Holocaust horrors uncovered

GVOZDAVKA-1, Ukraine -- As children watched in the hot sunshine, a dozen rabbis scoured a Ukrainian village meadow for bones -- the fragmented remains of Jews systematically killed here during the Holocaust.

People who live in Gvozdavka-1 know that thousands of Jews were killed in the area during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, but the evidence didn't surface until April, when workers laying gas pipes happened on the burial ground.

On Monday, the rabbis -- including three Holocaust scholars from Israel and the United States -- spent several hours hunting for bones, which they immediately shoveled back into the ground.

For 70 years, Gvozdavka-1's villagers planted vegetables and grazed cows on the meadow, and told their children horrific stories about the execution of thousands of Jews in the village, 110 miles northwest of Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea.

"My grandmother frightened me with this story. What happened here is horrible," said Vika Bengul, 14, who often played in the meadow.

In November 1941, Romanian troops allied with the Nazis set up a concentration camp in Gvozdavka-1, where about 5,000 Jews perished, according to regional Jewish leaders.

Jews were brought here from several regions of Ukraine, as well as from what is now Moldova, they said.

Each day several cartloads of Jews arrived, villagers said. Some Jews were executed, while others died of starvation or disease.

"They extended their hands through the camp fence begging for food," said 78-year-old Olha Tomachenko.

"We threw potatoes and bread to them."

Tomachenko recalled how the Jews lived in the open, drenched by rain, freezing in the winter. "They gave birth to their kids and died at the camp," she said.

Yakov Ruza, rabbinical representative at the Israeli government's L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, said there are plans to fence off the site and put up a monument.

No plans are being made to exhume the bodies or to identify them.

Villagers say the mass grave is only one of at least four in Gvozdavka-1.

"They buried them everywhere. It was impossible to remember the places," said 80-year-old Olha Korsya.

Parfeniy Bohopolsky, 85, said he remembered how Jews were tortured and killed, and their bodies then piled on carts for burial at sites scattered through the village. Bohopolsky said that when he was 18, he drove one of the carts.

"Then I told my boss: 'You can kill me, but I will never do it again,' " he said, his eyes filling with tears.