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

Pre-1939: Warkowicze, town, województwo wołyńskie, Poland; 1939–1941: Varkovichi, Dubno raion, Rovno oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Warkowitschi, Rayon Dubno, Gebiet Dubno, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Varkovychi, Rivne oblast’, Ukraine

Warkowicze is located 26 kilometers (16 miles) southwest of Równe. In 1921, there were 886 Jews living in Warkowicze (80.6 percent of the total population).

In September 1939, the Red Army occupied Warkowicze, and the area was soon annexed by the Soviet Union. At this time a Jewish kolkhoz was established near the town. On the eve of the German invasion in June 1941, including Jewish refugees that had arrived from central and western Poland in 1939, there were probably more than 1,200 Jews living in Warkowicze.

Units of the German 6th Army occupied Warkowicze on June 27, 1941. On July 8, German security forces conducted an Aktion against members of the Jewish intelligentsia in which they shot at least three men and two women.¹ In July and August 1941, the town was under the control of a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur). The German military authorities ordered the establishment of a Jewish Council ( Judenrat) and demanded the surrender of valuable gold and silver items, which were forwarded to Berlin.²

In September 1941, authority was transferred to a civil administration. Warkowicze was incorporated into Rayon Dubno within Gebiet Dubno. The Gebietskommissar was Nach- [End Page 1490] wuchsführer Brocks, and the Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer from the spring of 1942 was Leutnant Eberhardt.³

In the summer and fall of 1941, the German administration introduced a number of anti-Jewish measures in Warkowicze. Jews were required to wear distinguishing armbands bearing the Star of David and, later, a yellow patch on their chests and backs.⁴ Jews were forbidden to leave the limits of the town or to trade with non-Jews and were obliged to perform forced labor.

In April or May 1942, the Germans ordered the Jews to live in a certain part of the town, which became known as the ghetto.⁵ The ghetto was enclosed by a fence reinforced with barbed wire, but it was not always strictly guarded.⁶ About 20 families of Jewish artisans lived outside the ghetto. The Jews were required to perform the dirtiest jobs and were frequently beaten by the German and Ukrainian police. The two most notorious German policemen in the region were Papken and Hammerstein, who also participated in the liquidation of the Warkowicze ghetto.⁷

Shortly before the ghetto’s liquidation, the Jews of Warkowicze began to learn from various sources, including the German press, about other towns in the region that had been rendered “cleansed of Jews” (judenrein). Then a group of Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) were instructed to prepare ditches at a sandpit about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) outside of town. Some Jews, especially the refugees from central and western Poland, understood these signs and fled the ghetto or went into hiding.⁸

One day in early October 1942,⁹ German and Ukrainian police forces surrounded the ghetto in the early morning hours and proceeded to round up the Jews. The Jews were then escorted to the ditches on foot, with the elderly and infirm transported on trucks. On their arrival, the Germans and their collaborators shot them into the mass graves. Because many Jews went into hiding or tried to escape, the Aktion lasted two or three days, as repeated searches were made for Jews in the ghetto and the surrounding area.¹⁰

According to Soviet sources, around 1,500 Jews from Warkowicze were shot together with up to 1,000 Jews from the neighboring village of Ozeriany.¹¹ Of the many Jews who were able to escape on the eve of the Aktion, most were recaptured with the aid of Ukrainian collaborators and other local inhabitants and subsequently were shot. About 25 escaped Jews, including several from Warkowicze, found shelter with sympathetic Czechs and Poles in the nearby village of Kurdyban. During 1943, this village came under frequent assault from Ukrainian nationalist partisans (Banderowcy) who attacked the Polish and Czech peasants. The Jews took up arms and fought with the peasants to resist these Ukrainian attacks.¹² The Red Army drove the Germans out of Warkowicze in early 1944. According to one estimate, about 200 Jews from Warkowicze managed to survive the German occupation.