Božena Ivanová

"The Germans decided that they would take trucks. They came to school and said that these children were barbarians, they have no proper upbringing, no education, those Russians would not enrich them in any way. So, the children were loaded and taken to Germany for re-education so that they could become a cultural nation. A class after a class was loaded onto the trucks. Instead of going to Germany, they took them to Kamienec Podolsko, to those huge pits. There the children stood around the pit and a couple of soldiers with rifles stood nearby and shot them. And the children were jammed next to each other in front of the pit. When the German shot one of them, the child grabbed a neighbor and they fell into those pits together. There were thousands of children, the Germans took schools from all over the area. There were four pits, but don't wish for that - the volume and the corpses! When they declared that the children had not left to Germany, but were buried in Kamienec Podolsko, (it is a city, the city must have it recorded, it was an event, a terrible tragedy, there must be commemorative books and witnesses, everything there must be captured), so parents came from all over the area, walked along the paths and looked at the corpses. They knew how old the children were, not their faces anymore, it was no longer visible, but there were little dresses, boots, bows. The girls had beautiful bows; they wore them a lot in their hair. That's how the parents were coming to see them…"

"I have experienced a situation when a person died from starvation. When my grandmother brought me there, we lived in a housing estate. They cooked on kerosene lamps, and my mother and I - I was six years old – we went for kerosene. These were such special containers. So, we went down the hill to such a shop where they had kerosene. It was in the winter. And as we went down, a man was lying by the fence, and another one was standing next to him, pulling his wellingtons off his legs. And he - that was the first Russian word I remembered - he kept telling him 'pagadi, pagadi', he kept saying it. We went around them, my mom speeded up. When we went back, the man was lying there and he was already dead. And he wasn't wearing boots, the other one pulled them off - what would a dead man need shoes for? And that 'pagadi' meant 'wait'. So, he didn't wait and took off his shoes. He was starving to death. It was the famine. Then I had a friend in Lugansk, that was before the war, she lived in a village. And she told me that when she was little, she was going with her parents (she was about 22), exchanging corpses. They were changing them from a village to a village because no one in the village wanted to eat their relative or a neighbor.”

"We were standing and they let go the children's military train at night, and when we came to see them in the morning, it was all bombed out. There were five hundred children and two hundred adult staff. And there was not a single person alive. Well, they wanted to move on, right. As if there were not enough people and everything else to clear already. What a show. It was all cut and pulled off those tracks. There was only one track back and forth, two tracks couldn't be built, they wouldn't have made it, so everyone with arms and legs had to help. We went to help too. There were a few families of us, maybe there were six of us of the age of 14 and older with our parents. We got big gloves that fell, so they tied them on our hands with twine, and we also had to remove the corpses. It had to be buried, people couldn't be left there among the iron. That wasn't a pretty sight. Well, when the tracks stretched, they drove again for a while before they arrived and broke it again."