PIRIATIN
Pre-1941: Piriatin, town and raion center, Poltava oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Pirjatin, initially under the control of Rear Area, Army Group South (rückwärtiges Heeresgebiet Süd), subsequently (from September 1942) center of Gebiet Pirjatin, Generalkommissariat Kiew, Reichskommissariat Ukraine; post-1991: Piriatin, Poltava oblast’, Ukraine
Piriatin is located on the Udai River 142 kilometers (88 miles) to the east-southeast of Kiev. According to the population census of 1939, 1,747 Jews lived in Piriatin (12.68 percent of the total).
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and particularly during August and September 1941, a small portion of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east. Eligible men were conscripted into or volunteered for the Red Army. Yet more than 80 percent of the Jewish population remained in Piriatin and came under German occupation.
Units of the German 6th Army occupied Piriatin on September 18, 1941. A military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) administered the township and the Rayon until September 1942. A local administration and Ukrainian auxiliary police force were created, serving under the German occupying forces.
In September 1942, power was transferred into the hands of a German civil administration. Piriatin was incorporated into Generalkommissariat Kiew and became the administrative center of Gebiet Pirjatin, which included the Rayons of Pirjatin, Tschernuchi, and Sentscha.
Shortly after the occupation of the township, the German administration ordered all Jews to be registered and marked. The Jews were obliged to wear white armbands bearing six-pointed stars in plain view. A large amount of Jewish property was confiscated, including any items of value. Jews were forbidden to appear in public places. Jewish men had to perform various forms of forced labor.
At some date between the end of September 1941 and the beginning of 1942, the Germans established a ghetto in Piriatin. At the end of March or the beginning of April 1942, the Jewish population in the ghetto numbered 1,530 persons.1 On April 6, 1942, German security forces liquidated the ghetto. Almost all the Jews, mainly old men, women, and children, were shot in the woods at Pirogovskaia Levada about 3 kilometers (1.9 mile) south of the town.2 The Jews were made to undress, and their remaining property was taken from them. Then the Germans forced them into a pit and shot them in groups of 5 with submachine guns. The graves were filled in by local non-Jewish residents, including Pyotr Chepurenko. As he worked, he saw several Jews who had only been wounded, including a five-year-old boy, trying to climb out of the pits. However, they were immediately shot and killed by Germans and local policemen who were still overseeing the operation.3
The mass shooting was apparently organized and carried out by the SD unit “Sonderkommando Plath” (headed by SS-Hauptsturmführer Plath). On May 18, 1942, it is likely that this command force carried out another Aktion in the town. On this occasion the SD shot 380 Communists and Soviet activists, along with 25 Roma (Gypsies) and 163 Jews belonging to various families.4
SOURCES
A brief description of the mass shooting on April 6, 1942, can be found in Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman, eds., The Black Book: The Ruthless Murder of Jews by German-Fascist Invaders Throughout the Temporarily-Occupied Regions of the Soviet Union and in the Death Camps of Poland during the War of 1941–1945 (New York: Holocaust Library, 1981), p. 57.
Documentation on the extermination of the Jews of Piriatin can be found in the following archives: DAPO (R3388-1-1086; R-1876-8-98); GARF; NARA; and YVA (O-3/3951).
NOTES
1. NARA, T-501, reel 33, fr. 643, report of Feldkommandantur 607 on activities during the period from March 18 to April 15, 1942; Rossiiskaia Evreiskaia Entsiklopediia (Moscow: Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, Jewish Encyclopedia Research Center, “Epos,” 2000), 6:235–236, dates the establishment of the ghetto at the beginning of 1942, but it is unclear on what sources this is based.
2. DAPO, R1876-8-98, p. 1; see also International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies—Cemetery Project, available at www.jewishgen.org/cemetery/e-europe/ukra-p.html.
3. Ehrenburg and Grossman, The Black Book, p. 57.
4. DAPO, R3388-1-1086, p. 1.
