The Impact Of The Holocaust On Society Teacher: Daniela Bălțatu Children sPalace, Piatra Neamț Testimony of the architect Simion Simion, one of the witnesses of the Pogrom against the Jews from Iași, from 1941: "It was about 400-500 meters from the Prefecture. And what should I do, I thought? I still had a German ausweis (permit) for the car and I said with that maybe I can pass. And we left ... We reached about 100-150 meters from the Prefecture and we were stopped by a cordon of Romanian soldiers - they were all Romanians from the front and rear trucks. I stopped there. They didn't let us go any further. After about half an hour, three-quarters of an hour, there was a large group of citizens, surrounded by the army, coming; they had entered the courtyards, in front of the Prefecture, and took out the Jews ... There were women, children, shouting, screaming, and the cordon of the Romanian army was pushing them aside and crowding (the men) on the road to put them in the Prefecture. At one point they stopped, I heard a machine gun rumble of about ten or fifteen minutes and there was silence ... It took about half an hour before I could go farther. Before the Prefecture, I saw that there were corpses on the pavement, on the sidewalks, and some people pulling these corpses to take them to the edge ... And on the ditch flowed the blood of those who were shot. They were also in the courtyard of the Prefecture - where corpses were gathered - but there were also living people ... I went on, to go to Vaslui. I was told that the unit is to Vaslui. Before on the road, about 400-500 meters, when I had to take the road on the right, in front was a shop with shutters pulled. We were walking very slowly and at one point a citizen, a civilian, was walking forward and behind him was a German soldier whom I had not seen since. He had arrived in front of the store, and in front of him was a citizen who wanted to raise the shutter. The other, who was coming with the German, at one point showed it to him and said: "that is ..." The German pulled out his revolver and shot him in front of the store. He was the only German I saw and I went on. We had a hard time, and by the time we reached the Prut, the unit had already passed. And they didn't let us, we couldn't pass. With a sigh, I returned to Bacau ... That's what I saw there. " In the pit of the dead: “On the way to Transnistria, the summary executions of the Jews, which began in July-August 1941, continued, and some miraculously escaped, such as Shabs Roif. We were headed to the Dniester, in Soroca County, in a forest by the river. It was raining hard and there I was in the grave with the dead for one night. There were some pits there that had already been plugged by the time we arrived, and a third pit wasn't quite full. I was 11 years old at the time and I ran there with other children, at that age I didn't really understand everything that was happening.
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