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

[End Page 1529] Pre-1941: Iarun’, village, Novograd-Volynskii raion, Zhitomir oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Jarun, Gebiet Zwiahel (Nowograd-Wolynskyj), Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Iarun’, raion center, Zhytomyr oblast’, Ukraine

Iarun’ is located about 95 kilometers (59 miles) north-northwest of Zhitomir. According to the 1939 census, 386 Jews lived in Iarun’ (19.7 percent of the total population). An additional 270 Jews lived in the villages of what was then the Iarun’ raion, bringing the total to 656 Jews.

German armed forces occupied the village on July 6, 1941, two weeks after the initial German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941. Part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east. About 80 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Iarun’ at the start of the occupation.

From July until October 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) governed the settlement. The German military authorities appointed a village elder and established an auxiliary Ukrainian police squad from among the local residents. The Ukrainian police played an active role in all the Aktions against the Jewish population. According to witness testimony, there were several brutal killings of individual Jews by local policemen, which probably took place during the first months of the occupation.¹

At the end of October 1941, authority passed to a German civil administration. Iarun’ was incorporated into Gebiet Nowograd-Wolynskyj. Regierungsassessor Dr. Schmidt was appointed to the post of Gebietskommissar. Gebiet Nowograd-Wolynskyj was part of Generalkommissariat Shitomir, within Reichskommissariat Ukraine.²

Shortly after the occupation of the village, the Ortskommandantur ordered the registration and marking of the Jewish population. They were required to wear armbands bearing the Star of David and also to perform various forms of heavy labor. Jews were forbidden to trade with the local Ukrainian population.

At some time during the summer or fall, and certainly by November 1941, a ghetto was created in the village. Jews were resettled there from the surrounding villages. For example, on November 27, 1941, seven Jews were brought to Iarun’ from the village of Zakrinich’e.³ At that same time, able-bodied men were taken to a labor camp in Novograd-Volynskii.

According to the diary of survivor Klara Garmel, “[T]he ghetto was surrounded with barbed wire. We were all driven inside it. We were made to starve and ate only what people would bring and throw through the wire.”⁴

Some Jews hid with Ukrainian families outside the ghetto. In the case of those Jews who hid with the family of Maria Svidelya, they were betrayed by other local inhabitants and sent into the ghetto.⁵ Other Jews hid successfully, including some such as Klara Garmel, who escaped at the time of the ghetto’s liquidation. Of those in hiding, some subsequently left the village to join the Soviet partisans, while others remained hidden, aided by local inhabitants, until the area was recaptured by the Red Army.

The ghetto was finally liquidated on May 5, 1942. German Gendarmes and local police surrounded the ghetto and began to forcibly remove its inhabitants during the night. On that day, according to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) report, 580 Jews were shot in a large mass grave, but the actual number was probably somewhat less than this.⁶