Seven Jews were shot on July 23, 1941, exactly a month after the German occupation began. Two days after the occupation began, on June 24, 36 Jewish men had been ordered to escort carts of looted valuables across the Bug River. They returned. They were shot. The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia records that on July 25, the Germans killed 29 Jews chosen specifically because they were community leaders - rabbis, teachers, the men whose voices held the village together. The orphanage children were murdered next, a few at a time at first, and then on September 23, 1942, the rest. Each of these dates marks not a statistic but specific people, named in the testimonies that survive: parents, teachers, neighbors, children whose grandchildren now do not exist.

On September 18, 1942, the Germans ordered the remaining Jews of the Damachava ghetto to dig pits on a sandy hill half a kilometer east of the village, in a place known locally as the Shilov Swamp. Some of those forced to dig understood what the pits were for and tried to scatter. Forty-two were caught and shot where they ran. Two days later, on September 20, the cavalry squadron of the German gendarmerie stationed in Damachava, together with the local police, an SD Sonderkommando, and Belarusian collaborators, killed between 2,700 and 2,900 Jews at those pits. About 250 escaped during the chaos. Most of those were hunted down in the following weeks by local police. Ten Jewish specialists with skills the Germans temporarily needed were spared until August 1943, when they too were shot. The Damachava Jewish community, which had existed in some form for centuries, ceased to exist in roughly 14 months.

An incomplete list of those murdered was eventually published in the chronicle-documentary book Memory: Brest District, part of a Belarusian regional series compiled in the 1990s and 2000s. It runs to roughly 2,000 names of those tortured and killed in the ghetto itself, not counting those killed elsewhere or in the early shootings. The list is incomplete because so many of the witnesses who could have named the dead were among the dead. The local memorial at the Khabotske forest pits commemorates the September 20 massacre. A. Volkovich's essay Eternal Flame in Damachava, written in 2008, walks through what the village remembered six decades later. The Yad Vashem archive holds the testimonies. The names matter because the Germans counted by numbers and the survivors count by faces.

Among those who participated in the killings was a local Belarusian policeman named Andrei Sawoniuk, who later took the name Anthony and emigrated to Britain after the war. He worked as a railway ticket inspector for British Rail until his retirement. In 1999, when he was in his late seventies, he was convicted at the Old Bailey in London of two counts of murder of Jewish women in Damachava in September 1942 - the first conviction under the United Kingdom's 1991 War Crimes Act. He died in prison in 2005. The trial brought a few names of the dead into the legal record and a few details into the British press. It also clarified, for those willing to look, that the killings at Khabotske were not abstract Nazi crimes but specific acts by specific men. Some of those men were Germans. Some were Belarusians. Each of them, on each day, made a choice.