OPALIN
Pre-1939: Opalin, village, województwo wołyńskie, Poland; 1939–1941: Liuboml’ raion, Volyn’ oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon Golowno, Gebiet Luboml, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Vyshnivka, Liuboml’ raion, Volyn’ oblast’, Ukraine
Opalin is located in northwestern Ukraine, on the Bug River, 24 kilometers (15 miles) west-northwest of Luboml. According to the 1921 census, 516 Jews were living in the village out of a total population of 1,226. In September 1939, as per the agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union, Opalin was occupied by the Red Army and subsequently incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR. By the middle of 1941, it is estimated that there were probably about 600 Jews in the village.
At the end of June 1941, soldiers of the German 6th Army occupied Opalin. In July and August 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) controlled the village. In September 1941, authority was transferred to a German civil administration. Opalin was a village in Rayon Golowno, in Gebiet Luboml. Kameradschaftsführer Uhde was appointed as the Gebietskommissar in Luboml, and the Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer was Leutnant der Gendarmerie Kurz.1
In the summer and fall of 1941, German occupying forces in Opalin introduced a number of antisemitic measures. Jews initially had to wear armbands bearing the Star of David and, from September 1941 onward, yellow patches sewn onto the front and back of their outer clothing. Jews had to hand over all money, gold, and valuables; they had to perform forced labor for little or no pay, probably in agriculture; they were prohibited from leaving the boundaries of the village; and they were subjected to systematic robbery and assaults by Ukrainian policemen.
At the end of 1941, the Jews of Opalin were resettled into a ghetto, probably around the same time as in Luboml, where the ghetto was formed on December 6, 1941. Those leaving the ghetto without permission faced the death penalty.
The ghetto was liquidated on October 2, 1942. According to testimonies given at the trial in March 1945 of the head of the local Ukrainian police, Omlian Timoshvits, five Germans and several dozen Ukrainian police officers from Luboml arrived in Opalin on October 2, 1942. The Germans and Ukrainians gathered 582 Jews (305 men and 277 women) and brought them to a large pit prepared in the Jewish cemetery. The Jews were forced to undress and were then shot and buried in the pit.
SOURCES
Publications on the fate of the Jewish community of Opalin during the Holocaust include the following: “Vishnevka,” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2000), 4:263; and “Opalin,” in Shmuel Spector, ed., Pinkas ha-kehilot. Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities: Poland, vol. 5, Volhynia and Polesie (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1990), pp. 41–42.
NOTES
1. BA-BL, BDC, SSHO 2432, Organisationplan der besetzten Ostgebiete nach dem Stand vom 10. März 1942, hg. vom Chef der Ordnungspolizei, Berlin, March 13, 1942.
