Nazi Soldiers Use Jewish Infants for Footballs, Jewish Red Army Man Relates

A Red Army soldier now fighting on the Stalingrad front today gave an account of a horrible massacre of Jewish children which took place last July in Pegrebistchi, in the Nazi-occupied Kiev district, from where he escaped last month.

In a story appearing in the Soviet press, the soldier, twenty-six-year-old Abraham Fivusowitsch, stated that one rainy day last July 600 Jewish families from the towns of Lipowitz, Kasatin and Skwira were driven to Pegrebistchi. There the me were ordered to the Rezhovoutsky Forest where they hauled legs for four days. On the fifth day they were assembled and instructed by an Italian officer to clean the athletic stadium in Pogrebistchi “otherwise they would be hung from the logs they hauled into town.” By July 27 the stadium was cleared. That evening all the Jews-men, women and children, well or ill – were ordered to be at the stadium. The men were placed in one section and the women in another. The women, of whom there were about 500, were instructed to hold their children in their arms.

“A few minutes after we had all assembled, a group of German soldiers, dressed in athletic uniforms, entered the stadium,” Fivusowitsch relates. “The Germans snatched the infants from their mothers’ arms and used them for balls, bouncing and kicking them around the arena. In a short time the ground was drenched with blood and the stadium was filled with the anguished cries of the women whose children were being murdered before their eyes. I succeeded in escaping that same night, and reached the Red Army lines in August. I learned, however, that many of the Jews who had been forced to witness the massacre became insane while others died of fright.”