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

Pre-1939: Teplik, town and raion center, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon center, Gebiet Gaissin, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Teplyk, raion center, Vinnytsia oblast’, Ukraine

Teplik is located 111 kilometers (69 miles) southeast of Vinnitsa. According to the 1939 census, a total of 1,233 Jews (or 23.5 percent of the total population) lived in Teplik. Between the end of June and July 26, 1941, when German forces arrived in the town, about 200 Jews managed to flee to the east. Several dozen Jewish men were drafted into the Red Army or voluntarily joined the military forces to defend the town. When German forces occupied Teplik, there were probably some 1,000 Jews still residing there.¹

After the town was occupied, a German military administration assumed authority in August 1941. In the fall of 1941, the temporary military authorities gradually handed over authority to a German civil administration. Until the liberation of the area in March 1944, Teplik and the Teplik Rayon belonged to Gebiet Gaissin in Generalkommissariat Shitomir. The Gebietskommissar was Kreisleiter Becher.² The Gebietskommissar in Gaisin was responsible for the Rayons of Gaissin and Dshulinka, as well as Teplik. Once the civil administration was firmly established, the Ukrainian auxiliary police was subordinated to the local Gendarmerie post in Teplik. The Ukrainian police played an active role in the anti-Jewish Aktions.

A short time after the occupation of the town, the German authorities introduced a series of anti-Jewish measures in the area. The Jews had to wear white armbands with the Star of David on them in order to show in public that they were Jewish. They were also forced to carry out various kinds of physically demanding work. In December 1941, all the Jewish [End Page 1570] families were forced to move to two streets behind the main street, bordered on one side by the local river.³ This area was called the ghetto, but it remained unfenced as an “open ghetto.” In total, about 1,000 people were concentrated in the ghetto, including Jews brought in from some of the neighboring villages, although there remained a separate ghetto in Sobolevka, within the Teplik Rayon.⁴ The local Ukrainian police guarded the ghetto.

During the winter of 1941–1942, Jews aged between 13 and 45 who were able to work had to clear snow from the streets of Teplik under the close supervision of the Ukrainian police. The Ukrainian policemen abused their position of power to beat the Jews and steal from them.⁵

At some time in the first few months of 1942, the Germans also established a Jewish forced labor camp (ZAL) in Teplik on the site of the former local club, which held 200 to 300 Romanian Jews from Bukovina, including women and children. Local policemen also guarded this camp, which was under the command of German Polizeimeister Otto Brettin in the summer of 1942.⁶

The food rations in both the ghetto and the labor camp were very poor, and many Jews died of disease and starvation. The local population was forbidden to give them food.⁷ Jews from the ghetto and the labor camp were made to work on the Durchgangsstrasse (highway) IV construction project, building the road from Vinnitsa to Uman’. Some Jews from the ghetto had to perform agricultural work, while others worked as bakers or tailors or performed various cleaning tasks for the Germans.

In April 1942, approximately 250 Jews between the ages of 13 and 45 who were capable of work were transferred from Teplik to a labor camp in Raigorod, at that time under Romanian occupation.⁸ On May 26, 1942, most of the remaining Jews in the ghetto were shot by a detachment of the Security Police, with the assistance of the German Gendarmerie, the local Ukrainian police, and Lithuanian auxiliaries. Filipp Biberman recalls being woken at 4:00 a.m. and being brutally driven by men in uniform out of the ghetto to a site near a park about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 mile) out of town. The elderly, the sick, and children were transported on carts. At the killing site, the Jews were forced to undress, and German SS men shot them with machine guns.⁹ According to one local witness, the forensic examination of the bodies conducted by the Soviet authorities after liberation revealed that many of the women and children had been buried alive in the mass grave.¹⁰

Biberman managed to escape on the way to the park and hid behind some bushes. Then he went to the house of some school friends, the Kazachinsky family, who gave him food and clothes but were too scared to hide him. He then hid in the cemetery but was spotted by some local inhabitants the next day and taken to the commandant’s office. His mother, sisters, and blind grandfather were among those shot on May 26. From Teplik, he was sent to the forced labor camp in Raigorod and managed to survive the war.¹¹

After the Aktion on May 26, 1942, about 40 Jews, mostly carpenters, tailors, and shoemakers, remained in the ghetto. Their families also survived the liquidation Aktion.¹² Most of these people were murdered in 1943. The inmates of the Jewish forced labor camp either were murdered together with those from the ghetto or were transferred to other labor camps.

According to the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission (ChGK) report, the number of Jews murdered in Teplik was 769: 279 men, 330 women, and 160 children. Among these victims were apparently also 530 Jews (175 men, 280 women, and 75 children) who had been deported to Teplik from the Bukovina area. It is not clear whether the Jewish craftsmen murdered in 1943 are included in this figure.¹³