On September 1, a new order appeared in occupied Kiev: “All Jews of Kiev and its environs must appear at the corner of Melnikovskaya and Dokhturovskaya streets on September 29, 1941 at 8:00 am Take documents, valuables, as well as warm clothes with them and so on. Whoever does not comply with this order and will be identified elsewhere, will be shot… “
The announcement was read by everyone: they approached and, as usual, silently dispersed. That night all the Jewish population of Kiev did not fall asleep. The whole night a large Jewish family was crying at the wall in Dionisievsky. Mostly everyone knew what awaited them. Shortly before, our good pre-war acquaintance Yanina from near Fastov, captured by the Germans on August 20, came to us and told us that all the Jews were shot there. Early in the morning on September 29, on the eve of the holiday of Faith, Hope, Love, on the Glybochitskaya and Andreevsky descent from Podil moved terrible columns. There were
people of different professions, different ages, physical condition. Left healthy and chronically ill, disabled, paralyzed carried on carriages and wheelbarrows. Dressed in winter coats and fur coats. There were things, some of them were bundles of a favorite bow on the neck. With so many people, the thought of their mass death seemed impossible, wild. But the prudent did not take their children with them, left them to their neighbors or handed them over to orphanages. Near the Intercession Monastery nuns, who also went to Lviv street to look at the terrible column, sometimes snatched from the ranks of children, especially not similar in appearance to the Jewish. Ordinary Orthodox nuns. Among those who walked that morning to Lukyanovka was the actress of the puppet theater Dina Mironovna Pronicheva. Her children, Lida and Vova, neighbors were taken to an orphanage on Kerosene Street. This fate befell the three-year-old Marik, who in the summer of 1941 was in hospital with a scarlet fever in a hopeless state. Parents struggled in despair. They were going to the evacuation, and the doctors advised them to go without a boy:
under such circumstances, such a sick boy can not be taken anyway. But he recovered, and he was sent to an orphanage. The nationality was concealed, as it was with many other Jewish children. There were a lot of them, and they were saved by the humanity and kindness of the children’s home. None of the older children on Kerosene died. No one was given. The fact that it was there, in Babi Yar, Jews were shot, the inhabitants of the neighboring Lukyanovka and Kurenivka were the first to know, and then all of Kiev.
