BUKI
Pre-1941: Buki, town and raion center, Kiev oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Rayon center, Gebiet Taraschtscha, Generalkommissariat Kiew, Reichskommissariat Ukraine; post-1991: Cherkasy oblast’, Ukraine
Buki is located 38 kilometers (24 miles) north-northeast of Uman’. According to the census of December 16, 1926, there were 1,114 Jews living in the entirety of what then was the Buki raion.1 According to the 1939 census, 546 Jews (17.64 percent of the population) lived in Buki, with 183 more residing in the villages of the Buki raion: in total, 729 Jews. The reduction of the raion’s Jewish population by one third in the years 1927–1938 was due to the death of Jews during the Holodomor famine of 1932–1933 and to the resettlement of Jews to other towns and villages.
German armed forces occupied Buki on July 19, 1941, almost one month after their invasion of the USSR on June 22. During this intervening period, some of the Jews had managed to evacuate eastward, and men eligible for military service were drafted or volunteered for the Red Army. About 60 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Buki at the start of the occupation.
In the period from July to October 1941, a German military commandant’s office governed the town. The German military administration set up a town council headed by a starosta, or elder, and an auxiliary Ukrainian police force made up of local residents.
In November 1941, authority was transferred to the German civil administration. Buki became part of Gebiet Taraschtscha, which in turn was incorporated into Generalkommissariat Kiew in Reichskommissariat Ukraine.2
Soon after Buki was occupied, the German military commandant’s office ordered the local authorities to organize the [End Page 1591] registration and marking of the Jews with an armband displaying a six-pointed star, as well as their use for various types of forced labor.
As early as August 1941, German security forces conducted a first Aktion in Buki, in which they shot several dozen Jews. The shooting took place near the Gornyi Tikich River on the southeastern outskirts of the town. Today a granite monument stands there, bearing this inscription: “To the victims of fascism from their mourning relatives and countrymen.” In the fall of 1941, members of the Jewish “intelligentsia” were shot in a livestock burial ground 100 meters (about 328 feet) northwest of the village. Those Jews still alive, along with the Jews of the surrounding villages, were forced to move into a ghetto set up at a former landowner’s country house, about 1.5 kilometers (0.9 miles) from the center of Buki. In May 1942, those Jews who were unable to work were shot, while those deemed fit for work labored in a quarry. Additional Jews capable of work were brought in to the Buki labor camp from Man’kovka and Piatigory in the second half of April 1942.3 This work camp was liquidated in 1943 when the Germans shot all the remaining prisoners.
SOURCES
Information on the ghetto and forced labor camp in Buki can be found in the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine (Vaad Ukrainy), program “Pamiat’ Holokosta,” report on the village of Man’kovka, Cherkasy oblast’; and in A. Kruglov, Katastrofa ukrainskogo evreistva 1941–1944gg.: Entsiklopedicheskii spravochnik (Kharkov: “Karavella,” 2001), p. 51.
NOTES
1. Vsesoiuznyi perepys liudnosti 1926 roku (Moscow, 1929), 12:210.
2. BA-BL, BDC, SSHO 2432, Organisationsplan der besetzten Ostgebiete nach dem Stand vom 10. März 1942, hg. vom Chef der Ordnungspolizei, Berlin, March 13, 1942.
3. Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine (Vaad Ukrainy), program “Pamiat’ Holokosta,” Cherkassy District, village of Man’kovka; directive issued by the Man’kovka Area Council No. 41 from March 18, 1999; and Kruglov, Katastrofa ukrainskogo evreistva 1941–1944 gg., p. 51.
