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

[End Page 1572] Pre-1941: Tsibulev, village, Monastyrishche raion, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Zybulew, Rayon and Gebiet Monastyrischtsche, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Tsybuliv, Monastyryshche raion, Cherkasy oblast’, Ukraine

Tsibulev is located about 120 kilometers (75 miles) east-southeast of Vinnitsa. According to the 1939 census, Tsibulev had 434 Jewish residents, 7.3 percent of the village’s total population.

German armed forces occupied Tsibulev on July 22, 1941, just one month after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. By then, some of the local Jews had managed to escape eastward, fleeing ahead of the advancing German army. Other Jewish men were drafted or volunteered for service in the Red Army. About 60 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in the village at the start of the occupation.

From July to October 1941, the village was under the command of a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur), which created a village council headed by an elder. The military administration also established an auxiliary Ukrainian police force made up of local residents. In November 1941, authority was transferred to a German civil administration. The village of Tsibulev was located in the Rayon and Gebiet Monastyrischtsche, within Generalkommissariat Shitomir.

Shortly after the occupation of the village, the Ortskommandantur ordered the village council to register and mark the local Jewish population, requiring them to wear armbands with the Star of David. In addition, the Jews were used for forced labor.

The first killing of Jews occurred in late July 1941. At that time, all six members of the rabbi’s family were publicly shot.¹ On September 25, 1941, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 5 carried out the first Aktion in the village in which 78 Jews were killed, according to the Einsatzgruppen report “for insolence towards the Ukrainian population.”²

No detailed information has been found about the living conditions of the Jews in Tsibulev during the occupation, but it appears that, as in the nearby Rayon center of Monastyrischtsche, the remaining Jews of the village were forced into some form of ghetto in the summer or fall of 1941. In any case, more than 200 Jews remained in the village throughout the winter of 1941–1942.

According to an account prepared for publication by Ilya Ehrenburg: “The winter of 1941–1942 was a severe one. The Germans forced unclothed women and barefoot old men to work.” The same report mentions the murder of about 100 children, shot and buried in a pit not far from the village.³

The ghetto was liquidated on May 29, 1942, when all its inmates were herded to Monastyrishche to be shot there together with most of the remaining Jews of the Rayon. On the way there, 105 children and around 50 elderly people were taken out of the column and shot in the forest.⁴

According to the account prepared for The Complete Black Book, an eight-month-old baby boy was cast onto the road as the Jews were being transported away in the hope that he might be rescued, but a German smashed the baby’s head against the side of a vehicle. Tamara Arkadevna Rozanova hid a Jew in her cellar, but the Germans burned down her house, and Rozanova was herself only spared by chance.⁵