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

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

Ratno is located 51 kilometers (32 miles) north-northwest of Kowel. In late 1937, there were 2,140 Jewish residents in the town.

German forces captured Ratno at the end of June 1941. In July and August, a German military administration governed the town, and from September 1941, power was transferred to a German civil administration. Ratno was a Rayon center in Gebiet Kowel, within Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien. The Gebietskommissar in Kowel until June 1942 was Regierungsrat Arno Kämpf, and the Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer was Leutnant der Gendarmerie Philipp Rapp.¹ In June 1942, Kämpf was arrested for taking bribes from Jews, and Erich Kassner took over the duties of Gebietskommissar. The Germans established a local administration and recruited a Ukrainian police force in Ratno. The local police was subordinated to the German Gendarmerie post consisting of several German Gendarmes.

During the brief power vacuum after the Soviet forces had retreated, but before the German administration had been established, there was some looting of Jewish property by local Ukrainians from the villages, during which one Jew who resisted was killed. On July 6, 1941, local Ukrainian peasants organized a pogrom in Ratno, again looting property and killing several more Jews. However, on July 7, a platoon of German soldiers arrived from Kowel. Local Ukrainians initially mistook the Germans for armed Jews and opened fire. The Germans, returning fire, killed 10 Ukrainians. The German forces then conducted a reprisal Aktion, alleging that the Jews had fired on them. The Jews were made to parade on the square near the monastery, and about 30 Jews were selected and shot. The Germans shot roughly the same number of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) at the same time.²

In the summer and fall of 1941, the Germans introduced a number of anti-Jewish measures in Ratno: on July 14, Jews were required to wear distinctive symbols (a Star of David), and a curfew was imposed; on July 17, a Judenrat was established, headed by David Shapiro; Jews were compelled to engage in forced labor without pay, they were forbidden to leave the village, and they were subjected to systematic beatings by the Ukrainian police. The German authorities also confiscated all the livestock of the Jews and successively took most of their valuables, furniture, and clothes. In November 1941, workshops were set up in the town for skilled Jewish workers. Survivor accounts also mention that heating materials were scarce and that the murder of Jews became almost a daily occurrence.

The fragmentary accounts in the yizkor book make no explicit mention of a ghetto in Ratno, but other sources indicate that probably in the spring of 1942 the Germans established a ghetto, which held up to 2,500 Jews (including Jews from the surrounding villages, such as Chocieszów, which had 20 families in the 1930s, and 60 families from Kortelisy).³ In June 1942, there was a partisan raid on Ratno in which two German agricultural leaders (Sonderführer) were killed. The partisans called on the youth of the town to join them, but there was no response.⁴

A variety of dates are given in the sources for the liquidation of the ghetto in Ratno, but it probably took place in July or August 1942, when approximately 1,500 Jews were shot near the village of Prokhod.⁵ The shooting was carried out by a squad of the Security Police and the SD, with the assistance of the German Gendarmerie and the Ukrainian police, who searched the attics and cellars for several days, looking for Jews in hiding. A few hundred Jews were able to escape initially, but many of them were betrayed to the Germans by local peasants and also shot. Some managed to join those Jews who had fled to the forest earlier.⁶

About 30 Jews who remained alive after the massacre continued to work for the Germans in an artel, or group of craftsmen. Jacob Shteingarten, who survived, recalls that he hid in the cellar of his house during the Aktion before fleeing to a forest warden whom he knew, where he worked for a while. At one point he was also denounced and brought to Ratno, but fortunately he was permitted to continue working for the warden. When he heard in early 1943 that the remaining Jewish artisans had been shot, he fled to the forests, where he joined the Soviet partisans.⁷

Some of the Jews who fled successfully from Ratno fought in the Komarov unit of Soviet partisans around Pińsk. When Ratno was liberated on March 22, 1944, 14 survivors initially returned to the town, but most left for other countries shortly afterwards.

On August 11, 1942, the Security Police shot several Jews in the Ratno district, in the villages of Starościn and Koniszcze,⁸ and the 9th Company of the 15th Police Regiment shot 74 Jews in the village of Samary on the border with Rayon Dywin on October 31, 1942; one Ukrainian family (six people) was shot together with the Jews, for hiding a Jewish woman.⁹

According to the documents of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), 5,960 civilians were killed in the Ratno raion between 1941 and 1944, including some 2,600 Jews.¹⁰