POLONNOE
Pre-1941: Polonnoe, city and raion center, Kamenets-Podolskii oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Polonnoje, Rayon center, Gebiet Schepetowka, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Polonne, raion center, Khmel’nyts’kyi oblast’, Ukraine
Polonnoe is located 83 kilometers (52 miles) west of Zhitomir. In 1897, the Jewish population was 7,910. According to the 1926 census, 5,337 Jews resided in Polonnoe. The January 1939 census recorded 4,171 Jewish residents; they comprised 30.2 percent of the total population. In addition, 675 Jews lived in the town of Poninka, and another 883 Jews lived elsewhere in the Polonnoe raion, mostly in the settlement of Novolabun’.
After Nazi Germany attacked the USSR on June 22, 1941, some Jewish men were drafted or volunteered for the Red Army; other Jews were able to evacuate to the eastern regions of the Soviet Union. It seems likely that about 4,000 Jews remained in the Polonnoe raion at the start of the German occupation.
Polonnoe was occupied by units of the German 17th Army on July 6, 1941. In July and August 1941, the city was governed by a series of German military commandant’s offices (Ortskommandanturen). The military administration formed a local authority and an auxiliary police force recruited from local non-Jewish inhabitants. Polonnoe became a Rayon center within Gebiet Schepetowka. The Gebietskommissar was Regierungsassessor Worbs, and the Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer was Leutnant der Schutzpolizei Richard Höse.1
In early August 1941, German security forces murdered 19 Jews in Polonnoe as alleged Communist activists. On August 23, a German police cavalry squadron, subordinated to the Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer (HSSPF) Russland Süd, Friedrich Jeckeln, shot 113 Jews in the city.2
On September 2, 1941, a mass shooting of the Jews was carried out by German Police Regiment South, assisted by their accomplices in the local police. The Jews were hunted down, loaded onto trucks, taken to the woods near a railway station, then shot and buried in pits. Before they were killed, they were made to strip naked, and gold teeth were removed from their mouths. According to German records, approximately 2,000 people were killed on this occasion. At the same time, in all likelihood most of the Jews of Poninka, about 500 in all, were murdered by the same police regiment.3 More than 80 Jews from Labun’ and Novolabun’ were murdered in the nearby forests in the summer and fall of 1941.4
Another 15 families (about 50 Jews) from Polonnoe were shot in the nearby town of Liubar on September 13, 1941, by the German 45th Reserve Police Battalion.5
During October and November 1941, a ghetto was created in Polonnoe in three or four barracks at the granite quarry on Berezovskaia Street, which were fenced in with barbed wire. Subsequently all the Jews from Poninka, Novolabun’, Bereznia, Vorobevka, and Kotelianka who were still alive were brought to the ghetto. According to Maria Tribun, in the barracks Jews slept on the concrete floor and on shared bunks; there was no heat, and food was sparse. Some local residents tried to help by bringing potatoes, beets, and bread for those in the ghetto. Nevertheless, disease, including typhus, spread among the ghetto inhabitants as a result of the miserable conditions.
Nobody was permitted to leave the ghetto, and on the way to work the local police guarded the Jews. The ghetto inhabitants were ordered to wear a special symbol on their clothes: yellow circles on the front and back, which replaced the white armbands with a Star of David initially ordered by the military authorities. Anyone deemed guilty of the slightest misdeed [End Page 1446] was subjected to corporal punishment or even shot dead. Among the forced labor tasks was the carrying and destruction of Jewish gravestones in the cemetery.6 In the recollection of Boris Timoshenko, “[T]he conditions of life there were terrifying—cold and hunger were common.”7
According to Anna Kalika, the remaining Jews of Labun’ were brought into the Polonnoe ghetto in mid-February 1942. “While letting us through the gate into the ghetto, we were repeatedly hit by clubs; our valuables were taken away; those who dared to disobey were shot dead right on the spot.”8
As mentioned, most of the Jews of Poninka had been murdered before the winter of 1941–1942, and the remaining Jews, except for three families, were sent to the Polonnoe ghetto. These last three families, except for Yasha the barber, who escaped, were then escorted to the ghetto by the local police in mid-March 1942.9
On June 25, 1942, the German police from Shepetovka and local collaborators surrounded the ghetto. First they shot several people to intimidate the Jews. Then they selected about 15 young men and women to be sent to the Shepetovka ghetto a week later to work as craftsmen. Then the remaining people, mainly women, children, and the elderly, about 1,270 in total, were shot near Poninka.10
Maria Tribun escaped from the ghetto before the liquidation and was hidden with her sister in the village of Kotelianka by the family of Radion Ianiuk, whom they had known previously. Anna Kalika was transferred to Shepetovka in July 1942, where she survived the mass shooting by hiding in a ditch and was subsequently helped by forest wardens. Maria Shafranskaia was hidden by Anastasia Boriskina, even though part of her house was for a time occupied by the local chief of police and those found to be hiding Jews were threatened with the death penalty.11
SOURCES
Several personal accounts by survivors of the Polonnoe ghetto and other information on the fate of the Jews of the Polonnoe raion can be found in the yizkor book edited by S.L. Bentsianov, Sefer Zakorrem: Book of Memory. Suffering of Jews that Died during the Nazi Occupation: History of Polonnoye Jews (1993), which has been translated into English and made available on the Web by Jewishgen. There is also a survivor testimony concerning the ghetto in Boris Zabarko, ed., Holocaust in the Ukraine (Portland, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), pp. 288–291.
Additional information on the Jewish communities in the Polonnoe raion and their fate during the Holocaust can be found in the following publications: Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), p. 1012; A. Kruglov, Entsiklopediia kholokosta: Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia Ukrainy (Kiev: Evreiskii sovet Ukrainy, Fond “Pamiat’ zhertv fashizma,” 2000), pp. 181, 185–186, 197, and 230.
Relevant documentation on the anti-Jewish Aktions carried out by the German police under the authority of the HSSPF Russland Süd, Friedrich Jeckeln, in the Shepetovka-Polonnoe region in August and September 1941 can be found in the following archives: VHAP; and USHMM (RG-48.004M). Additional information can be found in the following archives: DAKhO; GARF; VHF; and YVA.
NOTES
1. BA-BL, BDC, SSHO 2432, Organisationsplan der besetzten Ostgebiete nach dem Stand vom 10. März 1942, hg. vom Chef der Ordnungspolizei, Berlin, March 13, 1942.
2. VHAP (USHMM, RG-48.004M), HSSPF Russland Süd, Jeckeln Telegram, no. 154, August 24, 1941.
3. Ibid., HSSPF Russland Süd, Jeckeln Radiogram, no. 61, September 4, 1941; Mariya Moiseyevna Tribun, “I Ought to Tell …” in Bentsianov, Sefer Zakorrem, pp. 27–28. The ChGK report gives the figure of some 4,000 Jews murdered in Polonnoe on this occasion.
4. O. Lochkin, “On the Roads of War,” p. 49; Anna Moiseyevna Kalika, “Memoirs of a Former Prisoner of a Jewish Ghetto,” pp. 29–30—both in Bentsianov, Sefer Zakorrem.
5. A. Kruglov, Katastrofa ukrainskogo evreistva 1941–1944gg. Entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik (Kharkov: “Karavella,” 2001), p. 197.
6. Tribun, “I Ought to Tell …,” pp. 27–28.
7. Testimony of Boris Timoshenko, in Zabarko, Holocaust in the Ukraine, p. 289.
8. Kalika, “Memoirs,” pp. 29–30.
9. “Fight with Death,” in Bentsianov, Sefer Zakorrem, pp. 43–46.
10. “The Tragedy of Black September,” in ibid., p. 78.
11. “The Saviour,” in ibid., p. 49.
