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

Pre-1941: Volochisk, town and raion center, Kamenets-Podolskii oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Wolotschisk, Rayon center, Gebiet Proskurow, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Volochysk, raion center, Khmel’nyts’kyi oblast’, Ukraine

Volochisk is located 126 kilometers (78 miles) south of Równe. In 1926, 2,068 Jews lived in Volochisk. According to the 1939 census, there were 753 Jews living there. The same census recorded 2,926 Jews living in the entire Volochisk raion, including those in Volochisk itself. About half of the Jews in the villages of the raion lived in Fridrikhovka, where there were 521 Jews, and in Kupel’.

Volochisk was occupied by units of the German 6th Army in early July 1941. In July and August 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) controlled the town. The Ortskommandantur appointed a mayor and recruited a Ukrainian auxiliary police force. In September 1941, authority was transferred to a German civil administration. Volochisk became a Rayon center in Gebiet Proskurow, within Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien. Hundertschaftsführer Schmerbeck was appointed as the Gebietskommissar.¹ In Volochisk itself, a German Gendarmerie post was established, to which the Ukrainian auxiliary police unit was subordinated.

The Aktions targeting the Jewish population of Gebiet Proskurow, which included Volochisk, were carried out in 1942 by the Security Police outpost (Sipo-Aussendienststelle) [End Page 1489] in Starokonstantinov. This outpost was headed by SS-Hauptscharführer Karl Graf. The German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian auxiliary police played an active role in the anti-Jewish Aktions.

In the summer and fall of 1941, a series of anti-Jewish measures was implemented in Volochisk. Jews were ordered to wear distinguishing markings, initially armbands bearing the Star of David and later yellow patches. The German authorities established a ghetto in Volochisk. According to the child survivor Frima Laub, shortly after the arrival of the Germans, they “fenced in about 20 blocks or so—and all the Jewish people had to move out of their homes and go to live in that area.”² Jews were taken every day for forced labor at work sites outside the ghetto. Otherwise, they were not permitted to leave the ghetto, which was surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by the Ukrainian police.

In Volochisk, German security forces conducted at least two large-scale Aktions against the Jews. Laub describes one Aktion when many of the Jews were driven out of the ghetto and collected together in an empty factory building, where they were forced to undress and surrender all their valuables. From there the Jews were marched in a column to a site outside the town to be shot. Frima, together with her sister and her mother, managed to avoid being shot by claiming to be non-Jews who were taken there by mistake; but they were kept in prison under investigation for several weeks afterwards until they managed to escape and returned to the ghetto. Shortly before the ghetto’s liquidation in September 1942, Laub escaped through the barbed wire of the ghetto and was put into hiding by her mother, initially with a non-Jewish woman in return for payment but separated from the rest of her family. However, because of German threats of the death penalty for anyone caught hiding Jews, the woman became very scared and turned Laub out on the street, and she had to find refuge elsewhere for several months. To avoid endangering another family that helped to keep her alive, Frima slept for some time under a house with a dog for warmth, until she managed to rejoin her family in the spring of 1943.³

In August 1942, Jews from neighboring villages—including from Kupel’, Fridrikhovka, and Voitovtsy—were resettled into the ghetto. On September 11, 1942, German security forces liquidated the ghetto, shooting all the remaining Jews. The number of Jews killed was probably around 3,000 people, although Soviet sources give numbers that are somewhat higher.⁴ The mass shootings were carried out by a detachment of the Sipo outpost in Starokonstantinov, assisted by the German Gendarmerie and Ukrainian police. In the fall of 1942, Ukrainian policemen arrested and shot several hundred additional Jews who were found in hiding.

In July 1944, nine men who served in the local police in Volochisk during the German occupation were tried by the Soviet authorities. All of them were found guilty, and six of them were sentenced to death and hanged in Volochisk, while the other three received terms of hard labor. According to evidence presented during the trial, some 4,000 Jews had been murdered in Volochisk in the summer of 1942.⁵