The Chronicle of the Holocaust in Ukraine contains thousands of episodes of diabolical cruelty. One of them was the events of December 1941 in the village of Bogdanovka (now Mykolaiv region). In October 1941, the Romanian occupation authorities set up a concentration camp there. As of December 1, 1941, more than 10,000 Jews from Bessarabia and 30,000 deportees from Odessa were concentrated in the camp. According to various estimates, the number of prisoners in the camp was 40,000 to 54,000. Due to the overcrowding of the camp, in early December 1941 an epidemic of typhus broke out in Bogdanovka. Romanian and Nazi authorities have found a simple and effective "solution" - the total extermination of prisoners in the camp.
The massacre, which involved Romanian soldiers and police, Ukrainian police and the local population, began on December 21st. According to one of the locals:
In the winter of 1941/42, I took part in the mass shootings of Jewish citizens on the outskirts of a village in a ravine near the Southern Bug River. These people were kept in the piggeries of the Bogdanovka state farm, from where they were escorted by police to the ravine. Before the execution, the doomed men, women and children were deprived of their valuables and then stripped naked… It is difficult to imagine what happened there. Shooting all around, the cries of the doomed… Before the shooting, the victim was put on his knees and shot in the back of the head. If the corpses themselves did not fall into the ravine, they were dropped by the Jews from the "working team" There, in a deep ravine, the corpses burned continuously…
(Cited by: Kruglov A., Umansky A., Shchupak I. The Holocaust in Ukraine: Reich Commissariat "Ukraine", Governorship "Transnistria". P. 428.)
Approximately 5,000 patients and people with disabilities were locked in two stables, which were later burned to the ground. The remaining prisoners were sent to the river in groups of 300-400. There, having previously taken off their clothes and got on their knees, they were shot and killed by hand grenades. During the 4-day execution, 30,000 people were killed. The killings were suspended on Christmas Eve (December 25), and the rest of the Jews were left outside, where they were waiting for death in the cold. The action of destruction was resumed on December 28. By the beginning of 1942, about 11,000 more Jews were killed. Two hundred were left alive to burn the bodies, after which most of them were killed. According to some estimates, about 55,000 Jews were killed in just two weeks.
The facts of the extermination of "peaceful Soviet citizens" in the village were confirmed after the war by numerous eyewitness accounts and the forensic medical expert commission of the USSR.
A memorial was erected in 1996 to honor the memory of the fallen Jews at the site of a former concentration camp in the village of Bogdanovka. Recently, in 2017, at the initiative of one of the survivors of the camp, an Alley with 127 trees was planted - in memory of up to 127 people who managed to survive the terrible tragedy.
You can learn more about the terrible tragedy of the south of Ukraine in the library of Museum "Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine":
- Круглов А. И. Катастрофа украинского еврейства 1941–1944 г.:Энциклопедический справочник. Харьков: Каравелла, 2001, 376 с.
- Круглов А., Уманский А., Щупак И. Холокост в Украине: Рейхскомиссариат «Украина», Губернаторство «Транснистрия». Днипро: Украинский институт изучения Холокоста «Ткума», 2016. 564 с.
- Гельфонд Е. Г. Майданек над Бугом. Воспоминания о южноукраинских лагерях и гетто. Донецк: Апекс, 2008, 90 с.