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

Pre-1941: Dashev, town and raion center, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Daschew, Rayon center, Gebiet Monastyrischtsche, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Dashiv, Illintsi raion, Vinnytsia oblast’, Ukraine

Dashev is located 76 kilometers (48 miles) southeast of Vinnitsa. Dashev consists of three parts (former villages): Staryi Dashev, Novyi Dashev, and Polevoe.

According to the 1939 census, there were 967 Jews living in Dashev (34.1 percent of the total population); in the villages of what was then the Dashev raion, there were an additional 452 Jews. Most of these Jews lived in the villages of Kitaigorod and Kal’nik.

German armed forces occupied the town on July 25, 1941, about five weeks after their invasion of the USSR on June 22. During these intervening weeks, some Jewish men volunteered for or were drafted into the Red Army, and a number of Jews managed to evacuate eastward.

In the period from July to October 1941, a military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) located in Gaisin governed the town. In November 1941, a civil administration replaced the German military administration. Until its liberation in March 1944, Rayon Daschew was part of Gebiet Monastyrischtsche, in Generalkommissariat Shitomir. The Gebietskommissar was SA-Oberführer Werder. In Dashev itself, there was a Gendarmerie post to which a squad of Ukrainian police was subordinated; the latter, together with the German Gendarmerie, took an active part in the anti-Jewish Aktions in the Rayon. In July 1942, the head of the Ukrainian police (Schutzmannschaft) in Dashev was a man named Charilon Sachartschuk.¹

In the summer and fall of 1941, the Germans established a Jewish Council (Judenrat); Jews were required to wear armbands bearing the Star of David; they were forced to perform work on behalf of the German occupation agencies; they were forbidden to leave the town limits; and they were ordered to hand over all their valuables, including bicycles, sewing machines, and gramophones. Jews were forbidden to sell products in the market, while the local Ukrainian residents were forbidden to maintain relationships of any kind with Jews; infractions of this rule were subject to flogging. The places where the Jews lived in close proximity, both in Staryi Dashev and in Novyi Dashev, were declared to be “Jewish quarters” (open ghettos). The open ghetto in Staryi Dashev was liquidated on October 28, 1941,² when almost all the Jews were shot; in November 1941, around 200 Jews from the village of Kitaigorod [End Page 1524] were herded into Staryi Dashev and shot.³ The total number of victims was 814.⁴ The shooting was carried out by a detachment of Einsatzkommando 5, assisted by other German forces and the Ukrainian police. In Novyi Dashev, 165 Jews were shot, probably on December 17, 1941, followed by 37 more on December 20, 1941.⁵ Ortskommandantur I (V) 275, based in the Vinnitsa region, reported on December 18, 1941, that it had received two postal saving books that had been confiscated by the Feldgendarmerie in Dashev on the occasion of an Aktion against the Jews there on December 17.⁶

According to the Jewish child survivor Basia Malinskaia, after these mass shootings, there were only about a dozen Jews (probably specialist workers and their families) left in Dashev. They all were moved into two houses in Staryi Dashev, at the very end of the town. One family lived in the last house, and in the other there lived a Jewish man who served as the “commandant” or elder of the Jewish settlement, together with a few other people. The Jewish commandant with his son kept watch on German orders, to ensure that nobody left the two houses. They hoped that if they obeyed orders, perhaps their lives would be spared. There was a well in the courtyard of one of the houses, where the families could get water and do their washing.

In the spring of 1942, the Germans conducted several roundups in the small remnant ghetto, but some Jews succeeded in hiding, either in the fields or concealed in a cellar within one of the houses. Those who were taken in the roundups, probably including the Jewish elder, all were shot in a ravine near Kupchintsy, about 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) from Dashev.⁷ According to the records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), the remaining 13 Jewish specialists from Novyi Dashev were shot in May 1942.⁸

The murder of the Jews of Dashev is mentioned by the Jewish survivor Ida Kalnizkaia, whose grandparents were apparently shot there in the courtyard of their home.⁹ Basia Malinskaia survived after her parents passed her on to a Ukrainian family in the village of Parkhomovka for the remainder of the German occupation. The son of the Jewish elder of the remnant ghetto also somehow managed to survive and returned to live in Dashev after the war.¹⁰