Memorial to the murdered Jews of Samhorodok

Меморіал на місці масового розстрілу євреїв Самгородка

In Samhorodok, two memorials remember the up to 700 Jews of the village who were murdered there between 1941 and 1943.

History

Samhorodok is a village 40 kilometers northeast of Vinnytsya, which was founded in the early 17th century. In 1897, out of 3,605 inhabitants of Samhorodok, 1,234 were Jews, just over a third of the total population. During the Russian Civil War there was a pogrom in the village: in October 1920 Red Army soldiers looted Jewish houses. There were fatalities, several women were raped.
During the early Soviet period, the number of Jews in the countryside continued to decrease as many Jews moved to the cities. On the eve of the Second World War only about 800 Jews were still living in Samhorodok.
The German Wehrmacht occupied Samhorodok on July 22, 1941. At that time there were about 700 Jews on site, who had to move to an open ghetto only a short time later. While many Jewish communities in the region were wiped out in a wave of mass executions in autumn 1941, Samhorodok remained relatively quiet for a long time. On May 16, 1942 however, the Jews were forced to move to a particularly squalid part of the village. From this point on, the living conditions of the people in the ghetto were catastrophic and after only a few days they were physically very weakened. On June 4, the ghetto was violently dissolved. German gendarmes, Hungarian soldiers and local Ukrainian policemen participated in the action. Old and infirm people who could no longer walk were shot on the spot. All others were driven to the nearby settlement of Hermanivka (then called Lozivka). Here farmers had to dig a pit beforehand. Hungarian soldiers sealed off the area. The approximately 500 Jewish children, women and men had to undress here and lay down in the pit before they were murdered by German gendarmes with a shot in the neck. In the weeks that followed, individual Jews in the area were repeatedly caught and shot in the Jewish cemetery of Samhorodok.

Samhorodok, 2019, Memorial stone at the Jewish cemetery for the Jews shot there, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Samhorodok, 2019, New memorial plaque on the day of the dedication of the monument, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Victims

After many Jews had already lost their lives because of the catastrophic conditions in the ghetto, German gendarmes murdered about 500 Jewish children, women and men in the mass shooting of June 4, 1942. After that, individual Jews were captured repeatedly and shot at the Jewish cemetery. With the exception of about 10 persons, all up to 700 Jews who lived in Samhorodok at the beginning of the German occupation were murdered.

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 Red Army reconquered Samhorodok on January 1, 1944. Only about 10 Jews from Samhorodok lived to see this day. Even before the end of the war, a Soviet commission of inquiry investigated in Samhorodok to collect evidence of German crimes. The testimony of a Jewish survivor was also recorded, which was very rare in such investigations. Several local collaborators were also arrested. In the immediate post-war years, an obelisk was erected at the site of the mass shooting on June 4. No one can say with certainty which inscription this monument had and in which language, not even who took the initiative for the memorial. Later, this obelisk, which stood in the middle of an agricultural field, was supplemented by a concrete slab and fenced in.
Non-invasive archaeological investigations in 2016 and 2017 revealed that the concrete slab was indeed on the mass grave, but did not cover it entirely. In September 2019 a new memorial was solemnly dedicated here. The memorial was supplemented by an information stele, which informs about the fate of Samhorodok's Jews in Ukrainian, English and Hebrew. The investigations as well as the erection of the new memorial were carried out within the framework of the »Protecting Memory« project, which is based at the Berlin office of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe". A memorial stone in the Jewish cemetery now also remembers the Jews murdered there during the German occupation.

Samhorodok, 2019, General view of the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Open

The memorial is accessible at all times.

Contact

https://www.erinnerungbewahren.de/samhorodok/

info@erinnerung-bewahren.de

Samhorodok

Oranienburg

Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen

The Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen commemorate the over 130,000 prisoners from all over Europe, held captive in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945. During that time, over 20...

Wittstock

The Death March Museum

The Death March Museum in the Below Forest is situated in the north of Brandenburg close to Wittstock. Its exhibition commemorates the death march of the prisoners from Sachsenhausen concentration cam...

Lehesten

»Laura« Memorial

Prisoners of the Buchenwald concentration camp had to construct the »Vorwerk Mitte«, a production site for V-2 rockets, in an underground slate mine in the Thuringian town of Schmiedebach. The strenuo...