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

Pre-1939: Tuczyn, town, województwo wołyńskie, Poland; 1939–1941 and 1944–1991: Tuchin, raion center, Rovno oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Tutschin, Rayon center, Gebiet Rowno, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Tuchyn, Hoshcha raion, Rivne oblast’, Ukraine

Tuczyn is located 26 kilometers (16 miles) northeast of Równe. The 1921 census recorded 2,159 Jews living in Tuczyn. Allowing for a natural increase in the population of about 0.9 percent per year, there were probably around 2,600 Jews living in the town in June 1941.

Units of the German 6th Army occupied Tuczyn on July 6, 1941. In July and August 1941, the town was run by a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur). On September 1, 1941, the area around Tuczyn was transferred to a German civil administration. Tuczyn became the center of Rayon Tutschin in Gebiet Rowno. The Gebietskommissar was Regierungsrat Werner Beer.¹ The German Gendarmerie maintained an outpost in Tuczyn, to which the local Ukrainian police force was subordinated.

In the first days of the German occupation, antisemites from among the town’s Ukrainian population organized a pogrom. In the course of the violence, about 60 or 70 Jews were killed and many homes looted. The next day, an Einsatzkommando of the Security Police (Sipo) and Security Service (SD), drawing on lists prepared by Ukrainians, arrested and shot 20 Jews and 5 Ukrainians as Soviet activists and Communists.²

Other anti-Jewish measures that followed in the summer and autumn of 1941 included the appointment of a Jewish Council (Judenrat), the requirement that Jews wear armbands bearing the Star of David (later, a yellow patch), the conscription of Jews to perform forced labor, and the restriction of Jews to the limits of the town. Jews were also subjected to systematic plundering and beatings by the Ukrainian police.

According to one survivor, soon after the start of the occupation, local non-Jews stopped recognizing their Jewish acquaintances. The Germans confiscated Jewish valuables and their livestock, which led to shortages of food. A clothing factory for the German army was established in the town, which used Jews as laborers.³

Until the late summer of 1942, the Jews of Tuczyn lived in a form of open ghetto. Herman Wajcman recalled: “[T]he ghetto was an open ghetto. You could come in and out. We actually moved into the ghetto, but we had passes to go to the factory, where we lived half of the time. It wasn’t like the ghettos that were surrounded by police.”⁴ Apparently, with the aid of bribes, the Judenrat managed to postpone the establishment of a formal ghetto until early September 1942. Then a ghetto was established in about 50 small houses along Waskadawska Street. Living conditions were very crowded, with many people having to sleep on the floor.⁵ At about this time, all the Jews from the surrounding area were also concentrated there, including from the village of Antonówka, raising the Jewish population in the ghetto up to around 3,000 people.⁶

On September 24, 1942, a unit from the regional Sipo-SD headquarters in Równe liquidated the Tuczyn ghetto with the assistance of the Gendarmerie and the Ukrainian police. An organized resistance effort on the part of the ghetto inhabitants enabled many of Tuczyn’s Jews initially to flee.

Following the murder of the Jews in Równe in mid-July 1942, refugees arriving from there told the Jews in Tuczyn what had happened. When news arrived that the Germans were preparing mass graves nearby, the leaders of the Tuczyn community decided to resist. Among the principal organizers of resistance were the chairman of the Judenrat, Hershel Schwarzman, and his deputy, Meir Himmelfarb. They planned to set fire to the houses and to attack the Germans with available weapons to enable the bulk of the ghetto residents to flee into the nearby forests. With Judenrat funds, kerosene was purchased, and some weapons, including five rifles and more than 20 revolvers, were obtained. A group of Jews who worked felling trees in the forests attempted to contact the Soviet partisans to gain some outside support. When the Jews went to pray together for the last time on Yom Kippur (September 21, 1942), Schwarzman and the other resistance leaders revealed their plans to the assembled Jews.

On the evening of September 23, the Germans surrounded the ghetto. The leaders of the uprising alerted the Jews, and those with weapons prepared to resist. At dawn the following day, the Germans and Ukrainian police entered the ghetto. In response, the Jews set fire to the houses in the ghetto and German warehouses nearby. When the Jewish fighters opened fire on their advancing foes, other Jews used the ensuing chaos of fire, smoke, people yelling, and rifle fire to break through the wooden barricades around the ghetto and flee. Herman Wajcman used some of the tombstones in the cemetery as cover as he tried to reach the forests. Several Germans and Ukrainian policemen were killed and wounded.⁷ It is estimated that initially up to 2,000 Jews, including many women and children, reached the forest. Most of the fighters stayed behind to tie down the Germans, and they fell in battle or were captured and then shot. This was the fate of Schwarzman and Himmelfarb as the uprising ended on September 26.

The Germans and Ukrainian police soon organized a manhunt for the Jews who had escaped. Within three days, around half of them had been captured and killed, and many, especially women with children, realized that they could not survive in the forest and returned to Tuczyn, where they were also shot. According to the records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), 753 Jews were shot in the Jewish cemetery in Tuczyn during the autumn of 1942, while Ukrainian nationalist partisans in the Kudrinka Forest killed about 240 Jews. The German Gendarmerie shot more than 300 Jews, Ukrainians, and Poles in the town park.⁸

A number of Jews held out in the woods into the winter, but some died of hunger and cold, and others were denounced to the Germans or killed by peasants. A few of the younger Jewish escapees eventually joined Soviet partisan units. When [End Page 1485] Tuczyn was liberated on January 16, 1944, only around 20 Jews remained in the area.