From the collections of Yad Vashem and Ilya Ehrenburg. The article was published in one of the newspapers under the heading "Tiraspol tragedy"
Author: Senior Lieutenant Evseev K.
Life before the war was happy and joyful in the flourishing Moldavian city of Tiraspol.
“We had plenty of everything,” the workers say, “we honestly worked, had a cultural rest. The Germans came, their henchmen the Romanians, and our happiness faded. This succession dragged on the black days of slavery, bitter hard labor life.
For more than two and a half years, the Romanian-German barbarians "dominated" in Tiraspol. They turned the Soviet city into a heap of ruins, into ashes. Every street has a trace of their monstrous atrocities. Here is the theater named after the great Ukrainian poet Taras Grigoryevich Shevchenko. The bandits burned it down. All schools, hospitals, an agricultural institute, a hydropathic facility were blown up. Ruins, bare walls stand on the site of the Tkachenko cannery, the First of May, pasta, carpet, hosiery and furniture factories, an elevator, water and power stations. Hundreds of other public buildings and dwelling houses of workers and employees were destroyed.
The blood runs cold when you learn about the atrocities of the Germans against the civilian population and prisoners of war. It cannot be forgotten, it cannot be forgiven!
In the area of the old Tiraspol fortress, the Germans dealt with the Soviet people. Thousands of men and women were brought here, doomed to death. Hungry, shod and undressed, mothers with children walked, carrying infants on stiff arms.
“We heard heartbreaking groans and screams, pleas for mercy and shots,” says Praskovya Prokhorovna Matienko. They fired from machine guns, fired from machine guns, fired all night ...
We stand at the open grave. In 1942, the Nazi scoundrels drove hundreds of innocent people here and shot them. They did not press charges against their victims. They knew that they were Russian, Soviet people and they had to be destroyed. And they destroyed. The commission found 38 corpses in a grave dug up to half. And before her appeared a picture that captured the last minutes of the life of innocent Soviet people, a picture of the monstrous atrocities of fascist bandits. Here is the body of a woman. Her hands are tied, 5 bullet holes are visible in the back of the skull. The fascist beast killed her from behind. They did this with every victim, tied their hands and shot in the back of the head with a machine gun. In each corpse, the commission found three to five bullet wounds in the head. In the second pit, which has just begun to be opened, children's bones and undershirts come across. According to the commission's definition, there are more than 100 corpses in each pit, and eight such pits have been found on the territory of the fortress so far.
– How many of them are there in Tiraspol! Stepan Trofimovich Matryuk says bitterly. They are from the territory of the school suburban economy, and in the floodplains, and on Borodino Square in prison. Only in the last days before the retreat, the Germans and Romanians shot 1,500 people in this prison.
- On May 1, 1943, in the prison on Pokrovskaya Street, - says Maria Nikitichna Lyubimskaya, - 200 people were shot, on May 2 - 300 and on May 5 - 200 people. I saw how, on the banks of the Dniester, three Romanian soldiers lifted a captured Red Army soldier on bayonets, and two were shot and thrown into the river.
- The Romanians shot my neighbor, the head of the bakery, Sergey Mikhailovich Volkov, for allegedly being a partisan, - says the lieutenant's wife, Lidia Mikhailovna Shvedova. Together with Volkov, another 47 citizens of the city were shot. They shot the Palamarchuk family. They cut a captured Red Army soldier with a dagger in front of my eyes, killed a partisan under my window with rifle butts ...
“My heart bleeds,” Lidia Mikhailovna says further, “when you remember how these monsters mocked our captured soldiers. The camp of prisoners of war, located on the territory of the Tkachenko plant, enjoys an ominous glory. The prisoners were kept underground here and died from hunger, disease, torture and humiliation to which they were subjected by fascist executioners.
Once a group of prisoners was driven down our street. Exhausted, thin, hungry, they walked, barely dragging their feet. One Red Army soldier came out of the crowd and asked for bread. I gave him a piece. The German saw, went up to the fighter and hit him on the head with a butt, took away the bread and threw it into the mud. Covered in blood, with a broken head, leaning on the shoulders of his comrades, the Red Army soldier wandered on.
There is a huge grave in a small garden on the water supply street. The corpses of captured Red Army soldiers were brought here in cars and carts, stacked in piles and slightly sprinkled with snow and earth.
Here they are, traces of fascist atrocities in Tiraspol. But not all the traces have been found, not all the pits have been excavated, not all living witnesses have told about the heinous atrocities of the Romanian-German executioners.
The Soviet people will not forget, will not forgive this fascist cannibals! The blood of our children, mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters calls for revenge. Hitler's band of robbers will answer for everything.
Senior Lieutenant K. EVSEEV
