1 Killing site(s)
Raisa Abramovna N., a Jewish survivor born in 1926 : "At the beginning of the war, we were evacuated from Belarus to Kursk. When the Germans were retreating, they took over 600 evacuated civilians with them. When we arrived in the Snihurivka district, we were divided into different groups. That’s how we ended up in Novyi Shliakh. It was 1942. By that time, there were no Jews left there — they had all already been shot in the well outside the village.
The Germans moved us into the empty Jewish houses. There was only one Jewish boy left, Lionia Leikin, who was eight years old. He survived because, during the chaos of the shootings, the village chief put a cross around his neck and told the Germans he was Russian. This chief was a Volksdeutsche — I’m not exactly sure what that means — but he spoke both Russian and German. The boy was entrusted to a local man and survived.
The Germans didn’t know we were Jewish because a man had advised us to destroy our papers. Thanks to him, we survived. But once we were in this village, a woman denounced us, saying we looked like Jews. My mother, my two brothers, and I were taken to the Kommandantur in Snihurivka, and then to Kherson. My mother was violently beaten, but she never admitted we were Jewish. She said we were Belarusian, and after checking, we were released." (Testimony N°YIU320U, interviewed in Novy Chliakh, on July 16, 2006)
The village of Novyi Shliakh is located approximately 69 km (42 mi) east of Mykolaiv. It was established in 1931 as a Jewish agricultural colony and was part of the Kalinindorf Jewish National District. The colony was economically developed, and a Jewish kolkhoz operated on its territory.
Since its establishment, the settlement bore several names: Merezhenfeld, Nay Veg, and Plot No. 10. It appears that later, the colony was merged with the neighboring kolkhoz “Chervona Zirka” (also known as Plot No. 10). In 1946, Plot No. 10 was officially renamed Novyi Shliakh by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR.
According to witnesses interviewed by Yahad, only seven non-Jewish families lived in the colony before the war; the rest of the inhabitants were Jewish.
At the beginning of the Second World War, only two Jewish families from the colony managed to evacuate. The remaining Jewish residents did not consider leaving, as they were unaware of Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish policies and the early reports of mass killings of Jews — information that was not disclosed by the Soviet press.
Novyi Shliakh was occupied by German troops in August 1941. According to available sources, in the second half of September 1941, approximately 600 Jews were killed on the territory of the “Arbeit” kolkhoz and the neighboring “Chervona Zirka” kolkhoz (not to be confused with the village of Chervona Zirka, today Suvorove).
According to a local resident interviewed by Yahad, Vira Sh., born in 1931, one day two trucks filled with Germans arrived in the colony. All the Jewish residents were ordered to assemble in the club building under the pretext of being relocated elsewhere. Once all the Jews had gathered inside, they were forced to undress and were taken under guard in groups of about twenty to the outskirts of the village, where they were shot by the Germans over a well, which was then filled in with earth.
After the Aktion, the victims’ belongings were taken elsewhere, while the Jewish houses were reassigned by the village’s Volksdeutsche starosta (village head) to residents from the surrounding area and to evacuees from other places — including the family of a Jewish survivor from Belarus, Raisa Abramovna N., born in 1926.
The memorial erected today at the killing site is dedicated to the eternal memory of the inhabitants of the village of Novy Put (today Novyi Shliakh) shot by the German fascist occupiers.
Of all the Jewish inhabitants, only the two Jewish families who left before the occupation managed to survive the war.
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