IANOV
Pre-1941: Ianov, village, Kalinovka raion, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Janow, Rayon and Gebiet Kalinowka, Generalkommissariat Shitomir, post-1991: Ivaniv, Kalynivka raion, Vinnytsia oblast’, Ukraine
Ianov is located 30 kilometers (19 miles) north-northeast of Vinnitsa. There were probably around 1,000 Jews living in Ianov in 1941.
Units of the German 6th Army occupied Ianov on July 22, 1941. In the summer and fall of 1941, a military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran the village. The commandant appointed a village elder and organized an auxiliary Ukrainian police force. At the end of October 1941, authority was transferred to a German civil administration. It became part of Gebiet Kalinowka, within Generalkommissariat Shitomir. The Gebietskommissar was Regierungsrat Dr. Seelemeyer. Based in Ianov as part of the civil administration were one or two officials of the German agricultural administration (Landwirtschaftsführer).1
In the summer and fall of 1941, the German occupying authorities introduced a series of anti-Jewish measures. The Jews were ordered to wear distinguishing marks in the form of the Star of David (later, a yellow circle). They were required to perform forced labor, often without pay. They were not permitted to leave the limits of the village. Finally, Jews were subjected to systematic lootings and beatings by the Ukrainian police and local antisemites.
According to the The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life, in March 1942 hundreds of Jewish families were crowded into a ghetto in Ianov.2 In mid-May 1942, a group of able-bodied Jews from the Ianov ghetto was selected and sent on foot to the village of Kalinovka, where they were placed in a forced labor camp and assigned to work on the construction of an airfield.
On May 30, 1942, the Germans liquidated the ghettos in Ianov and nearby Pikov at the same time. Forces of the German Gendarmerie, the Ukrainian police, and also Hungarian soldiers, who arrived from Kalinovka, rounded up the Jews in Ianov in the morning and escorted them to a prepared pit, near the Jewish cemetery, which lay approximately halfway between Ianov and Pikov (Pikov is about 10 kilometers [6 miles] to the north of Ianov). There the Jews had to wait for about two hours until additional Germans (probably an SD detachment from KdS Winniza) arrived in the afternoon to carry out the mass shooting. Some of the Jewish children were simply beaten to death or were buried alive in the mass grave. It is estimated that more than 800 Jews from Ianov were killed on this day.3 [End Page 1528]
In the initial days of June 1942, the Germans and the Ukrainian police searched Ianov repeatedly for Jews in hiding. According to the records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), by June 12, 1942, they had shot an additional 194 Jews, so the total number of victims in Ianov exceeded 1,000.4
The Red Army drove the German occupiers from Ianov in March 1944.
SOURCES
Publications concerning the persecution and destruction of the Jews of Ianov include the following: “Ianov,” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2000), 4:494; and “Janov,” in Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder, eds., The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life before and during the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 559–560. The ghetto in Ianov is also mentioned in Handbuch der Lager, Gefängnisse und Ghettos auf dem besetzten Territorium der Ukraine (1941–1944) (Kiev: Staatskomitee der Archiven der Ukraine, 2000), p. 35.
Documentation regarding the destruction of the Ianov Jews can be found in the following archives: BA-L (B 162/7364); DAVINO (R5022-1-176); GARF (7021-54-1274); USHMM (RG-22.002M, reel 4); and YVA.
NOTES
1. BA-BL, BDC, SSHO 2432, Organisationsplan der besetzten Ostgebiete nach dem Stand vom 10. März 1942, hg. vom Chef der Ordnungspolizei, Berlin, March 13, 1942.
2. DAVINO, R5022-1-176, dates it in early 1942.
3. BA-L, B 162/7364 (204a AR-Z 134/67), pp. 190–191, 353. GARF, 7021-54-1274, p. 252, gives a total of 814 Jews from Ianov killed on May 30, 1942.
4. GARF, 7021-54-1274, p. 252. BA-L, B 162/7364 (204a AR-Z 134/67), pp. 190–191, 353, gives slightly different figures for Ianov in early June, but these appear to be the numbers for Novyi Pikov from the ChGK records.
