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

Pre-1941: Kalinovka, town and raion center, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Kalinowka, Rayon and Gebiet center, Generalkommissariat Shitomir, post-1991: Kalynivka, raion center, Vinnytsia oblast’, Ukraine

Kalinovka is located about 26 kilometers (16 miles) north of Vinnitsa. The census of 1939 reported 979 Jews living in Kalinovka, or one fifth of the total population, and 2,214 Jews residing in what was then the Kalinovka raion. Thanks to the railway line that ran through the area, some Jews successfully evacuated from the town soon after the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

German forces occupied Kalinovka after some skirmishes on July 22, 1941. The German occupying forces ordered Jewish men to perform heavy manual labor. A ghetto was formed on those streets where the Jewish population predominated. Jews from other streets were resettled into this confined area, and non-Jews were resettled into vacated Jewish homes. For example, Lena Konopska recalls that she and her mother had [End Page 1532] to move into the ghetto once they were recognized as Jews, but her father, who was Polish, was permitted to live outside the ghetto area.¹ The Jews had to wear white armbands bearing yellow six-pointed stars. The authorities appointed Jewish elders to watch over the Jews. Ukrainian police guarded the ghetto. With their means of support exhausted, the prisoners of the ghetto suffered from hunger and disease.

At the end of October 1941, authority passed into the hands of a German civil administration. Kalinovka became both a Rayon center and the center of Gebiet Kalinowka, responsible also for the neighboring Rayons of Ulanow and Komsomol’skoe. Regierungsrat Dr. Seelemeyer was appointed the Gebietskommissar. In turn, Gebiet Kalinowka was part of Generalkommissariat Shitomir.² In November or December 1941, a squad of several Gendarmes arrived in Kalinovka from Germany and established a post initially under the command of Meister der Gendarmerie Max Lohbrunner. The Gendarmerie also assumed control over the local Ukrainian police, now renamed Schutzmannschaft-Einzeldienst, which included about 40 men and was under the command of Zugführer (platoon leader) Roman Holdetzki. The SS- und Polizei-Gebietsführer appointed in 1942 in Kalinovka was Leutnant der Gendarmerie Konrad Lange.³

In mid-May 1942, about 100 young men and women were taken from the ghetto and ordered to work on the construction of an airfield on the outskirts of Kalinovka, a project that had been started by the Soviet authorities. Jews from Kalinovka and also from the nearby settlements of Pikov, Ivanov, Ulanov, and Sal’nitsa were sent there to work. Altogether, 400 to 500 people were resettled into sheds and barracks located in the area of the airfield, surrounded by a wire fence. Some of the Jews brought here from outside Kalinovka also refer to this labor camp as the Kalinovka ghetto. However, it appears that only Jews capable of labor were placed in the camp, as those women accompanied by infants or small children were shot either during the march to Kalinovka or on arrival together with other Jews unfit for labor from the Kalinovka ghetto.⁴ The prisoners of the camp were fed pea soup. The Jewish construction laborers had to work until totally exhausted, and occasionally those who lapsed were shot. Cases of suicide by hanging were not unusual. At the aerodrome the Jewish laborers also worked alongside Soviet prisoners of war (POWs), but these prisoners were accommodated in a separate barracks. This forced labor camp for Jews existed until the middle of 1943, when the last of the prisoners were shot. When the airfield was finished, the 100 prisoners who remained were removed to a stable in the village of Kordelevka, 5 kilometers (3 miles) from Kalinovka. The Jews were burned alive there in compliance with higher orders. A few prisoners managed to escape from the aerodrome camp, mostly women who could pass as non-Jews and who received help from other local inhabitants.

At the start of 1942, a small resistance group formed in the Kalinovka ghetto, under the leadership of Efim Kamenetskii. They collected firearms and were even able to make contact with Soviet partisan units. They did not succeed in making any further preparations, however, or manage to establish a stronger resistance organization.

In late spring or summer of 1942, probably on May or June 30, the ghetto was encircled by the German and Ukrainian police forces early in the morning.⁵ The approximately 500 Jews were gathered and led out into a stable located next to a kolkhoz in Kalinovka. An additional 200 Jews from the nearby villages of Novyi and Staryi Pikov were also transported there. Some 33 Jewish craftsmen were selected out by Gebietsführer Lange, but all the others were murdered in a pit not far from the Jewish cemetery. A small number of Jews was able to hide or escape during the roundup. The majority of them found refuge with Ukrainian acquaintances. But the commandant’s office offered a reward of 100 rubles for the capture of each Jew, and a number of Jewish families were turned in to the authorities. They were placed along with the craftsmen in a few residences on the outskirts of Kalinovka. The residences were surrounded with barbed wire. A few Jews succeeded in escaping from there, but those remaining were murdered in mid-August 1942.⁶

Kalinovka was liberated by the Red Army in March 1944.