On July 19 or August 28, 1941, the Jewish men of Baranovka were gathered from their homes on the pretext of going to elect a new leader for the Jewish community. Instead, they were locked in the basement of the former prison, where they were beaten and abused. The Jewish men were then taken to a pit dug in a swampy area near Baranovka. The soil there was somewhat water-logged, and the pit was half-filled with water. Some of the victims were thrown into the pit alive, while others were shot dead. According to some testimonies, another shooting took place about two weeks after the murder of the Jewish men.

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The Sosnina Ravine seems to have been the major killing site of the Jews of Baranovka. According to some sources, several Jewish mothers were murdered there, while their children were spared. The first shooting at the site was carried out either in July or in October 1941. However, the largest murder operation took place either on January 5-6 or in February 1942, and it claimed the lives of most of the ghetto inmates. The victims were led to the edges of pits and forced to strip naked in the winter cold. First, the children were thrown into the pits alive; then the adults were shot, their bodies falling on top of the children. Some sources give the number of the victims of the largest operation as 594, while the total number of people buried at the site has been estimated at 1,765. The last victims – who were non-Jews, according to some documents – were shot in the ravine in early 1943.

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Several hundred employees of the Baranovka china factory, along with their families, were spared during the previous murder operations, and they continued to work for as long as the factory operated. According to some sources, on January 11, 1943, 600 of them (apparently, the majority) were shot by local policemen at silage pits on the outskirts of the village of Yosifovka, 8 kilometers from Baranovka. Some sources indicate that the shooting lasted for three days, and provide some details about the operation - e.g., that the policemen put planks across the pits, and that the victims were forced to step onto those planks, from which they fell into the pit after being shot.

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The last massacre of the Jews of Baranovka – and of Jews from the nearby villages of Rogachov and Dubrovka – took place on August 20, 1943. This group of victims, which included Jewish workers and their families, had been spared during the previous shootings, since the Nazis needed them as forced laborers at the railway sleeping car factory in the village of Dermanka. On August 20, these Jews, together with non-Jewish residents of Dermanka, were forced into the village club and the factory office, and were then burned alive as part of a "punitive operation" in the aftermath of a skirmish between a Hungarian unit and a partisan force. Some sources report that 70 of the 100 victims of this burning were Jews.

More information: Yad Vashem