Memorial to the murdered Jews of Plyskiv

Меморіали жертвам Голокосту у Плискові

In the small Ukrainian town of Plyskiv, memorials at two former sites of mass executions of Jews commemorate the victims.

History

Plyskiv is a small town located 55 kilometers northeast of Vinnytsya. In 1897 almost half of the approximately 4,000 inhabitants of Plyskiv were Jews. In 1919 and 1920 there were at least five targeted attacks on Jews: the perpetrators were Ukrainian nationalists, marauding Polish troops or members of the Red Army, depending on the course of the front during the Russian civil war. By 1926 only about a third of the population was still Jewish and by 1939 their number had fallen to less than a quarter, as many Jews moved to large cities.
The German Wehrmacht occupied Plyskiv on July 23, 1941, at which time about 600 Jews resided there, while approximately 300 Jews had managed to escape or join the Red Army earlier. The Germans set up a Ukrainian police unit, Jews had to conduct forced labour. In late August or early September 1941, men of Einsatzkommando (sub-group of Einsatzgruppe) 5 of Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing unit) C shot and killed 20-25 young Jewish men at an unknown location. Presumably on September 8, another group of 20-25 Jews was shot dead.
On October 22, German units shot and killed about 500 Jews, the vast majority of the Jews living in Plyskiv, in the woods north of the city near a livestock cemetery. Previously, German and Ukrainian police had looted Jewish houses for two days. Excesses of violence occurred: numerous Jews were beaten to death, women and girls were raped. The next day the killing continued: at least 120 Jews were shot dead in the yard of the former NKVD (Soviet Ministry of the Interior) building. After that, several hundred Jews, many of them from outside the city, lived in an overcrowded ghetto in Plyskiv. On May 27, 1942 most of them, a total of 360 Jews from Plyskiv, Dziunkiv and Spychyntsi, were murdered in the woods. The perpetrators were probably members of the German Security Police stationed in Vinnytsya.

Plyskiv, 2017, The former synagogue, now used as a cultural centre, Stiftung Denkmal

Plyskiv, 2019, Memorial at the site of the mass shooting in the city area, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Victims

Between late summer 1941 and spring 1942 there were several murder operations against Jews in Plyskiv. In total, German units murdered about 1,000 Jewish children, women and men in Plyskiv.

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 about 16 Jews in and around Plyskiv survived the Holocaust. After the liberation of the city by the Red Army in January 1944, a Soviet commission of inquiry investigated the city, but its findings remained vague and contradictory. Neither at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, nor at later trials in West Germany were perpetrators ever explicitly held responsible for crimes committed in Plyskiv.
In Soviet times, memorials for the Jewish victims were created in two places. Probably in 1976 a memorial was erected at the site of the large mass shootings in the forest. The obelisk bore a five-pointed star and a Russian inscription, but this did not indicate the Jewish identity of the victims. The second memorial was created at the site of the mass shooting of October 23, 1941, where the presumed site of a mass grave was fenced in. Except for the fence, nothing indicated the crimes committed here. As part of the »Protecting Memory« project, which is based at the Berlin office of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe", non-invasive archaeological investigations were carried out at both sites in 2016 and 2017. In both places the presence of mass graves could be scientifically confirmed. As a next step, new monuments and information stelae were erected at the two sites as part of the »Protecting Memory« project, which were inaugurated in September 2019.

Plyskiv, 2019, Detailed view of the memorial in the forest, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Plyskiv, 2019, Detailed view of the memorial in the forest during the inauguration ceremony, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Open

The memorials are accessible at all times.

Contact

https://netzwerk-erinnerung.de/places/plyskiw/

kontakt@netzwerk-erinnerung.de

Plyskiv, 2019, Obelisk in the forest from Soviet times and elements of the new memorial complex, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Plyskiv, 2019, Memorial in the forest on the day of its inauguration, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

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