COUNTRY RAVAGED

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25427, 7 January 1944, Page 3

COUNTRY RAVAGED

WHOLE FAMILIES MASSACRED (Rec. 9 p.m.) LONDON, Jan. 5. “Whole colonies of Russians have been reduced to Stone Age conditions since the Germans swept over their areas.” says the war correspondent of the Russian newspaper Izvestia, following a tour of ravaged territories now being liberated. The correspondent relates that in three days of horse riding in the Novograd Volynsk area he did not see a single person, house, or village. Dozens of villages had been systematically burned down. “The inhabitants were locke'd in large stables, which were set on fire, and at Domanovich 250 children were herded into a school and burned to death. A memorial mound had already been erected to the children, the in.scription reading: “Cursed forever be the German butchers.” Peasants were driven into their own wooden

houses, the doors nailed up, and the buildings set on fire. Whole families perished, from a 100-year-old grandfather to a baby a few days old. Bedridden sick were pinned to their beds by German bayonets before their homes were set on fire. Those who escaped the systematic terror are now living in huge underground burrows. The correspondent met a man whose

tongue had been cut out and a girl i whose eyes had been put out with needles.