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

Pre-1941: Chervonoarmeisk, town and raion center, Zhitomir oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Tscherwonnoarmeisk, renamed Pulin, Rayon center, Gebiet Zwiahel (Nowograd-Wolynskyj), Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Chervonoarmiis’k, raion center, Zhytomyr oblast’, Ukraine

Chervonoarmeisk is located 160 kilometers (99 miles) west of Kiev. In 1926, 1,056 Jews lived in Chervonoarmeisk. According to the 1939 population census, 523 Jews (13.2 percent of the total population) lived in the town. Additionally, 490 Jews lived in the villages of what was then the Chervonoarmeisk raion.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate. Eligible men at that time were conscripted or volunteered for the Red Army. Around 55 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in the settlement at the start of the occupation.

German armed forces occupied the town in July 1941. From July to October 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran the affairs of Chervonoarmeisk. The German military administration created a raion authority and established a Ukrainian police unit from among the local inhabitants. The Ukrainian policemen played an active role in the anti-Jewish measures.

At the end of October 1941, authority passed to the German civil administration. Chervonoarmeisk was incorporated into Gebiet Nowograd-Wolynskyj, and Regierungsassessor Dr. Schmidt became the Gebietskommissar. In turn, Gebiet Nowograd-Wolynskyj was part of Generalkommissariat Shitomir, within Reichskommissariat Ukraine.¹

Shortly after the occupation of Chervonoarmeisk, the German military administration issued orders calling for a registration and marking of the Jewish population with armbands. Jews were also made to perform unpaid heavy labor, such as the repair of roads and buildings.

At some time in the summer or early fall of 1941, the German Ortskommandantur established a ghetto or “Jewish residential quarter,” in Chervonoarmeisk. Jews were prohibited from leaving the limits of the ghetto and were forbidden to buy products from the local Ukrainians. Famine quickly ensued in consequence.

According to the Jewish survivor Mark Meshok, around September 1941, Jews were rounded up in the surrounding villages, including in the village of Ocheretianki, and were brought to the ghetto in Chervonoarmeisk, where hundreds of people were collected. The ghetto consisted of only five or six houses in the center of Chervonoarmeisk, surrounded with barbed wire. It was guarded by local policemen and by the Germans. However, Ukrainians still came to the ghetto and traded food for valuable items or for work, such as sewing.²

The ghetto existed until December 1941, when the Germans liquidated it and all its inhabitants were shot. Just before the Aktion, the Germans spread word that all the Jews would be sent to Palestine. Then early in the morning the local police drove the Jews out of their houses only half-dressed in the freezing cold. As the Jews were escorted to the pits, local Ukrainians started to rob them, taking their coats. The elderly who could not keep up were killed on the way. On reaching Iagodenka, just to the southwest of Chervonoarmeisk, the column turned up the hill, and the men started to pray, realizing that the end was near. The Jews were surrounded by Germans and local police and were shot into the pits. Infants were taken from their mothers’ arms and thrown into the pit to be buried alive.³ [End Page 1522]

The mass murders were carried out by three SS officers with the help of the Ukrainian police and by a detachment that was subordinated to SS-Obergruppenführer Jeckeln, Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer Russland-Süd. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), 274 people were shot, but this source dates the Aktion in September 1941.⁴

Mark Meshok and his mother were both saved by a local ethnic German named Fritsche (or Fricher), who lived in Iagodenka and managed to extract them both from the column of Jews and take them back to his home.⁵

In the second half of 1941, Jews were executed in a number of other villages in the Chervonoarmeisk raion. There were 6 Jews murdered in October 1941 in the village of Ocheretianki (to the northwest of Chervonoarmeisk), and 11 Jews murdered in the village of Sokolov (to the east).⁶