PIATKA
[End Page 1557] Pre-1941: Piatka, village, Chudnov raion, Zhitomir oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Pjatki, Rayon and Gebiet Tschudnow, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: P’iatka, Chudniv raion, Zhytomyr oblast’, Ukraine
Piatka is located 34 kilometers (21 miles) southwest of Zhitomir. According to the 1926 census, there were 870 Jews living in Piatka (24 percent of the total population). In the second half of the 1920s and in the 1930s, the number of Jews in the village declined substantially.
German armed forces occupied the village on July 7, 1941, almost two weeks after their invasion of the USSR on June 22. During that time, some Jewish men were drafted or volunteered for military duty in the Red Army, and a small number of Jews managed to evacuate eastward. About 250 Jews remained in the village at the start of the occupation.
In the period July through October 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) was in charge of the village, and it appointed a village elder and an auxiliary police force manned by local residents. In November 1941, a civil administration took the place of the German military administration. Until its liberation in late December 1943, Piatka was part of Gebiet Tschudnow in Generalkommissariat Shitomir.
In the summer and fall of 1941, the same anti-Jewish measures implemented in other German-occupied Ukrainian towns and villages were introduced in Piatka: Jews were required to wear distinguishing marks in the form of armbands with the Star of David, made to do forced labor, and forbidden to leave the village. They had to hand over all their valuables. They were forbidden to sell products in the market, and the local Ukrainian inhabitants were not allowed to have any contact with Jews. Those who violated this order were flogged.
In August 1941, the first Aktion took place in the village. In its course, a group of Jewish men were arrested and shot in a park in Chudnov.1 The remaining Jews were herded into a ghetto, which was set up in the synagogue building. Every day the Jews were led out to work on harvesting sugar beets. The ghetto was liquidated on October 24, 1941, when more than 200 people were shot on the northern edge of the village near a dilapidated mill (in 1950, a monument was erected at the site of the shooting).2 The shooting apparently was the work of a detachment of Einsatzkommando 5, with active participation by Ukrainian police. After the liquidation of the ghetto, the Ukrainian policemen hunted down Jews who were in hiding and shot them. Thus 7 captured Jews were shot a few days later.
Later in the occupation, a Jewish fugitive from the Chudnov ghetto, Mariam Sandal (Askes), found refuge in the nearby village of Maloselka (about 5 kilometers [3 miles]) from Piatka, as her grandfather was from Piatka and enjoyed a good reputation with many of the local peasants, who knew him as the cooper from Berdichev. According to Sandal (Askes), there were no Jewish survivors from the village of Piatka.3
SOURCES
Information about the destruction of the Jews of Piatka can be found in these publications: “Piatka,” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, vol. 6 (Moscow: Rossiiskaia Akademiia Estestvennykh Nauk, Nauchnyi fond “Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia,” “Epos,” 2008); “Piatka,” 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. 985–986; and I.O. Herasymov, ed., Knyha pam’iati Ukrainy. Zhytomyrs’ka oblast’, vol. 11 (Zhytomyr: L’onok, 1996).
Documentation regarding the fate of the Jews of Piatka can be found in the following archives: DAZO; GARF (7021-60-315); VHF; and YVA.
NOTES
1. Testimony of M. Sandal (Askes), in Boris Zabarko, ed., Zhivymi ostalis’ tol’ko my. Svidetel’stva i dokumenty (Kiev: Institut iudaiki, 1999), p. 389.
2. Archives of the Nauchno-prosvetitel’nyi tsentr “Kholokost” (Holocaust Research and Educational Center), Moscow; “Piatka,” in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia, vol. 6; Herasymov, Knyha pam’iati Ukrainy.
3. Testimony of M. Sandal (Askes), in Boris Zabarko, ed., “Nur wir haben überlebt”: Holocaust in Ukraine—Zeugnisse und Dokumente (Wittenberg: Dittrich, 2004), pp. 343–344.
