Many places in Ukraine remember the mass extermination of the Jewish people during World War II. The largest notorious tragedy, identified with the beginning of the Holocaust in Ukraine, is the shooting in Babi Yar in September 1941. But that terrible event was not the first act of destruction in Ukrainian lands…
"Pearl of Podillya", the city of Kamyanets-Podilsky was occupied by Nazi and Hungarian troops on July 11, 1941. Some Jews managed to leave the city before the arrival of Nazi troops. Shortly after the occupation, about 60 Jewish men were shot dead in the Old City. The occupation authorities appointed a local administration to be responsible for registering the Jewish people, forming members of the Jewish council, and making it mandatory for Jews to wear a yellow hexagonal star sewn on their clothes. And soon foreign Jews began to be brought into the city. According to the plans of the Hungarian leadership, about 30-35 thousand "foreign" Jews (refugees from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland) were to be relocated to the "liberated territory". As early as the end of July 1941, the Hungarian occupation authorities began deporting Jews from Transcarpathia (they were considered "Hungarian" because Hungary had seized these territories in March 1939) to Galicia. Most of the deportees were taken to the Kamianets-Podilskyi district and placed in a ghetto located in the Old City. The Nazi authorities were unprepared to receive so many newcomers that it immediately manifested itself, in particular, in food shortages. But the authoritarian regime of M. Gorty refused to take back the newcomers. So the Nazis resorted to radical measures. The case was taken up by the Supreme Fuhrer of the SS and the SS Police "South", Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, who proposed a solution to this problem through mass murder.
On August 25, the Jewish people were informed of the "resettlement," which began on August 26. The Jews came to the place of execution without much resistance - to the deep funnels on the outskirts of the city. The murder took place according to the so-called "Jeckeln system", or the "sardines" method: the victims themselves lay down to the grave "jack", feet to the heads - for "maximum use" of space. This "system" was later applied to the mass shootings in Babi Yar and elsewhere in the occupied territories. Officers of the 320th police battalion, the "staff company" led by F. Jeckeln and soldiers of the Hungarian army took part in the action of destruction. Jeckeln reported daily on the progress of the action personally to H. Himmler.
For three days, August 26-28, 1941, 23,600 people were killed. However, the shootings in the city continued later. Thus, in the summer of 1942, approximately 800 Jewish children and the elderly were executed; a few months later, the same fate befell 4,000 ghetto residents. More than 30,000 Jews were killed before the occupiers were expelled from the city.
After the liberation of Kamianets-Podilskyi, a special commission was set up to investigate the crimes of Nazi criminals. As a result of the investigation, 7 mass graves with Jews from the region were found, including a grave with the bodies of 500 children. Soviet authorities let the request to honor the memory of the victims unanswered. Only in 2015, with the help of the Hungarian government, the city council opened a memorial to the exterminated Jews in Kamianets-Podilskyi.
The Museum "Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine" offers some materieals to learn to know more about this tragedy:
- Kruglov A. "Jewish action" in Kamenets-Podolsky in late August 1941 in the light of German documents. The Holocaust and the Present: Studies in Ukraine and the World. Scientific journal. 2005. № 1. S. 43–48.
- Kruglov A. The catastrophe of Ukrainian Jewry 1941-1944: Encyclopedic reference book. Kharkiv: Karavella Publishing House, 2001. 376 p.
- Kruglov A. The tragedy of Babi Yar in German documents. Dnepropetrovsk: Tkuma Institute, 2011. 140 p.
- Kruglov A., Umansky A., Shchupak I. The Holocaust in Ukraine: Reich Commissariat "Ukraine", Governorate "Transnistria". Dnipro: Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies "Tkuma", 2016. 564 p.
- Slavik Y. The Way to Auschwitz: The Holocaust in Transcarpathia. Dnipro: Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies "Tkuma", 2017. 156 p.
- Honigsman J. The catastrophe of the Jewry of Western Ukraine. Jews of Eastern Galicia, Western Volhynia, Bukovina and Transcarpathia in 1933-1945 Lviv, 1998. 352 p.