In one room, those who survived wrote the names of the 18 who didn’t.

“An old man died near me and then his wife died next,” Valentyna Saroyan, a weary survivor, recalled Tuesday as she toured the darkened basement. “Then a man died who was lying there, then a woman sitting next to me. She was a heavy woman, and it was very difficult for her.”…

“Here’s a chair, and that’s how we were sitting for a month,” Saroyan said, recalling her aching legs.

As people died one by one in the basement, neighbors were allowed from time to time to place the bodies in a mass grave in a nearby cemetery.