ZHORNISHCHE
Pre-1941: Zhornishche, village, Il’intsy raion, Vinnitsa oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Shornischtsche, Rayon and Gebiet Illinzi, Generalkommissariat Shitomir; post-1991: Zhornyshche, Vinnytsia raion and oblast’, Ukraine
Zhornishche is located about 50 kilometers (31 miles) east-southeast of Vinnitsa. According to the 1939 census, 375 Jews resided in all the villages of the Il’intsy raion, but most lived in Zhornishche.
Units of the German 6th Army occupied the village on July 16, 1941. The German occupation forces appointed a village headman (Gordienko), a chairman of the village council (Kozovenko), and two Ukrainian policemen. The village headman was sentenced to 15 years in a corrective labor camp after the war, and the chairman of the village council was killed by partisans in February 1943.
In August 1941, the German Security Police organized the first Aktion against the Jews in the village. They arrested and shot 13 Jewish men, including one teenage refugee from Vinnitsa.1
In September 1941, a ghetto was created in the center of the village, to which all Jews were relocated—both local residents and refugees from Vinnitsa. The ghetto was guarded by the local policemen, the village headman, and the chairman [End Page 1581] of the village council to ensure that nobody left without permission. Jews had to wear armbands with a blue Star of David on a white background. A certain number of Jews were assigned to various work tasks, mainly in agriculture, each day.2
In October 1941, authority was transferred from the military to a civil administration. Zhornishche was located in Gebiet Illinzi, within Generalkommissariat Shitomir. The Gebietskommissar in Il’intsy was Kreisleiter Heinrich Scholdra. The Gendarmerie post in Il’intsy was commanded by Meister Andreas Wagner. The German Gendarmerie also took over responsibility for the Ukrainian local police, which was renamed the Schutzmannschaft.
On May 27, 1942, a team of Security Police assisted by the Ukrainian Schutzmannschaft surrounded the Zhornishche ghetto at night. These forces rounded up all the Jews living there (some 200 to 300) and escorted them to Il’intsy. Here they were shot, together with Jews from the Il’intsy ghetto, in pits just outside the town.3
Some Jews evaded the roundup by hiding, including Boris Yavorsky and two of his siblings, who hid in an attic. The three children (aged 8, 13, and 15) survived with the help of non-Jewish friends, the Vershigora family. They received shelter and food in return for work and were not betrayed to the authorities. Subsequently they moved to the Romanianoccupied area, where they became inmates of the ghetto in Pechera. Only about 20 Jewish residents of Zhornishche are known to have survived.4
SOURCES
The testimony of Boris Yavorsky concerning the fate of the Jews of Zhornishche has been published in the volume edited by Boris Zabarko, Holocaust in the Ukraine (Port-land, OR: Vallentine Mitchell, 2005), pp. 385–387. The ghetto in Zhornishche is also mentioned in A. Kruglov, Katastrofa ukrainskogo evreistva 1941–1944 gg.: Entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik (Kharkov: “Karavella,” 2001), p. 116. A brief article on the Jewish community in Zhornishche can be found in Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2000), 4:453.
