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

Pre-1941: Kamenka-Shevchenkovskaia, town and raion center, Kirovograd oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1943: Rayon center, Gebiet Aleksandrowka, Generalkommissariat Nikolajew, Reichskommissariat Ukraine; 1991: raion center, Cherkasy oblast’, Ukraine

Kamenka-Shevchenkovskaia is located about 66 kilometers (41 miles) north of Kirovograd. The 1939 census reported 618 Jews in Kamenka (7.92 percent of the total population) and 737 Jews in the entire Kamenka raion. By the summer of 1941, however, the Jewish population also included a few refugees from Poland, who were forewarned about the brutality of the Germans.

German forces occupied Kamenka on August 5, 1941. During the six weeks after the initial German invasion of the Soviet Union, some of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east, and eligible men were drafted into the Red Army or enlisted voluntarily. About 75 percent of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Kamenka at the start of the German occupation.

In the summer and fall of 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) ran the town. The Ortskommandantur set up a local administration and an auxiliary Ukrainian police force recruited from among the local population. The latter took an active part in all the anti-Jewish measures. In chronological order, the chiefs of police were: at the start, the [End Page 1623] former tsarist army officer Gladkikh; from the end of 1941, I. Nuzhdenko; and from the end of March 1942, a man called Briukhovetskii. Gladkikh was placed in charge of the prison at the end of 1941. The Ukrainian police received their orders from the German Gendarmerie. In November 1941, authority passed to a German civil administration. Kamenka became a Rayon center in Gebiet Aleksandrowka, within Generalkommissariat Nikolajew. The Gebietskommissar in Aleksandrovka was a man named Lange.

On their arrival in Kamenka on August 5–6, 1941, German soldiers conducted an Aktion in which several Jews were killed, including some children. More than 200 Jews managed to survive by hiding or fleeing to the surrounding villages, and they returned to the town over the following days. As Philip Portianskii recalls, on his return to Kamenka, he and his family received registration numbers from the local administration, and they were forced to wear distinguishing marks so that everybody knew they were Jews. At that time there were 268 Jews registered in Kamenka.¹ Jews were also required to perform heavy labor in groups segregated according to sex. At some date after October 19, 1941, two ghettos were established in Kamenka. A ghetto for craftsmen (including blacksmiths, cobblers, tailors, and cabinetmakers) with their families was set up at the Pokrov sovkhoz (state-owned farm); all the remaining Jews were herded into another ghetto located in what was then the raion hospital building.² According to the testimony of Portianskii, who was probably in the noncraftsmen’s ghetto, as his father was a laborer, it was an ugly camp on the edge of the village. There were neither bedclothes nor soap. However, with the help of the police chief (probably still Gladkikh), he was able to escape.³ Jews were prohibited from going outside the borders of the ghetto to buy products from Ukrainians. As a result, starvation soon ensued. According to the regulation of January 10, 1942, issued by the Ukrainian police chief Nuzhdenko, Jews were only permitted on the street between 7:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Ukrainians were also forbidden to shelter Jews in their homes or to speak with them. For violating this regulation, Jews would be shot, and Ukrainians faced 30 days in prison and a fine.⁴

In February 1942, the Germans liquidated the ghetto for noncraftsmen on the hospital grounds. They rounded up the 280 Jews living there and shot them.⁵ At the beginning of March 1942, a second Aktion was conducted in which the ghetto for craftsmen was liquidated. At night, by decree of the Gebietskommissar, the more than 100 Jews who remained in that ghetto were arrested and taken to the horse stable in the yard of the police station. Then they were taken out in groups of 8 to 10 into the cellar of the police station building and shot by Ukrainian policemen.⁶

Altogether more than 400 Jews were murdered in Kamenka in February and March of 1942.⁷

The Ukrainian policemen from Kamenka also participated in the shooting of Jews in other nearby settlements. At the end of March 1942, under the chief of police, Briukhovetskii, they set out and shot Jews in the town of Aleksandrovka. Together with German forces and Ukrainian policemen from Aleksandrovka, they shot more than 300 Jews from Aleksandrovka in a ravine near the village of Ivangorod.⁸

A number of the local policemen in Kamenka were tried by the Soviet authorities at the end of the occupation. Among them were the policemen F.I. Tsvirkun, F.T. Zhilenko, and also Seregi Piven’, named by one survivor as a policeman with the worst reputation for atrocities.⁹