The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

Pre–September 1939: Ołyka, town, województwo wołyńskie, Poland; 1939–1941: Volyn’ oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon center, Gebiet Luzk, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Volyn’ oblast’, Ukraine

Ołyka is located 33 kilometers (21 miles) east of Łuck. According to the 1921 census, 2,086 Jews lived in Ołyka. By mid-1941, assuming a natural growth of 0.9 percent per year, there were probably about 2,500 Jews in the town at the outbreak of the war. Besides these Jews, there were many Jewish refugees from central and western Poland who settled in the town in the fall of 1939, as well as 60 Jewish refugees from Czech o slovakia.¹ After Germany attacked the USSR on June 22, 1941, and as the German forces approached Ołyka, about 150 Jews evacuated eastward,² but the vast majority of Jews remained in the town at the start of the German occupation.

Units of the German 6th Army entered the town on June 27 or 28, 1941. The town was caught in the fighting for several days and was severely bombarded by the Germans. By the time they had gained control of Ołyka, most of the houses had been destroyed, and many people had been killed or wounded.³ In July and August 1941, a German military administration governed the town, and from September 1941, power was transferred to a German civil administration. Ołyka was a Rayon center in Gebiet Luzk, within Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien. The Gebietskommissar was Regierungsassessor Lindner.⁴ Survivor testimonies mention the important role played by a local administrator named Max Tauber, but they do not mention his exact rank.⁵ A Ukrainian local council was set up in Ołyka as well as a local police force, which was subordinated to the German Gendarmerie post (created in the fall of 1941), consisting of several German Gendarmes.

In the summer and fall of 1941, the German occupation forces implemented a series of anti-Jewish measures in Ołyka: a Jewish Council ( Judenrat) was created in the town (chaired by Faya Borodata), through which the Germans transmitted orders and commands to the Jewish population. The Jews were required to wear distinctive symbols (first an armband with a Star of David, later a yellow patch) and to surrender all gold and valuables. They were also compelled to engage in forced labor and were forbidden to leave the town. In addition, the Ukrainian police subjected them to systematic robberies and beatings.⁶

In August 1941, the first anti-Jewish Aktion was carried out in Ołyka: 682 Jewish men were caught and collected in the Radziwiłł Castle, where they were told they would perform forced labor. But instead they were escorted to the Jewish cemetery and shot.⁷ A squad of the Security Police and SD from Łuck probably carried out this Aktion, with the assistance of the local Ukrainian police.

On March 13, 1942, a ghetto was created in Ołyka⁸ into which Jews from the surrounding villages were also brought. The ghetto was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. A Jewish police force, headed by Rosenzweig, was created to maintain order in the ghetto. The ghetto residents were forced to do various unpaid jobs. For instance, 120 people loaded timber into railroad cars at the Ołyka station 10 kilometers (6 miles) from the town; other Jews performed the same jobs at the Cuman and Rudoczka railroad stations; many Jews were also employed in agriculture.⁹

In late July 1942, a squad of the Security Police and the SD from Łuck, together with the German Order Police and Ukrainian police, liquidated the ghetto. On the night of July 25, 1942, Ukrainian police surrounded the ghetto. The next morning, July 26, all the ghetto residents were rounded up at the castle of former Polish duke Radziwiłł; they were told that they were going to be resettled. Meanwhile, Ukrainian police killed several sick, elderly, and disabled people in the ghetto and on the way to the castle. The attempt of several Jews to organize resistance was impeded by the Judenrat. After the liquidation of the ghetto, Ukrainian police looted all the houses in the former ghetto. Of the Jews gathered in the castle, a small group of specialists was separated from the others, and the women and children were then placed in an enormous garage in the castle, while the men were herded into a wooden barracks nearby. The doors and windows of the garage were tightly closed, and the shortage of air, intolerable heat, and overcrowding caused several women and children to suffocate there; others had been crushed as the Ukrainian police chased them into the garage, beating them cruelly. The Ukrainian police took their bodies in large wagons to the cemetery and buried them there. On July 27, the shootings began, in ditches on the former shooting range near the village of Czemeryn. Ukrainian police drove the Jews in groups of 50 to the ditch; the Jewish Police forced them to undress and to lie in the ditches facedown, after which drunken German and Ukrainian policemen shot them in the back of the head. Ukrainian peasants covered the bodies of those killed and wounded with a layer of earth, at which point a new group of Jews was brought in. At the end of the Aktion, the Jewish Police were ordered to undress. When they refused to do so, Ukrainian policemen brutally beat them, ripped off their clothing, and shot them.¹⁰ A small number of Jews, who hid in the former ghetto or fled during the night from the barracks, were able to survive. In early 1943, the 130 remaining Jewish artisans were shot in Ołyka.¹¹ [End Page 1435]

According to the documents of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), 5,500 civilians were killed in the Ołyka raion during the occupation, including 5,220 Jews: 720 in early August 1941 and about 4,500 in late July 1942.¹²