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Ha-Cohen Finkel. How
could 500 Jewish families not have owned 5,000 s’forim? In the
auto-da-fe of Jewish books were also burned two Jewish men and a
Jewish woman, whom the facists and the police threw into the fire. Who
they were, it is not possible to find out.
My wife Liba and I tried to look for
Jewish books in the Jewish houses that remained, but we found nothing at
all, only sheymes scattered in the courtyards. In a few
Christian houses pages from the Talmud and other books had been glued
to the walls.
Since there hadn’t been time to burn
all the s’forim in one day, the burning continued on the second
day. By then there were no longer any Jews present; they had already
been transported to the ghetto: the four batei-medroshim
[study/prayer houses] and the houses near the shulhoif [synagogue
courtyard]. The houses of the ghetto were as follows: 1) Meirche Yude
Henburg; 2) Ioisef Hendes; 3) Avrom Av; 4) Leyb Botvenik (Katzev); 5)
Iozef Akonievich; 6) Chaim Nisn Kanter; 7) Beniamin Lekoshevich; 8) Tsvi
Shlome Finkel; and 9) Anton Kasperovich.
To participate in the
violence committed against the Jews, the Germans selected an active
police force from the local non-Jewish population: Iozef Tsebulskii;
Michail Grigorovich Melgoi, a former student from Danzig University; and
Setski, a Pole.
We, Uri Finkel, {illegible second
signature}, decided to write this pinkes [record] September 9,
1945, the first day of our visit to the shtetl Rakov.
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As we approached Rakov,
we did not recognize the shtetl. More then three-fourths of the shtetl
had been consumed by fire. No more remained than the block on the
shtetl’s outskirts, Vilner Street from a couple houses before Berl
Shleyenke’s (Kantarevich) to the end, and 12 houses as far as
Radershkevitser Street (R’ Sholem’s alley). The retreating fascists set
fire to the shtetl as they withdrew. Our heroic Red Army drove them
into a cul-de-sac, from which they
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