Memorial to the Jews of Barashi and the Surrounding Area

Меморіал євреям Барашів і околиць

Since autumn 2019 a memorial commemorates the murdered Jews of the village of Barashi. The memorial was set up as part of the project »Protecting Memory«, which is funded by the German Foreign Office.

History

Barashi is a village in the Volhynia region about 50 kilometres to the north-west of Zhytomir. The first written record of Barashi is from 1566. Around 1750, a small Jewish community has already existed there. After the partition of Poland in 1793, Barashi belonged to the Russian Empire. In 1897, Barashi had 2,250 inhabitants with 338 Jews among them – 15 percent of the total population.
After the First World War, Barashi belonged to Ukraine and the Soviet Union respectively. In 1939, 320 Jews lived there, equivalent of around ten percent of the whole population. A further few hundred Jews lived in the villages of the surrounding areas.
The German Wehrmacht captured Barashi on July 20, 1941, about a month after its attack on the Soviet Union. At this point only 43 Jews had remained in the town, all others having had fled. Immediately after the arrival of the German troops Jews had to wear signs and conduct forced labour. At the end of August, a group of about 30-40 Jewish men and women were brought from the nearby town of Yemilchyne to a spot near Barashi and shot there. Many of the perpetrators were ethnic German inhabitants from the region.
In September 1941 all Jews from the surroundings had to settle in Barashi, so that their number rose to 166. In an »Aktion« that took place presumably on November 1, 1941, the vast majority, at least 95 persons, were murdered. First a group of around 20-25 men were led to a field near a road a few kilometres to the west of Barashi where they were ordered to dig a large pit. Some of them had to use their bare hands. Later, the Jewish men, women and children were led in small groups to the pit, where they had to undress and lie down in the pit, upon which they were shot. The perpetrators were presumably members of German gendarmerie units and assisted by local Ukrainian auxiliary police.

Barashi, 2015, Mass grave with fence from 1946, Stiftung Denkmal

location unknown, undated, Khinia Kipnis from Sushki, murdered in November 1941 in Barashi, Yad Vashem

Victims

At the end of October or the beginning of November 1941 German units shot at least 95 Jews from Barashi and surroundings. More than 170 Jewish men, women and children from Barashi and its neighbouring settlements were murdered during the occupation. It is probable that many Jews who had managed to escape from Barashi before the Wehrmacht entered the town were also murdered during the Holocaust.

Ukraine, the second-largest Republic in the European part of the former Soviet Union, was at the centre of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It is estimated that five to six million Ukrainians died during the war, including around 630,000 Jews. In mid-September 1939, following the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in accordance with the Hitler-Stalin Pact – a secret German-Soviet agreement –, the south-east of Poland became part of the Soviet Ukraine. The oppression of the local population was now an everyday occurrence. In summer 1941, the German attack on the Soviet Union initially affected these very regions. Right from the start of the invasion the Jewish population was accused of supporting the Soviet powers and became the target of brutal attacks. These attacks were often the work of nationalist Ukrainians, who initially welcomed the advance of the Wehrmacht. German SS Einsatzgruppen and allied Rumanian units soon began to carry out mass shootings of Jews. The Babyn Yar ravine near Kiev, where German units and Ukrainian militia murdered over 33,700 Jews over two days in September 1941, has since become a global symbol of the genocide of Jews. The non-Jewish population was also a target for persecution. National Socialist racist ideology classed Ukrainians, as all »Slavs«, as »subhuman«. The occupiers looted the country, deported way over one million civilians to carry out forced labour and publicly executed hostages. By 1943 a partisan war against the Wehrmacht was raging along with the campaign of the nationalist »Ukrayinska Povstanska Armiya« (Ukrainian Rebel Army or UPA) against the Soviets and the Polish population in western Ukraine. The number of Poles to die in the process lies way over 100,000. From 1944 the Ukraine was again part of the Soviet Union and also encompassed former territories in eastern Poland. The UPA continued its campaign until the mid-1950s. The Soviet authorities deported around 300,000 Ukrainians to Siberia to counter the resistance. The Ukrainian culture of memory was aligned with the symbolic forms of remembrance found in the Soviet Union. Monumental sites of memory were constructed to celebrate the »victory« in the Great Patriotic War. It is only recently that victims have been remembered alongside the venerated heroes. In addition, a culture of memory centred on the campaign of the UPA has emerged in western Ukraine, with the UPA’s legacy being interpreted as a struggle for independence. Confrontation with anti-semitism and the collaboration with the German occupiers has only begun around 2000. With just a few exceptions, the mass shootings of Jews were ignored until the 1980s. It was not until 1991 that the government of independent Ukraine acknowledged Babyn Yar as a »symbol of Jewish martyrdom«. Long after gaining independence, Ukraine was still on the search for its national identity. The documentation of Soviet crimes – for example the state’s responsibility for the Great Famine (Holodomor) in 1922-23 that led to millions of deaths – has more significance in the establishment of a Ukrainian identity than learning about the Holocaust. Nevertheless, new memorial sites for the murdered Jews were established throughout the country, such as Drobitskiy Yar in Kharkiv or the Holocaust Museum in Odessa. On many mass grave sites new memorials were created, partially with German support. In Kiev, a new grand memorial site with global relevance was planned at Babyn Yar. These plans were put on hold with the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. What impact the current defensive war will have on Holocaust remembrance in the future remains to be seen.

Remembrance

Only a few individuals seem to have survived the Holocaust in Barashi. At least one Jewish toddler survived because it had been hidden by a Ukrainian family while his mother joined the partisan movement.
The Soviet Army liberated Barashi on January 1, 1944. Shortly afterwards a Soviet commission of special investigation collected evidence about German crimes and initiated proceedings against local collaborators.
In 1946, local residents and returning survivors marked the grave of the victims of the mass shootings of November 1, 1941 by creating a small mound and putting a fence around it. The same was done at another location, although to this day it remains unclear whose remains lie there.
At the beginning of the 1990s, only very few Jews lived in Barashi. Today, there are none.
In April 2017 non-invasive forensic investigations were carried out by a team of archaeologists, coordinated by members of the international »Protecting Memory« project which is located at the Berlin office of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Both mass graves have been investigated and their size exact location and size determined. Jewish religious tradition prohibits the opening of the graves so human remains stay undisturbed.
In September 2019 as a further part of the project »Protecting Memory«, a new memorial was inaugurated upon the site of the mass grave. An information stele tells the story of the Jews of Barashi and surroundings in Ukrainian, English and Hebrew.

Barashi, 2019, Memorial and information stele at the mass grave, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Barashi, 2019, Pathway to the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times.

Contact

https://www.erinnerungbewahren.de/baraschi/

info@erinnerung-bewahren.de

Baraschi

Barashi, 2017, Non-invasive archaeological investigation of the ground, Stiftung Denkmal

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