yahad In Unum / Nicolas Tkatchouk) As in Tarnopol and Lvov, Yahad investigated camps whose primary purpose was the establishment and maintenance of the DG IV. German companies responsible for its maintenance, having insufficient manpower, camps were created along the road for Jewish prisoners forced to perform the most difficult labor for the maintenance work such as working in stone quarries or transporting tombstones. Four of these camps were located in villages Orlintsi, Pavlikovtsi, Volotchisk and Slavuta. Mikhail (born in 1930) of Pavlikovtsi who, as a boy “stole” potatoes from the camp kitchen said: “The Jews worked daily at the sandpit, except in very bad weather. In a line, every Jew threw a shovelful into a moving cart driven in turn by kolkhozien (collective) farmers from surrounding villages. The latter were then directed to the paved road where there were two piles of sand 2.5 m in height. Jews also performed work directly on the road. ” Research has shown that these camps were not cut off from the village: they were located most often in a kolkhoze in the heart of the village, occupying only a part, the other part being operated by non-Jews. Andrei (born 1928) from Orlintsi testified: “The men were separated from women during the night, each occupying a different wing of the building. The children remained locked up during the day, the windows covered with wooden planks. Ukrainians worked in other buildings of the kolkhoze.” The conditions for Jewish prisoners were terrible: “about twenty Jews were forced to pull their own carts.” Fifty of these unfortunates who died of exhaustion or hunger were buried in a pit behind the kolkhoz, which remains unprotected and without memorial. Unlike the camps in DG IV in the Ternopil region, the victims were shot in the town or village outside the camp (Slavuta, Volotchisk, Pavlikovtsi), or in another village (the Jews in the Orlintsi camp were shot at Manevtsi). In this area, the bodies of prisoners of these camps were not subjected to cremation as part of Operation 1005 (the Nazi project to eliminate evidence of their crimes). In addition, investigators noticed that the prisoners of these camps came from very diverse locations Kupel, Krasilov, Bazalia, Volotchisk), indicating the mobility of Jews in this area that the Germans deported according to their needs. Additional research on Starokonstantinov ..... Three witnesses reported the Nazi barbarism in the village of Koupel, where, “about fifty adult men and women were locked in the basement of a building in central Koupel. After several hours, the Germans told the witness to bring water to the survivors. The door was again closed and all died from suffocation. People working on the roads buried the bodies near the entrance, beneath the statue of Lenin.” The bodies were buried in the Jewish cemetery by villagers requisitioned by the Ukrainian police. Finally, thanks to Sergei (born in 1930), the team also located in the village of Teofipol one of the few Jewish kolkhoze buildings still standing in Ukraine or Russia.
Conclusion At the end of the 19th trip to Ukraine, the team had interviewed 56 witnesses and located 14 mass grave sites. Note that in the southern region, unlike other Ukrainian regions, over 80% of the mass grave sites have memorials. However, none is being protected from plunderers. Another trip will be required to complete the investigation in the Khmelnitski region. It will thus have taken four research trips to cover the largest region of Ukraine. |
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