PIKOV
Pre-1941: Pikov, village, Kalinovka raion, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Pikow, Rayon and Gebiet Kalinowka, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Pikiv, Kalynivka raion, Vinnytsia oblast’, Ukraine
Pikov is located 40 kilometers (25 miles) north-northeast of Vinnytsia. In June 1941, there were probably around 1,200 Jews living in Pikov.
Units of the German 6th Army occupied Pikov around July 22, 1941. In the summer and fall of 1941, a military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran the village. The German commandant appointed village elders 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 Gene- [End Page 1558] ralkommissariat Shitomir. The Gebietskommissar was Regierungsrat Dr. Seelemeyer. The SS- und Polizeigebietsführer in Kalinovka appointed in early 1942 was Leutnant der Gendarmerie Konrad Lange.
At the end of July 1941, the Germans established an open ghetto in the village, and Jews from neighboring settlements were also brought to the ghetto. According to survivor Leonid Langerman, a certain Bronitzky, who had been appointed as the village elder in Uladovka, issued a decree ordering the expulsion of the Jews from there, such that his family moved to Pikov. On arrival there, all the Jews were forced to move to the center of the village in Novyi Pikov; if anyone tried to escape, they were immediately killed. The Ukrainian police was very active. The Jews had to wear badges and armbands, and there was also a Jewish Council (Judenrat) to help enforce the German restrictions on the Jews. Everyone was forced to work on the kolkhoz—including women and children; they harvested potatoes, beets, and other vegetables. A group of men were forced to build a road through the town to the neighboring town of Ivanov and did not receive any pay.1
Another survivor, Eudokiya Manko, recalled that all the Jews were forced to perform hard labor and wear badges on the left side of their chests and bands on their left arms. With these markings, they were not allowed to go outside, to the market, or to the houses of other Ukrainians. Nevertheless, she hid her badge in order to go out to find food. All she was able to find was a little bit of bread and a few potatoes.2
In mid-May 1942, a group of able-bodied Jews from the Pikov ghetto were selected and escorted on foot to the village of Kalinovka, where they were placed in a forced labor camp for about 500 Jews and assigned to work on the construction of an airfield. The barracks for Jews were fenced off with barbed wire, and anyone who attempted to leave the site of the airfield was shot. The prisoners were given food once a day—150 grams (5.3 ounces) of bread and an unsalted pea soup.3
The Jews in the Pikov ghetto lived in great fear, since they knew it was just a matter of time until there would be a pogrom; the Germans could enter Jewish houses at any time, and the Jews had to do whatever they would demand. At night, the family of Eudokiya Manko all stayed together in one bedroom without a light, as they had so little kerosene. They never talked about the future (it was taboo) but reminisced about the past. Eudokiya saw a pit being prepared for what was to be the mass shooting, and after her mother and sister had been killed, she managed to escape into the forests.4
The Germans liquidated the Pikov ghetto on May 30, 1942. A force of about 30 German policemen that arrived in Pikov was enthusiastically assisted by the Ukrainian police, who abused and tortured the victims before they were killed. Jewish survivor Galina Lisitsyna, who had recently arrived in Pikov, recalled that in May or June the Germans arrived and organized a roundup of the Jews. She observed the Jews being led away into vehicles, and fortunately she was able to make her escape. As she escaped through the forest, she also saw how the Germans shot the Jews. The Jews were led through a corridor of guards supervised by a senior German and were then lined up 5 people at a time to be shot into a pit. The mass shooting took place near the Jewish cemetery that was located about halfway between Pikov and Ivanov (located about 10 kilometers [6 miles] to the south). According to Soviet sources, 960 Jews from Pikov were shot.5
In the first two weeks of June 1942, the Germans, assisted by the Ukrainian police, conducted two more Aktions, rounding up any Jews they found in hiding and shooting them. According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK), in these Aktions first 76 and then 44 Jews were shot.6
The few Jews that survived from the Pikov ghetto managed to escape at the time of the mass shootings or from the Kalinovka labor camp and survived with the help of non-Jews in the region until the Red Army drove out the German occupiers in March 1944.
SOURCES
Publications mentioning the Pikov ghetto include the following: Boris Rabiner, My rodom iz getto: Vospominaniia byvshikh uznikov Mogilev-Podol’skogo getto (New York, 1996), pp. 83–85; and 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), p. 988.
Documentation regarding the destruction of the Pikov Jews can be found in the following archives: BA-L (B 162/7364); DAVINO; GARF (7021-54-1274); USHMM (RG-22.002M, reel 4); VHF (# 115, 18247, and 23337); and YVA.
NOTES
1. VHF, # 18247, testimony of Leonid Langerman; and also the published testimony by Langerman in Rabiner, My rodom iz getto, pp. 83–85.
2. VHF, # 115, testimony of Eudokiya Manko.
3. Testimony of Langerman, pp. 83–85.
4. VHF, # 115.
5. Vinnichchina v period Velykoi vitchyznianoi viiny 1941–1945 rr. (Khronika Podii), p. 29, as cited by Aleksandr Kruglov, Katastrofa ukrainskogo evreistva 1941–1944 gg.: Entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik (Kharkov: “Karavella,” 2001), pp. 14, 24; and BA-L, B 162/7364, pp. 190–191—this source, however, gives the total of only 800 to 900 Jews from Ivanov and Pikov murdered altogether but is probably based mainly on the reports of the ChGK.
6. GARF, 7021-54-1274.
