NOVAIA PRAGA
Pre-1941: Novaia Praga, town and raion center, Kirovograd oblast’, Ukrainian SSR; 1941–1944: Nowaja Praga, Rayon center, Gebiet Adshamka, Generalkommissariat Nikolajew; post-1991: Nova Praha, Oleksandriia raion, Kirovohrad oblast’, Ukraine
Novaia Praga is located about 50 kilometers (31 miles) east-northeast of Kirovograd. According to the 1939 census, 113 Jews (1.2 percent of the total population) lived in Novaia Praga, and another 57 lived in the villages of what was then the Novaia Praga raion.1
At the start of August 1941, six weeks after the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, German armed forces occupied [End Page 1629] the town. Part of the Jewish population was able to evacuate to the east. Men of eligible age were drafted into the Red Army or enlisted voluntarily. Less than one third of the pre-war Jewish population remained in Novaia Praga at the start of the German occupation.
In the summer and fall of 1941, a German military commandant’s office (Ortskommandantur) governed the town. The German military created a local authority and an auxiliary Ukrainian police force recruited from local residents.
In November 1941, authority was transferred to the German civil administration. Novaia Praga was a Rayon center within Gebiet Adshamka, which in turn became part of Generalkommissariat Nikolajew. The Gebietskommissar in Adshamka was Kameradschaftsführer Lange.2
At the end of 1941, the German authorities ordered the establishment of a ghetto in Novaia Praga. A building in a schoolyard was used as the ghetto.3 Jews from nearby villages were also resettled into the ghetto. The German police liquidated the ghetto on June 9, 1942, when they took out the elderly and children (29 people) and shot them 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) outside Novaia Praga.4 Jews, whom the Germans deemed able-bodied, were forced to work in a labor camp that was guarded by Latvian policemen. The prisoners of the camp were sent to work in a quarry. Sometime in 1943, the camp was liquidated and all the prisoners were shot.
SOURCES
Published sources include Tkuma: Vestnik Tsentral’nogo Ukrainskogo fonda istorii Kholokosta “Tkuma” (Dnepropetrovsk), no. 10 (60) (2005), p. 3. Relevant documentation can be found in DAKO (1004-1-35).
NOTES
1. Mordechai Altshuler, ed., Distribution of the Jewish Population of the USSR 1939 (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1993), p. 59.
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. Testimony of S. Peskova, from the personal archive of Fiodor Plotnir, a regional ethnographer from Novaia Praga; F.F. Oksanych, “Nova Praha—selyshche khliborobiv: Korotkyi istoryko-kraeznavchyi narys,” in the files of the Aleksandriia (Ingulets) State Ethnographic Museum.
4. Testimony of Leonid El’bert, published in Tkuma, p. 3; and DAKO, 1004-1-35, p. 67.
