FASTOV
Pre-1941: Fastov, town and raion center, Kiev oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Fastow, Rayon center, Gebiet Wassilkow, Generalkommissariat Kiew; post-1991: Fastiv, Kiev oblast’, Ukraine
Fastov is located 56 kilometers (35 miles) southwest of Kiev. According to the 1926 census, there were 3,545 Jews living in Fastov.1 The 1939 census recorded a Jewish population of 2,149, or 10.37 percent of the total.2 This considerable decrease in the number of Jews in the period from 1926 to 1939 was due largely to the resettlement of Jews to other areas.
Units of the German 6th Army occupied the town on July 22, 1941, one month after the invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941. During this intervening period, a large part of the Jewish population managed to evacuate to the eastern regions of the USSR, and men liable for military service entered the Red Army as conscripts or volunteers. Around 40 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in the town at the start of the German occupation. [End Page 1593]
In the summer and fall of 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) was in charge of the town. The German military administration created a town council and an auxiliary Ukrainian police force consisting of local residents, which took an active part in the anti-Jewish measures.
In November 1941, authority was transferred to the German civil administration. Fastov became part of Gebiet Wassilkow. The Gebietskommissar was Kameradschaftsführer Döhrer.
Soon after the start of the occupation, the Ortskommandantur ordered the newly created Judenrat to organize the registration and marking of the Jews (they were required to wear armbands), as well as the collection of a monetary “contribution” and the use of the Jews for various types of forced labor. In August 1941, a detachment of Sonderkommando 4a conducted the first Aktion in the town, in which its members seized and shot 261 Jews between the ages of 12 and 60 and one “terrorist.” Before the detachment’s arrival, the Wehrmacht (a detachment of the Geheime Feldpolizei and members of a Landesschützenbataillon) had already shot 50 Jews and about 30 snipers (partisans).3
The remaining women, children, and old people in the town were then moved into an open ghetto. The Germans liquidated the ghetto on October 6, 1941, by shooting all the Jews. The victims included not only the local Jews but also Jewish refugees from Zhitomir and Jews from the Jewish kolkhoz in the village of Veprik.4 In total, up to 1,000 Jews were murdered in the town in the period from August to October 1941.5
A few Jews from Fastov managed to survive by going into hiding or assuming a non-Jewish identity.6
SOURCES
Relevant documentation can be found in the following archives: BA-BL (R 58/217); BA-L (B 162/5641–72); DAKiO (4758-2-49); USHMM; VHF (# 42017, 47413, and 47453); and YVA.
NOTES
1. TsDAVO, 505-1-395, p. 40.
2. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), p. 20.
3. BA-BL, R 58/217, Ereignismeldung UdSSR no. 80, September 11, 1941; see also BA-L, 114 AR-Z 269/60, Concluding Report, December 30, 1968.
4. Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine (Vaad Ukrainy), “Memory of the Holocaust” Program: Kiev oblast’.
5. According to lists of names, 120 people were killed in the town, including 85 Jews (DAKiO, 4758-2-49, pp. 5–6), while information from the town soviet indicates that 172 people were killed (ibid., p. 4).
6. VHF, # 42017, testimony of Mikhail Roitman, who assumed a non-Jewish identity; # 47413, testimony of Boris Goldschmidt, who went into hiding with the aid of non-Jews; and # 47453, testimony of Galina Kuchinskaia, who also went into hiding.
