After the roundup, and after all able-bodied men had been separated from their families at the market square and been sent off, the darkest part of the day began: the execution phase.  All remaining people of the community, mostly women, children, and some old people, were herded into trucks and taken outside the city to nearby woods.

Every member of a killing squad, there were about eight men per squad, would select a victim each.  They would all march with their victims, side by side, in a parallel single file through the woods, until they reached the killing ground a few hundred yards away.  At this point, the people were ordered to lay themselves face down onto the ground, in rows.  When all was ready, the signal was given.   The people were all shot in the back of the head.  At times their skulls exploded from the close range impact.  Minutes later, the successful executioners were back at the trucks to select new victims.  This cycle that would repeat itself for hours.  By the time it was all over, late in the evening, the day's 'work' had used up 1,200 lives.

What terror these executioners must have caused in the last minutes of their victims' lives as they stood before them soiled with blood, bone fragments, and brain matter.  It is hard to imagine, too, that the massive killing had not deeply effected the men of the battalion, more than they believed themselves, as they felt themselves shielded by the axioms that distort reality.

Although the major's offer was repeated during the killing phase, that whoever did not feel up to the task of shooting people to death, would be excused, only a few more men stepped forward.  Nevertheless, the historic record shows that for the Battalion's next genocidal operation, two months later, a special unit of "Hiwis" - made up of eastern Europeans, mostly Ukrainians - were brought in to do the killing for the men of the battalion, and even those were first made drunk.

To the men of Police Battalion 101, the 'incidence' of Joesefow became probably nothing more than a number for a statistic that was entered in a book of records.  To the victims, however, it was a 1,200 fold tragedy.  Stalin once said that the killing of a single individual is a tragedy, but the murder of a million is a statistic.  He evidently knew this from personal experience as he starved millions of farmers to death in the Ukraine.

Ironically, the 1,200 people who were shot to death by the Police Battalion 101 that day were the fortunate ones.  The life of the deportees who escaped this death became a living hell.  They became feed-stock for a vast camp system that contained industrial slave labor operations.  Except, the detainees were not just laborers, there.  By all accounts it was a hellish environment in which they found themselves, filled with torture as well as toil, in which even the strongest were eventually consumed by starvation, or fell victim to beating and diseases.  None of the early internees came out of the system alive.  They were used up and discarded.

The irony is, that Hitler's plan for the Jewish people had not been kept a secret.  It had been promoted with all the fanfare of the state owned media or in giant mass rallies, and this long before the plan was actually carried.  Ironically the Jewish community had not spend the necessary funds, or made the effort required, to change the political climate that clearly indicated a catastrophe in the making, or taken the steps to remove themselves from Hitler's realm or reach.

When the 500 men force of Police Battalion 101 arrived at the village of Joesefow they found a sleeping community in more ways then one.  Why had the Jewish communities remained there?  Why had they not joined the Soviet war effort against Nazism?  They knew what their fate would be if they remained.  They also knew what the solution would have to be.  As it was, they denied what they knew.  Proof is that few tried to find safety by building double walls in their houses for hiding behind them, which they did in vain.

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Stories about  Love from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche