STARAIA SINIAVA
Pre-1941: Staraia Siniava, town (PGT), raion center, Kamenets-Podolskii oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Staraja Sinjawa, Rayon center, Gebiet Starokonstantinow, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Staraia Siniava, raion center, Khmel’nyts’kyi oblast’, Ukraine
Staraia Siniava is located 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) northeast of Khmel’nitskii. According to the 1939 census, 1,237 Jews were living in Staraia Siniava (27.3 percent of the total population). An additional 605 Jews lived in the villages of what was then the Staraia Siniava raion.
Units of the German 6th Army occupied the town on July 9, 1941. In the two and a half weeks since the start of the German invasion on June 22, some Jews were able to evacuate to the east. Some Jewish men were conscripted into the Red Army or enlisted voluntarily. Around 1,000 Jews remained in Staraia Siniava at the start of the occupation.
In July and August 1941, a German military administration ran the settlement. The military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) appointed a local authority and formed a Ukrainian auxiliary police unit. In September 1941, authority was transferred to the German civilian administration. Staraia Siniava became a Rayon center in Gebiet Starokonstantinow. Regierungsrat Schröder became the first Gebietskommissar, and he was replaced later by SA-Standartenführer Curt Rolle. In the spring of 1942, Leutnant der Gendarmerie Otto Gent became the Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer. The Ukrainian police and Gendarmerie posts were subordinated to him, including the Gendarmerie post in Staraia Siniava.
In the summer and fall of 1941, a series of anti-Jewish measures was implemented in Staraia Siniava. A Jewish Council (Judenrat) was created. Jews were ordered to wear distinguishing marks: at first, an armband with a Star of David; later, a yellow patch. They were compelled to perform heavy labor without pay. They were not permitted to leave the boundaries of the settlement. Finally, they were subjected to systematic robbery and assault by the Ukrainian police.
On August 19, 1941, the first Aktion was carried out in Staraia Siniava and in the neighboring village of Piliava. The Stabskompanie (headquarters company) of the Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer (HSSPF) Russland-Süd, SS-Obergruppenführer [End Page 1472] Jeckeln, shot 511 Jews.1 The mass shooting took place in a ditch near a sugar refinery. Jeckeln personally directed the shooting.
At the end of 1941 or the start of 1942, a ghetto was created in the town. It was liquidated on July 23, 1942. On that day, the Jews of Staraia Siniava and the villages of Rayon Staraja Sinjawa, about 1,000 people in all, were driven forcibly to the Starokonstantinov ghetto and subsequently shot there.2 At a later date, the Ukrainian police caught 80 Jews who had hidden in various places around Staraia Siniava and shot them near the sugar refinery.3
According to a survivor from Ostropol’, Anna Nasarchuk, the Jews of Staraia Siniava were confined in the Starokonstantinov ghetto for several months together with other Jews from the Gebiet, before being killed when the ghetto was liquidated at the end of November 1942.4
SOURCES
Documentation regarding the destruction of the Jews of Staraia Siniava can be found in these archives: DAKhO; GARF (7021-64-816); and YVA.
NOTES
1. This tele gram from the HSSPF Russland-Süd, no. 120, dated August 20, 1941, can be found in VHAP, “Headquarters of the Command of the Reichsführer SS.” The tele gram is reprinted in A. Kruglov, ed., Sbornik dokumentov i materialov ob unichtozhenii natsistami evreev Ukrainy v 1941–1944 (Kiev: Institut iudaiki, 2002), p. 240. See also BA-BL, R 58/217, Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 86 of September 17, 1941, and GARF, 7021-64-816, p. 21. There were 300 Jews from Staraia Siniava who were shot, and 186 Jews from Piliava. The remaining 25 victims were likely from the village of Novaia Siniava.
2. “Staraia Siniava,” in V. Lukin and B. Khaimovich, eds., 100 evreiskikh mestechek Ukrainy: Istoricheskii putevoditel’: Vypusk 1. Podoliia (Jerusalem and St. Petersburg, 1998), p. 224.
3. GARF, 7021-64-7021, p. 21.
4. BA-L, B 162, II 204 AR-Z 442/67, Bd. I, pp. 328–340, statement of Anna Nasarchuk, March 28, 1973.
