POWÓRSK
Pre-1939: Powórsk, village, województwo wołyńskie, Poland; 1939–1941: Povorsk, Volyn’ oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Poworsk, Rayon and Gebiet Kowel, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Povors’k, Volyn’ oblast’, Ukraine
Powórsk is located about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) to the east of Kowel. In 1921, the Jewish population was only 37, but by the 1930s it had increased to more than 200.1 In September 1939, the village fell within the Soviet occupation zone.2
German forces occupied the village on June 26, 1941. There was no permanent German garrison in the town, but a Ukrainian police force was recruited from local inhabitants, led by a man named Zakuta.
In late August or early September 1942, the Ukrainians received an order from the Germans to establish an “open ghetto” in Powórsk, and all the Jewish families came to live [End Page 1448] on one street. There were three or four families living in each house. Just before the Jewish holidays in early September 1942, the Germans and their collaborators murdered all the Jews of the village (about 200 in total). On either September 2 or September 4, 1942, the Ukrainian police rounded up the Jews and escorted them to ditches that had been prepared previously by the Soviet occupying forces to hold gasoline tanks. Before they were shot, the Jews had to sit on the ground and were made to surrender any jewelry or valuables they possessed. The rabbi was the first to be led to the pits and also the first to be shot.3
Among the Jewish survivors from Powórsk were Basia Katz (née Eisenberg), who escaped with her entire family and migrated to Canada after the war, and Bella Fleishman.
SOURCES
The yizkor book edited by Yehuda Merin, Sefer yizkor li-kehilat Manyevits’, Horodok, Troyanovkah, Lishnivkah u-Povursk (Tel Aviv: Irgun yotse Manyevits’, Horodok, Troyanovkah, Lishnivkah u-Povursk veha-sevivah ba-Erets uve-hu.l., 2002) [in Hebrew, Yiddish, and partly in English], was first published in 1980 and republished in Givatayim, Israel, in 2002.
The Jewish survivor Basia Katz was interviewed in 1988 by the British Home Office War Crimes Inquiry. The original transcript of this interview is now held at the British National Archives (NA) in London.
NOTES
1. Blackbook of Localities Whose Jewish Population Was Exterminated by the Nazis (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1965), pp. 212–228; 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), pp. 1018–1019.
2. This entry is based mainly on the recollections of Basia Katz, a Jewish survivor from Powórsk, interviewed by William Chalmers for the British Home Office War Crimes Inquiry on September 9, 1988.
3. Testimony of Basia Katz, interviewed by William Chalmers on September 9, 1988, gives the date of Friday September 4, 1942; A. Kruglov, Entsiklopediia kholokosta: Evreiskaia entsiklopediia Ukrainy (Kiev: Evreiskii sovet Ukrainy, Fond “Pamiat’ zhertv fashizma,” 2000), p. 34, gives the date of September 2, 1942.
