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

Pre-1941: Voronovitsa, village and raion center, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Woronowiza, Rayon center, Gebiet Nemirow, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Voronovytsa, Vinnytsia raion and oblast’, Ukraine

Voronovitsa is located 21 kilometers (13 miles) southeast of Vinnitsa. According to the 1939 census, 860 Jews lived in the [End Page 1577] village. An additional 70 Jews lived in the villages of what was then the Voronovitsa raion.

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Undated portrait of rescuer Boris Bochkov (top right) and family. Bochkov hid two Jewish escapees from the Vinnitsa ghetto, Yuri Rakhman and his father, for which he was honored as Righteous Among the Nations in 1995 by Yad Vashem.

USHMM WS #57644, COURTESY OF JFR

Units of the German 17th Army occupied Voronovitsa on July 21, 1941. The majority of the Jewish population did not evacuate and remained in town. The speedy advance of the German troops caught them off guard, and even many of those who attempted to leave were forced to turn back and return home on foot. From July until October 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) controlled the village. It established a local administration and formed an auxiliary police unit from among the local residents. A man named Lishchuk was initially appointed head of the Ukrainian police at the end of July 1941. In August 1941, there were 10 policemen under his command. At this time there were 2,000 residents of the village, including 1,000 Jews.¹

On October 20, 1941, authority was transferred to a German civil administration within Generalkommissariat Shitomir. Voronovitsa was incorporated into Gebiet Nemirow. Kameradschaftsführer Sittig was appointed as Gebietskommissar.² In 1942, Leutnant der Gendarmerie Karl Heinze served as the SS- und Polizei-Gebietsführer in Nemirov.³ He had authority over the Gendarmerie post in Voronovitsa, commanded by a man named Lorenz. In the summer of 1942, the nominal strength of the Gendarmerie post was four Gendarmes and 40 local policemen (Schutzmänner).⁴

In the summer and fall of 1941, a series of anti-Jewish measures were implemented in the village. A Jewish Council (Judenrat) was established, which was tasked with collecting a large “contribution” from the Jews. Jews were ordered to wear an armband bearing the Star of David and later a yellow circle on the front and back of their clothing. They were forced into daily hard labor: cleaning, cutting wood, and loading railway cars. The local police ensured that the Jews complied with German regulations and orders.

A ghetto was set up in August 1941 in the southwestern part of the village. It was not fenced off, but whenever a Jew ventured outside the two streets where the Jews were forced to reside, he or she would be severely beaten and sometimes killed. The policemen Kostiuk, Kondratiuk, Mudrik, and Kravchuk were especially zealous in abusing and torturing the Jews. A new head of the police, Panas Boiko, was appointed once the ghetto was established. Alongside these brutes, there were decent people among the local population, and some of them risked their lives to smuggle food to the inmates of the ghetto.⁵

On November 11, 1941, the Jews were herded into the building of the former Catholic church, where the Germans singled out about 30 Jewish craftsmen. The following morning, the remaining Jews were loaded onto trucks and taken to large silage pits behind the sugar refinery in Stepanovka, about 5 kilometers (3 miles) to the east of the village. The Jews were ordered to undress and were shot by a squad of five or so SD men using machine pistols. Among the victims were women, children, and the elderly. The mass shooting lasted the entire day. The policemen were drinking alcohol at the execution site during the Aktion. According to investigative records, somewhere between 600 and 900 Jews were shot in this first Aktion.⁶

A number of Jews managed to escape from the Aktion into the forests and fields, but hunger and cold soon forced the fugitives to return to the ghetto, where they discovered that their houses had been plundered. The survivors of the massacre were placed in the few remaining houses. In the second Aktion, which took place on December 3, 1941, 380 Jews were murdered.⁷ Security Police officers from Einsatzkommando 5, which was based in Vinnitsa at this time, organized the two Aktions with the assistance of the local Ukrainian police and German Gendarmerie. The commander of the Security Police detachment in Vinnitsa was Theodor Salmanzig.

On May 27, 1942, the ghetto in the village was liquidated. On that day, 270 Jews were shot in a ditch near the Stepanovka sugar refinery.⁸ This mass shooting was carried out by a detachment from the Security Police and SD post in Vinnitsa (consisting mainly of former members of Einsatzkommando 5), assisted by the Ukrainian police.

Some Jews who had escaped from the massacres in Generalkommissariat Shitomir in 1941 and the first half of 1942 passed through the Voronovitsa area in an effort to cross the Bug River and make it to the Romanian-occupied zone to the south (Transnistria), where conditions for Jews were comparatively better.⁹

In August 1942, a labor camp was created in the village. Around 500 Jews were taken there as prisoners, many of whom were from the ghetto in Mogilev-Podolskii, at that time under Romanian administration.¹⁰ The prisoners were utilized for building roads. On January 20, 1943, 280 Jews deemed unfit for labor were shot near the Machine-Tractor Station (MTS) in Stepanovka. On May 24, 1943, the prison camp was liquidated, and all the remaining prisoners (270 people) were killed.¹¹