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

Pre-1941: Fraidorf, village, Sofievka raion, Dnepropetrovsk oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Rayon Friesen (Stalindorf ), Gebiet Kriwoj Rog-Land, Generalkommissariat Dnjepropetrowsk; post-1991: Dnipropetrovsk oblast’, Ukraine

Fraidorf is located approximately 100 kilometers (62 miles) southwest of Dnepropetrovsk. The Fraidorf village/kolkhoz was located about 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) from Stalindorf.¹

In August 1941, German armed forces occupied Fraidorf. The number of Jews that remained in Fraidorf at the start of the occupation is unknown. During the first months of occupation, a German military commandant’s office governed the village. The Germans requisitioned livestock and food supplies in the area. They appointed a young ethnic German kolkhoz worker named Filip as the village head (starosta), and a man named Mazur served in the local Ukrainian police.

According to Sofia Goldshtein, a Jewish survivor from Fraidorf, soon after the start of the occupation the local police “kicked us out of our house, and took everything we had, our chickens, cows, and other possessions. There was an order that all the Jews had to move to a single street, several families to a single house. We couldn’t take anything with us, not even a cow.”²

The ghetto in Fraidorf existed from the summer of 1941 until the spring of 1942. The Jews in Fraidorf also suffered from harassment by the local police, and some Jews were murdered as alleged Communists. Living conditions in the open ghetto were overcrowded, with six people sharing a single room. Those capable of work were taken out to perform unpaid agricultural labor, looking after horses and cattle. The Jews had to trade their last remaining possessions, such as bedding, to obtain food. Since the family of Anna Surzhenko had good relations with the family of the starosta, having helped them during the famine, she was able to leave the ghetto to barter items and was not troubled by the local police, who had been warned not to harm her. Most other Jews were not so fortunate. Local inhabitants warned the Jews to flee, but most remained in the ghetto, as they could not abandon sick and dependent relatives.³

At the end of 1941, authority in the region was transferred to a German civil administration. The village of Fraidorf was incorporated into Gebiet Kriwoj Rog, headed by Gebietskommissar Dr. Frick, which lay within Generalkommissariat Dnjepropetrowsk.

In March 1942, a number of young Jews capable of work, together with other Jews from Rayon Stalindorf, were marched together following horse-drawn wagons about 25 kilometers [End Page 1621] (15.5 miles) to a labor camp established in a stable near the village of Langovka. These Jews were used to construct the highway (Durchgangsstrasse IV) between Krivoi Rog and Dnepropetrovsk. Soon after the young Jews’ departure, the Germans shot all the remaining Jews in a ravine near the village. The total number of Jewish victims in Fraidorf is unknown. In 1939, there were 7,312 Jews living in the Stalindorf Jewish national raion. According to the records of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, 3,911 Jews were shot in the Stalindorf raion during the German occupation, most of them between May 1942 and August 1943.⁴

After the war, the local Ukrainian policeman Mazur was tried and punished, but the ethnic German Filip fled with the German army and thereby evaded punishment.