[Continuation --2]

Bety Petrescu Shechter from Dorohoi (now living in Bucharest,) together with her mother, a younger brother, and others from Dorohoi was evacuated in October 1942 from Moghilev to the camp Peciora.

Here is what she relates as a surviving witness.

"In the camp there wasn't any organization. The place was surrounded with barbed wire and sentries guarded day and night any exit from the camp, so that nobody could escape from this hell.

We had no sleeping places; everybody tried to find something on which to sit down. Some were lying on corpses which had to be taken away the next days.

There was no means for supplying food. People were in tatters, dirty and starving. In order to survive, many ate the meat of nearby human corpses.

During the night, despaired screams of detainees, who suffered of starving or other illnesses that ravaged the camp, could be heard.

Sometimes, Ukrainian peasants came and by charity threw over the fence of the camp vegetal left over that for us was veritable delicatessens.

The situation was desperate and hopeless, each of us awaiting the end."

The camp at Peciora is between the very few sites, known in Europe, where Jews driven to despair by starvation were obliged to become cannibals.

The camp at Scazinet was set up in the spring of the year 1942, and was destined for the Jews who were to be removed from Moghilev. In the months of May-June 1942 nearly 400 Jews were evacuated from Moghilev to this camp.

The misery that reigned here, the relentless famine and all kind of illnesses but mainly diarrhea and scab made hundreds of victims.

Some Jews were shot, because they tried to pass through the barbed wire fence, which surrounded the camp.

In the autumn of the year 1942 an end was put to the camp from Scazinet, the Jews who remained alive were driven on foot to the Bug into the villages Vorosilovca, Tivriv and Crasna, where more than one half died of starvation and illness.

The camp at Vapniarca was created for those suspected to be linked to communists, socialists, or having left oriented ideologies.

If in August 1942, the camp had only 100 inmates, in the middle of September the number increased to 1.135, to reach at the end more than 1,500 detainees.

It was here where they brought 407 Jews from the camp Tg. Jiu, 85 Jews from prisons, and 554 free Jews, but suspected for having left wing orientations. The rest of detainees belonged to other nationalities.

In the camp the hygiene was poor, the detainees suffered from thirst and starvation, some of them were tortured.

On the order of colonel I Murgescu, commander of the camp, the detainees were fed nearly exclusively with fodder pea; consequently they got ill of "lathyrisms".

In April 1943, a number of 427 Jews from the camp were transported into the districts Balta and Golta, to be used as labor force.

After there was put an end to the Vapniarca camp, the remaining Jews were confined into the camps Grosulovo and Slivina.

In the district Golta, the well known camps Bogdanovka, Domanovka and Acmecetka were organized. In these camps mostly local Ukrainian and Basarabian Jews were confined.

According to the order of Modest Isopescu, the prefect of the Golta district, in the period of December 1941-February 1942, in these camps thousands of Jews were massacred by Romanian gendarmes and Ukrainian police, enlisted in the SS troops.

The sick and infirm were housed in stables, which were set on fire; the rest of the detainees were massacred in groups of 300-400, using explosive cartridges. The corpses of those that had been shot were burned. The operation lasted nearly 2 months and was fulfilled by a group of about 200 Jews.