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

Pre-1941: Zen’kov, town, Kamenets-Podolskii oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Zinkow, Rayon Winkowzy, Gebiet Dunajewzy, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Zin’kiv, Khmel’nyts’kyi oblast’, Ukraine

Zen’kov is located about 18 kilometers (11 miles) southeast of Iarmolintsy. Just prior to the German invasion, the Jewish population of Zen’kov was approximately 2,248.

The German army occupied Zen’kov on July 12, 1941.¹ On the first day of the occupation, a Jew offered the Germans bread and salt. A German soldier shot him on his threshold.² In early August, the ghetto was set up. A few weeks later, Jews were ordered to wear yellow circles bearing Stars of David, one on the front of their clothes and one on the back.³

A Judenrat was established in the ghetto.⁴ The head of the Judenrat was a local bookkeeper.⁵ One Jewish policeman was named Avroham Vasilke.⁶ Jews were involved in various forms of forced labor, from working on the roads and the railroad to clearing snow. In May 1942, a group of men were taken to the front to deliver horses.⁷

Relatively few Germans were involved in the civil administration of the Zen’kov area. During 1942, there was only one official from the office of the Gebietskommissar, an SS man, and an agricultural commissioner. All the other officials were Ukrainian subordinates, mostly from the western Ukraine.⁸ The Ukrainian police force in Zen’kov, which was recruited locally, initially wore armbands, then later German uniforms, and carried rifles and rubber clubs with metal tips. They were not always issued with bullets, so they often used their rifles to beat people. Policemen were involved in robbing and killing Jews and sometimes raped Jewish women before they were shot. In the summer of 1942, one man bribed a policeman to let him escape, but the policeman killed him anyway.⁹ [End Page 1505]

Nevertheless, control over the ghetto generally was relatively lax. Jews were able to sneak out of the ghetto at night, and some were even able to elude their guards and avoid coming home from their work details in the evenings.¹⁰ The relatively disorganized liquidation of the ghetto also reflects this laxity.

The mass killings were associated with pogroms. For the most part, they appear to have been carried out by local policemen with only minor German involvement. The first of these took place on May 9, 1942. To the music of a 100-piece band,¹¹ about 588 people were shot at a mass grave in Stanislavovka, on the outskirts of Zen’kov.¹² The next night, during a rainstorm, the bodies washed out of the grave and had to be reburied.¹³

After the May massacre, a second, smaller ghetto was created. In June 1942, more than 100 Jews were sent away to the forced labor camp at Leznevo, just to the east of Proskurov.¹⁴ Another mass killing took place on August 4, 1942. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) report, 1,882 Jews were killed, but this figure is probably too high.¹⁵ A non-Jewish local inhabitant later recalled that during one of the roundups, many of the Jews were killed on the spot in their own houses. Afterwards, someone went around the ghetto and wrote the word “corpses” on those houses that contained bodies. A horse and cart were then used to transport the bodies to the mass grave.¹⁶

After the second large Aktion, the ghetto had shrunk to a single house.¹⁷ A final mass killing took place on October 7, 1942, when about 150 of the Jewish craftsmen who had been spared during the summer were murdered.¹⁸ The Germans then relocated the remaining 50 or so Jews to Dunaevtsy, where they were subsequently killed. In total, more than 2,000 Jews from the Zen’kov ghetto were massacred throughout the occupation.

The local police chief was Lisuk,¹⁹ and another police chief in the area was Busse, from Vin’kovtsy. The Gebietskommissar in Dunaevtsy was Gemeinschaftsführer Eggers. The Nazi officials involved in the massacres in Zen’kov included Kulmann, Göbelmann, Kelin, Schramm, Grapp, and Kran. Gebietskommissar Eggers and another Nazi by the name of Hofer were responsible for the mass killings in Dunaevtsy.²⁰ Another Ukrainian policeman was named Grach.²¹

Some 27 Jews are known to have survived the Zen’kov ghetto.²² Sonya Kipiler, a Jew from Zen’kov, operated a partisan unit in the vicinity of Zen’kov from late 1942 until the area was liberated in 1944.²³ Vladimir Kipiler escaped to Transnistria,²⁴ as did Semyon and Minya Gluzman²⁵ and Ida Vaynblat.²⁶ Shifra Reydman was hidden by a Ukrainian family.²⁷ The Foygelman and Abramovich families survived by hiding in an abandoned phosphate mine.²⁸

The statements of several surviving Jews can also be found in the 1947 Soviet trial of a local policeman named Hutsalov.²⁹