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

Pre-1939: Zofjówka, village, województwo wołyńskie, Poland; 1939–1941: Zof’iuvka, Volyn’ oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Sofjewka, Rayon Zuman, Gebiet Luzk, Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien; post-1991: Zof’iuvka, Volyn’ oblast’, Ukraine

Zofjówka is located about 35 kilometers (22 miles) northeast of the city of Łuck.

It is estimated that the Jewish population of Zofjówka in 1939 was between 1,500 and 2,000. Ivan Katchanovski notes that the population “almost doubled when the Nazis brought in Jews from nearby villages and small towns and established a ghetto.”¹ Gad Rosenblatt explains the population growth after 1939 as resulting from the flight of Jews eastward following the German invasion of western Poland. He estimates that by 1941 there were 5,000 Jews in Zofjówka and 1,800 in Ignatówka, but these figures are probably too high.²

In late June 1941, Jews who had cooperated with the Communist regime fled to Russia. Members of the Ukrainian local police went from house to house, stealing and looting. Ukrainians from neighboring towns accused many of the Jews of being Communists and threatened to turn them in to the authorities. It was pure blackmail; the Jews paid them off in exchange for a promise of silence. Those who were unable to pay had to go into hiding.³

The German authorities established a Jewish Council (Judenrat). The first chairman was Zechariah Antwerg. Later it was headed by Yosef Weisman and Motel Tcherpek. Two German officials arrived to run the town: an Austrian named Kreiser and a German named Gruber.⁴

The Germans ordered all cattle and horses rounded up for shipment to Germany, thereby destroying the economic basis of the local Jews in agriculture. Then the Germans demanded a ransom of several hundred thousand rubles, to be collected and paid within five hours. The Judenrat imposed a levy on each family, and the funds were delivered. In response to an order to organize the Jews into groups for forced labor, the Judenrat prepared a list of eligible workers. The Judenrat also appointed Jewish policemen to enforce recruitment for forced labor. Each group was sent to work on 17-day rotations, often to places as much as a half-day’s march away. Those who returned were worn to the bone. Some never returned, having been tortured and killed by their German and Ukrainian guards. The Jews in Zofjówka, as also in the neighboring village of Ignatówka, were confined to their immediate area, thereby establishing open ghettos. A few, at great personal risk, would sneak out at night or just before dawn to barter clothing and jewelry for food, such as grain, potatoes, milk, or butter. Jews were denied use of the flour mill, so they devised crude illegal mills to grind the grain into rough, barely palatable flour.⁵

Jews who were craftsmen—blacksmiths, tailors, cobblers—were able to ply their trade and earn enough to buy food. But many Jews went hungry, subsisting on partially cooked rotten potatoes and crusts of coarse bread. Those in forced labor, in the forests and sawmills, received one loaf of bread a week.⁶

From September 1941, power in the area was transferred to a German civil administration. Zofjówka became part of Rayon Zuman in Gebiet Luzk, which in turn belonged to the Generalkommissariat Wolhynien und Podolien. The Luzk Gebietskommissar was Regierungsassessor Lindner.⁷ The Jews in the town of Zuman (probably about 300) were all murdered in late August of 1941.⁸

Those Jews in Zofjówka who were skilled leather workers received special attention because their products were highly prized by the German officials. Early in the occupation an unusual event occurred. In the fall of 1941, a German named Klinger appeared on the scene, assigned as the “district commander” in charge of the local leather industry. He reportedly had a doctoral degree from a German university and carried the papers of an ethnic German (Volksdeutsche). However, a rumor quickly spread among the Jews that he was neither German nor a Volksdeutsche but actually a Jew in disguise. He treated the Jews well, restrained the Ukrainian police from their usually harsh treatment, and made his headquarters in the home of a Jewish family. The Germans loved the leather products, which Dr. Klinger brought to their headquarters in Łuck. The leather workers were not assigned to the forced labor groups, and their families were not mistreated. Then, in December, Klinger, possibly concerned that his disguise was wearing thin, announced that he was leaving for Warsaw. The Jews begged him to stay, and he agreed to postpone his departure until the first day of March 1942. On that night the Judenrat arranged a small farewell party attended by the German officials Kreiser and Gruber. After Klinger left the gathering, he was ambushed by Ukrainian police—angry, perhaps, because of his restraints on their conduct—and murdered.⁹

In his place the Germans appointed a Ukrainian overseer, Panchenko, accompanied by his son, who was a local policeman (Schutzmann). Panchenko demanded and received weekly “payments” from the Jews. Later on, after the community had been decimated by the mass murders in July 1942, Jewish partisans captured him and sentenced him to death. However, Hershel Neiden, one of the “protected” leather workers, fearful of an even harsher replacement, persuaded the partisans to let him go.¹⁰

The plan for the mass murder of the Jews began on July 25, 1942. The Jews from the area were rounded up by the Ukrainian police and brought to Zofjówka’s main street for an “assembly.” The leather workers and their families were ordered to move to the nearby town of Szaliszcze to set up their workshop as a labor battalion. The Jews from the neighboring villages of Ignatówka and Marjanowko were ordered to return home, pack up a small bundle of personal items, and return to Zofjówka within two hours. Elderly and sick Jews who were unable to move quickly enough were shot on the spot. At the sound of the shooting, many Jews ran off in every direction.¹¹

On July 26 the liquidation Aktion began. Some Jews were taken first to a field to dig two pits, each 30 meters (98 feet) [End Page 1507] long, which were to serve as mass graves. Then the remaining Jews were taken in trucks and by foot, 200 at a time, to the killing site. They were forced to undress and get into the pits, where the German forces machine-gunned them to death. An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 Jews were killed. A subsequent roundup of those Jews found in hiding led to the murder of another 1,000 on September 21, 1942. The “protected” leather workers were put to death in late December 1942. All in all, up to 6,000 Jews, including those from neighboring villages, were murdered in the Aktions in the fields near Zofjówka and Ignatówka.¹²

Some small groups and individuals escaped into the forests, many linking up with Soviet and Ukrainian partisans, including a few who joined the Kovpak division. Ivan Katchanovski provides some information on the fate of Ukrainians in the village of Klobuczyn, where some 200 survivors of the Zofjówka ghetto and a nearby village reportedly took refuge. On November 2, 1942, the Nazis, with the help of the local police, executed 137 residents (including women, elderly people, and 36 children) of Klobuczyn in reprisal for the actions of Ukrainian partisans who had helped Zofjówka Jews. These partisans took up arms against the Nazis and their collaborators, supplied weapons to a Jewish resistance group in Zofjówka, and executed a local peasant for killing Jews who escaped the Nazi massacres. The Klobuczyn partisans accepted Jewish partisans from Zofjówka into their unit and provided protection to more than 150 Jewish survivors who escaped the Nazi massacre in this village and nearby small Jewish settlements and were hiding in a forest near Klobuczyn. Many of these Jews later joined another Soviet/Ukrainian partisan unit in the region. Most were killed during combat with the Nazis.

Only about 40 Jews from Zofjówka survived until the end of the war.¹³ Among those who helped them to survive was Alojzy Ludwikowski, who helped to feed more than 30 Jews hiding in several bunkers in the forest or near his home. Unfortunately, some of the bunkers were discovered by the German Gendarmes and their collaborators, and not all of those he assisted managed to survive.¹⁴