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

Pre-1941: Samgorodok, town and raion center, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Rayon center, Gebiet Kasatin, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Samhorodok, Koziatyn raion, Vinnytsia oblast’, Ukraine

Samgorodok is located 41 kilometers (26 miles) northeast of Vinnitsa. In 1926, the Jewish population in the town was 1,243. [End Page 1567]

Units of the German 17th Army occupied Samgorodok on July 20, 1941. Soon after their arrival, the German authorities registered the Jews. According to the records of Feldkommandantur 675, based in Vinnitsa, in August 1941 there were 3,000 people residing in Samgorodok, of whom 700 were Jews.¹

Initially the military authorities ordered Jews to wear a white armband with a Star of David. Subsequently they had to wear a Star of David patch on their clothing. A large contribution was collected from the Jewish population, and over time virtually all Jewish property was confiscated. The Jews were also forced to perform physical labor. On one occasion they were forced to clean the area around the church and then run around it. Those who failed to carry out such orders were severely beaten. It was also forbidden for the Jews to buy or barter food items, and even their access to water from the well was restricted.²

According to the Jewish survivor Semen Beger, who was only 11 in 1941, shortly after their arrival the Germans rounded up all the Jews and forced them to live concentrated together in the center of the town, forming an open ghetto. On Sundays there was a market in Samgorodok that the Jews were able to visit, which was also attended by peasants from the surrounding villages. On one occasion the Jews who had attended the market were brutally beaten by the Ukrainians.³

The transition from a military to a civil administration in the Vinnitsa region occurred on October 20, 1941. Rayon Samgorodok was located in Gebiet Kasatin of Generalkommissariat Shitomir. The German Gebietskommissar in Kazatin was Hundertschaftsführer Steudel. The chief of the local police in Samgorodok was Anton Nikolaevich Vashchenko, who was tried by the Soviet authorities after the war. The commander of the Gendarmerie post in Samgorodok from February 1, 1942, was Oberwachtmeister Josef Richter. He was killed by Soviet partisans on August 20, 1943.⁴

On May 16, 1942, the German authorities, assisted by local Rayonchef Shvabskii, forcibly resettled the Jewish population into a separate part of town on the other side of the river. The Jews did not take much of their personal property with them as they suspected that an Aktion would soon be conducted against them, and in any case, there was little room in this second ghetto. The overcrowding was such that between three and five families occupied each house.⁵

Then on June 4, 1942, German police forces, men of the Hungarian army, and the local Ukrainian police surrounded the ghetto at 3:00 a.m. Under the command of police chief Vashchenko, the local policemen collected the Jews from their houses and drove them into the middle-school building. Those who tried to escape, refused to go, or were too infirm to walk were shot on the spot. On that morning 24 local peasants were ordered by the police to dig a grave 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) outside the town on the road to Germanovka. The grave was approximately 10 meters long by 8 meters wide and 3 meters deep (33 by 26 by 10 feet).

At about 10:00 a.m, the German forces, Hungarians, and local police escorted the column of Jews to the grave site. Two carts carried the el derly and unfit. At the grave the Jews were forced to remove their clothes and were led down into the ditch, where two or more SD men who had arrived from the Security Police outpost in Vinnitsa shot them.⁶ Gebietskommissar Steudel, who oversaw the Aktion, ordered the peasants to move away and lie facedown on the ground until the shooting was completed. Then they returned to help the local policemen fill in the grave.⁷

During the Aktion, 492 Jews were shot (including about 240 children), together with 15 Soviet prisoners of war (POWs).⁸ The local police chief in Samgorodok, Vashchenko, later “confessed” that he “selected the specialist workers, who were to be employed on various tasks by the Germans, and under my direction the Samgorodok police kept the Jews under strict guard during the shooting.”⁹ About 10 or 15 Jews were selected and sent to Kazatin as specialist workers; they were subsequently shot there by the SD in September.¹⁰

Some Jews, such as Moshe Berger, managed to survive the roundup by hiding in cellars and other places of concealment.¹¹ They later sought refuge in the surrounding countryside. However, in early July the Gendarmerie-Gebietsführer in Kazatin, Behrens, sent a memorandum to the Gendarmerie post commander in Samgorodok, Richter, writing that he was aware of Jews hiding in the villages and forests and instructing that all villages must report the presence of Jews. He warned that if Gendarmes or Ukrainian policemen found Jews, “the entire village was to be punished.”¹² Over the following months, most of the Jews in hiding were captured by local police patrols. For example, on March 1, 1943, a patrol from the Gendarmerie post in Samgorodok found two female Jews, Busa and Sulka Chernus, hiding in a hayrick, and they were then “shot trying to escape” (a euphemism used by the Germans to report their summary execution). On March 19, three more Jews were captured by the Gendarmerie in Samgorodok, and the SD was informed.¹³ A Ukrainian Schutzmann, Wasyl Palamarchuk, based in Samgorodok, was recommended for a decoration in the summer of 1943, as he had “especially distinguished himself during the resettlement of the Jews in June 1942 and in the subsequent apprehension of individual Jews who variously concealed themselves.”¹⁴

The Red Army liberated Samgorodok on January 1, 1944. Among the Jewish survivors from Samgorodok were Elisabeth Lifshitz and Mark Bresman.