Memorial to the Jews of Mukacheve

Пам'ять жертв Голокосту у Мукачеві

Until 1944 Mukacheve (Ukrainian: Mukatschewe, Hungarian: Munkács, Czech: Mukačevo) was home to the largest Jewish community in Carpathian Ruthenia. Only small memorials and memorial plaques in the town remember the fate of the murdered Jews.

History

Mukacheve is located on the banks of the Latorica river in the Carpathian Ruthenia region, also known as Transcarpathia or Subcarpathia. Before World War I the area belonged to the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Empire, then to Czechoslovakia. In the course of the break-up of Czechoslovakia Hungary took back the region in two steps: The area around Mukacheve in November 1938 and the rest in March 1939.
The Jewish community of Mukacheve was the largest and most important in the region. In 1941 approximately 13,500 Jews lived in the city, about 40% of the total population. And yet the community was not very old, only in the 18th century Jews started settling in Mukacheve, many of them hailing from the territory of today's Ukraine. Well into the 20th century the Munkacheve Jews remained rather conservative, the religious movement of Hasidism played an important role. Between the wars when the region of Transcarpathia was stricken with poverty Zionist groups gained strength.
With the region's annexation by Hungary in 1938 the anti-Jewish Budapest laws applied there too. Jewish men were drafted for forced labour within the Hungarian army, many of them died. In addition many of the Jews living in Transcarpathia were regarded as foreigners by Hungarian officials. Hungary deported thousands of them in Summer 1941 to Ukraine, which had just been occupied – the SS murdered the majority of them near Kamianets-Podilskyi a few weeks later.
Few weeks after the German Wehrmacht occupied Hungary the ghettoisation and deportation of Hungarian Jews, mutually planned by the German and Hungarian authorities, began also in Mukacheve. The Mukacheve Jews were confined to a sealed off part of town, the Jews from the surrounding villages were held captive in two factory buildings. In May 1944 all Jews from Mukacheve and surroundings were deported to the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1944, A family from Mukacheve – the standing girl Gerty Ackerman among them – shorly before being murdered in the gas chambers, Yad Vashem

Mukacheve, about 1900, synagogue, public domain

Victims

Between May 14 and 24, 1944 nine transports with about 3,000 Jews at a time left Mukacheve towards the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In total 28,587 persons were registered on these transports. Most of them were murdered by the SS in gas chambers on their arrival. The number of persons who were put on forced labour after the selection at the ramp and who saw the day of their liberation is not known, after the end of war the number of survivors was estimated at about 2,000.

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

The Transcarpathian region including Mukacheve was incorporated into the Soviet Union after the war, since her independence in 1991 it belongs to Ukraine. Initially many Jewish survivors returned to Mukacheve. For a start they managed to rebuild a synagogue but it was taken away from them by the Soviet authorities shortly after. Soon most Jews decided to emigrate, already in 1948 only few Jews remained in the city. Today their number is estimated at a few hundred, only a small minority maintains its religious tradition.
In the city there are few traces of its Jewish past. The old Jewish cemetery for example was flattened during Soviet times. Quite recently the site which had been empty for years was reshaped and a menorah was erected at the centre. There are two memorials on the cemetery remembering the murdered Jews of Mukacheve: One with a Hebrew inscription dates back to the immediate postwar period, while the other memorial bearing an Ukrainian inscription was unveiled in January 2010.
On a building in the city centre which was the entrance to the ghetto in 1944 there are two plaques. On the plaque mounted in 1994 the Ukrainian and Hebrew inscriptions read: »Here started in 1944 the deadly journey of thousands of Jews into the unknown«. The second plaque was unveiled in 2013 by an undersecretary of the Hungarian foreign ministry. It remembers the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg (1912-?) who saved the lives of thousands of Budapest Jews during World War II. He bears no tangible relation to the fate of the Mukacheve Jews even though the adjacent street where the ghetto was once located is also named after Wallenberg.

Mukacheve, 2010, Holocaust memorial, Marshall J. Katz, USA

Mukacheve, 2010, Post war memorial on the old Jewish cemetery, Marshall J. Katz, USA

Open

The memorial plaques are accessible at all times. The gate to the old Jewish cemetery is opened irregularly.

Contact

Kosmonauta Beliajeva/Valenberga
89600 Mukatschewe

Mukacheve, 2014, Memorial for the victims from the ghetto, karpatinfo.net

Mukacheve, 2014, Memorial plaque for Raoul Wallenberg, karpatinfo.net

Mukacheve, 2018, New Jewish Cemetery, Christian Herrmann

Mukacheve, 2018, Old Jewish Cemetery, Christian Herrmann

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