The relationship between Germans and Jews in Ukraine began in 1918 after World War I. According to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty concluded with the Bolsheviks in 1918, German troops were allowed to occupy Ukraine. The Germans entered Kopaigorod and behaved in a rather friendly manner towards the local population including the Jews. They gave candy to the children and exchanged schnapps for various homemade sweets and dairy products. The Yiddish language, which arose on the basis of German dialects, came in handy for the Jews. The Jews even became respectable. After all, now Ukrainians turned to them for help when it was necessary to come to an understanding with the occupation authorities. The Germans of 1918 were the absolute opposite of the Germans in 1941. This is one reason why Jews who may have had the opportunity to evacuate in the time before 1941 did not do so, relying on their memories of well behaved, good Germans.

In his book, Babi Yar, Anatoly Kuznetsov wrote:

Before the war, Soviet newspapers only praised and extolled Hitler and wrote nothing about the situation of Jews in Germany and Poland. Among the Jews, it was possible to find even enthusiastic admirers of Hitler as a talented statesman. On the other hand, the old men told how the Germans were in Ukraine in 1918, that they did not touch the Jews then, but, on the contrary, they treated them very well. How wrong they were!

In July 1941, Kopaigorod was occupied by German troops. At that time, there were about 300 Jews who did not have time to evacuate.

The unfolding of events in Kopaigorod during the occupation was as follows. At the end of September 1941, all of the Jews of the village were driven to a camp near the Kopay railway station in Kopaigorod. The camp was in a forested area 6 km northwest of the village. In October 1941, several thousand Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were brought to the same location. At the end of November 1941, all of the Jews were sent back to the Kopaigorod ghetto and found their homes devastated and looted. They had to live three to four families in one room in which each small family was allotted a corner. A large family was given two corners. In most cases, the floors in the houses were earthen and damp. People searched for old boards in the ruins and built common bunks from them. The ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire. Leaving the area without permission was punishable by death. A total of 5,000-6,000 Jews were concentrated in Kopaigorod. Infectious diseases spread throughout the ghetto due to hunger, cold and unsanitary living conditions. There was no medicine. Nine Jews were shot. Two Jews from Bessarabia and three local Jews were shot and killed in July, 1942. In March of 1943, one Jew from Bessarabia and two local Jews were shot and in February 1944, one local Jew. In 1942, a group of young and healthy Jews was sent to the Tulchyn labor camp for peat extraction, and in 1943 young people were sent to the Trikhaty labor camp near Mykolaiv to build a bridge. In January 1943, a four man delegation from the aid committee of the Central Bureau of Romanian Jews visited the ghetto in Kopaigorod, as well as in other settlements of Transnistria, with the permission of Romanian authorities. According to the delegation member, F. Sharaga, they counted only 2,200 Jews in the ghetto, including 98 Jewish orphans. On September 1, 1943, there were 1,295 Romanian Jews in the ghetto, and an additional 676 local Jews from Bessarabia and 619 from Bukovina.

My mother used to tell me about the events of those days. The Jews gathered in the central Jewish square of the town with their small bags of belongings, as ordered by the German authorities. This square was called “Near the Bank” because the district bank was located in the two-story building. This street was called Pershotravneva and my mother's house was behind the bank.

Kopaigorod, Jews in the ghetto

In this manner, all of the Jews were transferred to a concentration camp in the forest near the Kopay railway station. The camp was a part of the forest area where the Red Army barracks were located before the war. There were six observation points around this territory and observation towers from which the Germans controlled the camp. German guards lived in the barracks and Jews lived in huts or in the open air. Food was brought by former neighbors and exchanged for things that the Jews still had.

Once a German officer was speaking before the Jews in the camp, and the translator translated the following: “We drove you here not so that you live here, but our goal is that you die not by your own death, but by starvation.”

The guards of the forest camp gathered representatives of the families several times a day for various showdowns. They warned, for example, that leaving the territory of the camp would mean the most severe punishment; even execution. Failure to comply with any order would not go unpunished. And just to intimidate all the inhabitants of the camp, two prisoners were shot. Local residents stood around the barbed wire fence. Some watched how the Jews lived in captivity, others were angry, and others exchanged food for valuables under humiliating conditions for the Jews. Local policeman shot a girl who had climbed over the fence to exchange some items for medicine for her sick mother, with a peasant woman. She was shot in front of the Jews. The second shot rang out at an unarmed Jew who had climbed a tree to cut a thick branch for his kuren. I. Malamud was killed because he came close to the edge of the encircled camp. The police decided that this was an escape attempt.

Those who had nothing to exchange ventured out on night forays which sometimes cost them their lives. Prisoners were used for forced labor; many were killed. According to Jewish survivors, before leaving this area in 1941, the Germans decided to shoot every tenth person. However, something happened with the machine gun, and later the Romanians intervened, because they needed manpower. Therefore, the shooting did not take place.

Deportation of Jews from Kopaigorod to the concentration camp at Kopay station. The station was 1,000 meters away from the concentration camp. Among them were my mother Anyuta Koyfman, grandmother Hayka Iosevych and other relatives, 1941.

Kopaigorod became part of the Transnistria governorate. The border of Transnistria ran in the south along the coast of the Black Sea and between the mouths of the Dniester and Southern Bug rivers; to the west along the Dniester River from its mouth to the confluence of the left tributary of the Lyadova River into the Dniester; in the east along the Southern Bug River from its mouth to the confluence of the right tributary of the Riv River into the Southern Bug, in the north along the Lyadova and Riv Rivers to their sources in the Bar District of Vinnytsia Region.

Transnistria was divided into 13 counties. One of the counties was Mohyliv, which included Mohyliv, Zhmerinka, Balky, Kopayhorod, Chervone, Yaryshiv, Shargorod, Stanislavchyk, as well as villages around these towns.

Kopaigorod was one of the kraisgebits, or districts, created by the Romanians. In recognition of its merits, Romania received part of the Ukrainian territory east of Bessarabia between the Dniester and Bug rivers. This region included the city of Odessa, several smaller cities and many small towns, including Kopaigorod. Romania needed this territory for the settlement of Jews deported from the regions of Bessarabia and Bukovina, regions which were taken away from the Soviet Union and fully returned to Romanian rule. The Romanians had their own plans to solve the Jewish question in these territories. Some of the Jews were to be sent to death camps in Poland, some were to be exterminated on the spot, others were to be deported to Transnistria, and the rest were to be persecuted, but not evicted.

The Jews of Kopaigorod were allowed to return to the village where they were settled in a fenced ghetto. Fourteen ghetto areas were created in the former Kopaigorod district. This was the largest number of ghettos set up in the districts of the Vinnytsia region.

The house in which my mother lived was part of the ghetto. When they returned home, the house had already been ransacked like the houses of other Jews. Hostile Ukrainians robbed simple Jewish property. Some dragged pillows, blankets, furniture, tools, everything they could grab. And others said: “Aliens don't get warm,” but they looked at how Jewish houses were being looted. Everyone thought that the Jews would never return.

According to former prisoners, the territory of the ghetto was approximately 800 x 400 meters in size. It was forbidden to leave the ghetto and Jews were not allowed to cross Lenin Street, which was the central street and a border of the ghetto. Lenin Street separated the Jewish and Ukrainian parts of Kopaigorod and was patrolled by local policemen.

I think that the suffering of the Jews of Kopaigorod, their hunger, cold, humiliation and the constant expectation of death, was not much different from the suffering of the Jews in other ghettos. And although they constantly talked about mass murders and abuse in the ghetto, the Jews still hoped that the worst would not happen to them. In all of the Transnistrian camps and ghettos, Jews had to get used to beatings as one of the measures of control. Officers, plutoners (assistant officers), ordinary soldiers, magistrates, and all administrative employees were beating them. All those who were supposed to beat Jews were beating without pity. In the orders that were posted in all the towns and promulgated by the governor Alexianus, flogging was a special punishment that was applied to the Jews.

A portion of the map of the Transnistria governorate in Kopaigorod

Several thousand Jews who were deported from Bessarabia and Bukovyna were driven here to the town. According to the information bulletin of the gendarmerie inspector in Transnistria for December 15, 1941–January 15, 1942, 91,189 Jews from Bukovyna and Bessarabia were evacuated through Yampil and Mohyliv-Podilskyi to that part of Vinnytsia region that became part of Transnistria in the fall of 1941. In July 1942, 450 and 4,000 Jews were deported from Dorohaya (Romania) and the city of Chernivtsi to Vinnytsia region (Tulchyn district), and in September 1942, 1,046 communist Jews were deported from Romania to the Vapnyarka camp and another 500 Jews were deported from the city of Chernivtsi.

J. Gilsker, a former prisoner in the Kopaigorod ghetto said:

At night, we were awakened by the shouts of the Romanian gendarmes: 'Jews, hurry up to the ferry.' It took a little time to gather. The gendarmes were hurrying us up all the time. And here we are, on the banks of the Dniester. We have been sailing for a long time, I really wanted to sleep. I woke up from rude screams and blows with a whip. They kicked us off the ferry. Then there were dirty barracks in Mohyliv, where we spent the night, sleeping on bunks in our clothing. And on the road again. They were chasing us like cattle in a convoy. Sometimes local peasants ran up to our column and they exchanged their products for our things. Breaks were arranged in the open air. As soon as somebody moved a step away from the column or approached it, the gendarmes opened fire. My father and mother were killed in one of these gendarme actions and I became an orphan. Aunt Khana, my mother's elder sister with whom I stayed, decided to send me to Kopaigorod, where my grandfather and aunt lived, where I had to survive the occupation.

In total, more than 97,000 Jews were deported to the Vinnytsia region. The number of deportees in Kopaigorod district is shown in Table 1.

Settlement	August 1942	Beginning of 1943
Kopaigorod	1600	1161
Kosharyntsi	277	170
Karyshkiv	282	301
Kuzmyntsi	175	292
Grabovtsi	486	294
Galchyntsi	223	120
Gorai	150	83
Gromovka	200	81
Hrynivka	389	241
Yuzina (luzina)	390	41
Maryanivka	233
Luchynets	2360	1307
Luchynchyk	391	106
Nemerche	453	304
Vyshche Olchedaiv	23
Popivtsi	905	791
Ploske	25
Primoshchanytsia	173
Romanky	282	59
Stepanky	371	221
Volodiivtsi	156	43
Vinozh	279	220
Total in the district	6056

Map of the occupation zones of Vinnytsia region with designation of ghettos and concentration camps

Those who survived recounted that there were a lot of dead people. Sometimes people slept on the floor for several nights next to a dead body until it was time to bury it. They were buried one by one. People could not accompany the deceased on their last journey. No one alive was allowed outside of the ghetto. The bodies were placed on carts together with many others and were buried in one of the mass graves, in which several hundred deceased were lying. No one could find out in which mass grave this or that person was buried. There were no records or lists.

The ghetto prisoner Sh. Portnoy spoke about the events of the winter of 1942–1943 as follows: “Two sleds loaded with naked corpses (the clothes were removed for those who were freezing) went round the houses, from which new dead people were taken out.”

In most cases, treatment consisted of a kind word, a glass of water, or a cold compress on the head. Vunya visited the houses every day, trying to help the sick, but mostly it was treatment without the necessary drugs. Doctor Vunya was a man of athletic physique, but he was seriously ill too. Yosyp Zilber was known in the ghetto as an unfailing doctor who went to save people at the first request. He selflessly fulfilled his medical duty to the sick, regardless of whether it was a deported Jew or a local resident. Unfortunately, he contracted typhus, fell seriously ill and died in March 1942.

My relatives also consulted these doctors. My father said that even before Kopaigorod was liberated from the fascists, he fell ill with typhus and, thanks to these doctors, he survived. Eternal memory to you, the best, compassionate doctors. You certainly deserve eternal gratitude and remembrance.

The doctor, Vunya (Zeev) Grupenmacher, died in the ghetto at the age of 40

There was very unpleasant work to do in the ghetto every day. Everyone stripped naked and carefully inspected their clothes for lice. The identified parasites were destroyed with fingernails, and clothing was periodically boiled. Lice in the ghetto and beyond became a deadly threat. Typhoid fever broke out in the ghetto. At first, the homeless and those who were starving began to die, and later the epidemic intensified. When the epidemic reached its peak and up to a hundred people died a day, only then did the Romanian authorities begin to do something. Every morning a Jewish policeman came and made people clean the streets. The territory was washed and cleaned near each house. They began disinfecting the public wooden toilets. The homes of the deceased were also disinfected. The winter of 1942–1943 was harsh. There were constant blizzards and wind and frost. The Germans from Bar, who were here on business, were furious when they saw the living Jews, while the Jews were quietly dying of frostbite and typhus.

The Kopaigorod ghetto was home to Jews who escaped from Bar, Murovani Kurylivtsi, Snitkiv, Vinnytsia, and other cities and towns of Vinnytsia and Khmelnytskyi regions. My father, who lived in Sataniv before the war, ended up here as he was running away from the shootings. The others who resided in the room where my mother lived with her grandmother and her sister, included Mina Mints (Sterenberg), Fanya Krasnianska (Sterenberg), Zhenya Kelman and other people from Bar. All of them survived and were in constant communication after the war. The family of Anshin E. Belfer Fira and her sister Nina from Bar, the family of A. Shmuklerand his wife Brana Habiy were from Kopaigorod. Others also hid in Kopaigorod.

David Maniu from Mohyliv-Podilskyi described the events of those times as follows:

My mother, like many other Jews, did not want to hear about the evacuation. Where are the Germans and where is Mohyliv-Podilsky? And only when the Mohyliv railway bridge was bombed, did she realize that the enemy could, God forbid, occupy their cities. But it was no longer possible to get on transit departing from Mohyliv. You couldn't dream about a cart even for gold. All that remained was to set off on foot. We were walking along the hilly Shargorod road, the sun was unbearable. People fell off their feet. The thirst was so great that when we came across an abandoned well with stagnant water it was immediately and completely drained. The Germans blocked our way near Kopaigorod to a town 50 kilometers from Mohyliv. However, we escaped only to fall into the hands of the Romanian gendarmes. All of us walking were not robbed: no, we were only ordered to lie down on the ground face down, and wearing boots, they laughed and danced happily on our backs. (Evening New York, 1988, April 22-23). That's how they found themselves in Kopaigorod.

Nelly Ovsiyivna Oksman, a doctor from Kyiv, said that when she and another Jewish woman were interns in a hospital in the Khmelnytskyi region in 1942, they were hidden by a Christian Evangelist watchman. He advised them to ask the evangelists for shelter, on the way to the Romanian zone. After walking 200 km at night, the girls reached Kopaigorod. (From the book Years of War with German Fascism and Catastrophe (1941-1945).

From the memoirs of Fira Illivna Belfer (born 1920), a prisoner of Bar ghetto, after she and her sister escaped from Bar after the second episode of shooting at Jews, they headed to Kopaigorod:

When we passed through the village of Mytki, we met a Ukrainian woman who knew our parents. She took us to her home, gave us food and hid us from the police for several days. Then at night, her son led us through the forest to Kopaigorod, located in the territory controlled by the Romanians. On the way, we were met by Romanian gendarmes who sent us to the ghetto. There were many Jews who had been expelled from Romanian territories in this ghetto. The local Jews helped them, shared everything they could with them and with those of us who had escaped the German occupation. People worked very hard in this ghetto, but there was no mass killing here. Once the Romanians sent a group of guys to work on the Odessa railway, and they did not return. There was a community here, the members of which were Romanian and local Jews. The chairman of the community was Orenstein, a Romanian Jew. There was a Jewish police force and Tranchteyboym was the chief. I remember two of the policemen, Salo and Rytsa who were Romanian refugees and Niunchyk was a local policeman. In the Kopaigorod ghetto there were, apart from us, a few more Jews who had escaped from the German pogroms in Bar. Among the Romanian Jews there were also doctors who tried to help prevent epidemics almost without medication. But people got sick, starved and died mainly from hunger and the cold. I met my future husband in the ghetto, who was a dentist from Romania. I remember that there was a family of five in the ghetto. The father died of pneumonia, and the mother, sister and brother returned to Romania. At the end of March 1944, we were liberated by the Red Army, and we returned to Bar. (Revival of memory. Memories of witnesses and victims of the Holocaust. Dnipropetrovsk, 2008).

Krushynskyi, the former head of the finance department, was appointed as the head of the police, and Vasylyshyn as his deputy. The following people became policemen: V. Balynskyi, N. Kushnir, P. Revulskyi, I. Natalyuk and other local residents. The police department was located in the premises of the bank. Before the arrival of the Red Army, Krushynskyi wanted to kill all the Jews of the town, but he did not have time. Knowing this, the Jews organized defense posts in the ghetto, armed themselves with knives, axes, clubs, and crowbars. They were ready for anything to protect themselves.

Semen Shmukler's memoir contained his memory of police officers:

The police chief and his assistant Vasylyshyn, who had the experience of pogroms in other districts of the region, came up with a new action. They arranged shooting from machine guns and rifles at the windows during the night. We sat, until morning, anxiously waiting for something unpredictable. The men were arrested In the morning. A Jewish policeman came for my father. During the search, he was shot and taken to the commandant's office. My Dad was interrogated, beaten, forced to surrender his weapons, which, of course, he did not have. At the end, he was released for ransom. Yes, there were also Jewish policemen here in the ghetto. Such a person, too diligent, was the policeman Nyunchyk.

Brumberg Azriel from Bessarabia recounted:

They drove to Kopaigorod. During the day, distribution took place: the Romanians decided whom to send where. Our family ended up in the village of Karyshkov, three kilometers from Kopaigorod. We were accommodated in the center of the village in a building belonging to a farmer. In Karyshkovo there were Jews not only from Brychany, but also from other places. We were not given food for two days. In Karyshkovo, a Ukrainian policeman named Vorovsky was especially violent. He drove us out into the field in the rain and mud, into the very swamp. We were ordered to lie down, and Vorovsky and his partner robbed us. They took all of our valuables and goods from everyone and left. We returned to the farmer's premises ourselves. Later on, our family of eight received one room for housing. A woman and her son lived in the second room. Life in the ghetto began. In the Karyshkovsky ghetto, the chairman of the community committee was Beirl Postolaky, a native of Brychany. He received orders from the Romanians, where to and how many people should be sent to work. Once there was an order to collect 100 young healthy guys to work in Kryzhopol for logging. I got into this team, and we were immediately sent without food to the station in Kopaigorod. They loaded us into wagons and brought us to Kryzhopol via Zhmerinka. In Karyshkovo, the Romanians organized a collective farm in order to take the economy into their own hands. Ukrainian Rodion, a tall, strong man, was appointed as a chairman of the collective farm. Father went to the collective farm to work as a blacksmith. For his work, he received half a loaf of bread and a few potatoes every day. We lived in the ghetto in the village of Karyshkov, and the collective farm was outside the village, on the road to Kopaigorod. On February 20, 1942, Dina's mother died of typhoid fever at the age of 45 in the Karyshkov ghetto. We all got infected from her. I was sick for a month and a half and no one knew what to do with me. But thanks to my father all of the children survived. Dad suffered from typhus on his legs. He knew that if he fell ill, we would all perish. My sick father worked on a collective farm and fed the entire sick family. He cooked soup consisting of six potatoes per bucket of water, and looked after us. In Karyshkovo, many people and families suffered from typhus. The dead were transported from the ghetto in full wagons. I recovered and also started working at the collective farm.

In 1944, a criminal case was opened against police officers in Kopaigorod and the district. The police were mostly former servicemen of the Red Army. The report of the case noted that these officers betrayed their oath to the Soviet homeland, voluntarily surrendered, personally expressed a desire to join the police and swore to support the laws regarding the implementation of the new fascist order. The policemen were accused of forcibly sending the population to work in Germany, participation in the shootings of the Jews, partisans, and party-Soviet activists.

However, up until the middle of 1949, not all bandit groups consisting of traitors to the motherland were liquidated in the Kopaigorod district. This was pointed out at a meeting of the Vinnytsia party regional committee to Ryabokon, the head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Internal Security of Kopaigorod district, about the extremely unsatisfactory results related to the elimination of these groups and the neglect of agency business. This would have resulted in severe punishment by the party and dismissal from work, but taking into account Ryabokon's statement that the bandit groups would be eliminated in the next 10-15 days, punishment was limited to an instruction and a demand to report to the regional committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine by June 23, 1949 on the implementation of this resolution.

The occupiers mocked the Ukrainian people as well. A Romanian officer, accompanied by a policeman, came again to buy groceries from the Ukrainian, Mazur. But what can you give when you have already given away everything in your store? The woman could not stand the occupiers and spat in the direction of the officer. She was then beaten fifty times with ramrods in the village square, after which she died. Her son Vasyl Mazur died a month before the end of the war. He accidentally met his son in the war. Leonid was thirteen years old when he fled to the front. Father and son served together. They were a soldier and an officer who was the deputy commander of the airborne division. In November 1945, Leonid Mazur made his way to the reception of Marshal Konev, who then commanded the Central Group of Forces in Austria, and he helped to transport his father's remains from Austria to Kopaigorod. In 1946, the Guards Major Vasyl Mazur was buried in the Memorial Square in the center of the village. This grave is under protection as a monument of the history of the Bar district (decision No. 313 dated 10.06.1971).

There are many testimonies of Jews who lived in Kopaigorod during the occupation, some of which have been published in various memoirs. They describe how hard it was to live in the concentration camp at the Kopay station and the ghetto. Albert Reuter recalls:

In the spring of 1942, the regime was tightened. The ghetto was surrounded by a fence. Those who tried to leave the ghetto were shot on the spot. It was forbidden to visit the synagogue. I remember that just at that time a German came to pick up bread. Once he found a group of old men praying, he called the Romanian gendarmes and declared that he had discovered the conspiracy. The head of the gendarmerie ordered to leave only a tenth of the population in the ghetto, and the rest to be moved to the station barracks of the camp. People leaving there in search of food were shot. When the German left, the Romanians allowed all the survivors to return. How did those who survived manage to survive? Artisans earned bread and potatoes by secretly fulfilling the orders of the local population. Those who knew Romanian were fed by mediation in trade between residents and soldiers - salt, matches, sugar could only be bought from them. My father, who graduated from the pharmacist's assistant course, procured the necessary drugs and prepared medicines that no one, even Romanians, had enough of. In 1943, we began to receive parcels from Romanian Jews. We were also lucky when Romania refused to take us to Poland, to Auschwitz. In March 1944, when the wave of the Soviet Army attack reached us, every fifth Jew who was placed in the Kopaigorod ghetto met his liberation.

Feiga (Bronya) Mitelman, a prisoner of the Kopaigorod ghetto, wrote:

Jews who were driven into the ghetto did not have the right to go beyond their limits. The Germans dealt with anyone who tried to approach the barrier violently. They opened fire without warning. A group of daredevils decided to challenge the fascists and put an end to their arbitrariness and bullying. Fifteen ghetto prisoners pretended to be guards and went to the gate, which was also fenced with barbed wire, in order to escape from this hell and tell people where the Jews of Kopaigorod were. But their heroic actions were interrupted by the machine gun fire of the fascist guards. All 15 of these fearless brave men, who took up the struggle of the Jews in the confined space of the ghetto, were killed. The residents of Kopaigorod learned about their actions from the surviving ghetto prisoners who escaped and were waiting for the liberation by the Red Army.

In May 2016, the Dutch Holocaust researcher Cor Roos visited the Kopaigorod secondary school and presented his book, Born to Suffer? which included testimonies of those witnesses who survived the Catastrophe. It also contains the memoirs of Mykhailo Kalika, a resident of Kopaigorod, a juvenile prisoner of the ghetto.

In the first days of the occupation of Kopaigorod, the Germans burned books, various documents, and forced the Rabbi to watch as they burned the Torah. The Rabbi was stripped naked in front of everyone and dragged by his beard. The rabbi could not stand this abuse and hung himself. According to memoirs of ghetto prisoners, this happened in the camp at the Kopay station.

Valentyn Livshits wrote a memoir about his experiences. As a sixteen-year-old boy, he was harnessed like a horse to a two-wheeled cart with a barrel and forced to carry water from the spring to the Romanian kitchen. He was exhausted from the overwhelming work and one day he decided to run away, at least for a few days, to hide somewhere and rest a little. As soon as he got off the two-wheeler and started walking, lacking the strength to run, the policeman Vaska Balynskyi appeared and shouted: “Damn you, where are you heading?”. He knocked the boy to the ground and beat him with his boots until he was bloody. “You dog. If you run away, I'll shoot you!” After these beatings, Valentin barely regained consciousness, and a few days later he was driven back to work.

Many women, who were the majority of those who survived the ghetto, recalled their crafty work to survive. One sewed, another did cutting, and a third glued galoshes. Those who were unable to do anything worthwhile had the last, though rather risky, opportunity, to beg near village churches on Sundays. It made no sense to sell their bodies, as the Romanians and the local police did not see the need to pay for what they could get for free any moment, by force.

There is a well-known case of women who were forced into prostitution. This is how Shkolnyk Sheiva testified to this:

Once upon a time, a policeman left Kopaigorod to travel to Popivtsi. There were two beautiful girls, and he wanted, excuse me, one of them. She ran away. Then all the Jews were expelled to the square, and he said that if they don't find this girl, they will all be killed. They begged for their lives and said that they would help find her. I know they received something, help from America. And they begged her, she went with them. And then in the morning they let everyone into the apartments. How about us? Did she come back? Yes. He just slept with her. And who persuaded her? People from the Jewish committee. Did the committee persuade? Yes. And did this happen often? I remember once. (BF “Center for the Study of the History and Culture of Eastern European Jewry”, Interview card Shkolnik Sh. of the project “Jewish Fates of Ukraine”, Slavuta, 1997).

In 1943, the Elgeser family was transferred to the Kopaigorod ghetto from the liquidated village of Maryanivka. Josyp Elgeser, who was 13 years old, painted icons for local residents and thanks to this, the family survived. Perhaps someone still has these painted icons. After the war, he became a famous Ukrainian composer and pianist. He lived in Chernivtsi, and then in Kyiv after the war.

Aleksandr Spiegelblan and his parents were in the Kopaigorod ghetto. Alexander was starving and sick with typhus. The family miraculously survived the hell of the occupation. They were deported from Romania. After the war, Spiegelblan became a Romanian and Israeli poet and novelist. The family of Avigdor Shahan from Khotyn was also in the Kopaigorod ghetto. He was eight years old at that time. He became a children's writer, and an Israeli historian, known for his works in the field of military history and research on the Holocaust in Transnistria.

Mykhailo Palatnik told how, after the shooting of Jews in Snitkiv and the death of his parents, he fled to Romanian territory in Kopaigorod. He was 11 years old. After crossing the river, it was necessary to climb a steep, almost vertical cliffed bank. Mykhailo had only reached the middle of the bank when German border guards ran to the river for their morning exercises. They immediately spotted the escapees and pointed at them. But the officer gave some order, and the detachment moved on to another location. When the escapees reached the top of the slope, the sun was already shining. They hid in the corn all day. They expected a roundup, but it did not happen. They ended up in Kopaigorod at night. The adults went on to look for partisans, and Mykhailo stayed in the ghetto. Here he waited to be freed. From the memories of a resident of Novoselytsia, Chernivitsi region, L.Z. Kushnir:

First we were brought to Ataki by train under guard, and then by ferry across the Dniester to Mogiliv-Podilsky, but the local concentration camp was overcrowded, and we were driven to Kopaigorod in a column. Corpses of Jews who had been shot were laying everywhere on the roadsides, and our hearts sank with fear. Wedid not know what awaited us at the end of each journey. From Kopaigorod, we were sent to a labor camp for highway construction, and then we were lucky for a while. Closer to the winter of 1941, we joined the agricultural team harvesting sugar beets in the collective farm fields. They settled in an empty pigsty where the little bit of straw on the floor could not help protect them from the unheated room and cold wind blowing from all sides. There was no bread. We collected beets, which we baked and boiled, so that we would have something to eat. The peasants sometimes gave us a little flour and potatoes, and we were able to survive the first winter and not die of hunger. When the Romanian guards were replaced by Ukrainian policemen, who had so much hatred for the Jews, we hunkered down with them. I still remember the last name of the senior policeman - Posyak. Then an epidemic of typhus began, during which our whole family fell ill.

A typhus epidemic took hold due to overcrowding and unsanitary conditions in the ghetto, killing 2,808 people from 1941–1943. There is no exact data on the numbers who died, although records of Jews were kept. A list of tenants hung on the wall in each room. Periodically, this list was checked with the information provided by the Romanian authorities. According to some data, about 4,000 Jews lived in the ghetto. As of September 1, 1943, only 1,295 Jews lived in Kopaigorod. Less than 1,000 Jews survived the liberation in March 1944. It was estimated that 175,000 of the 320,000 local Jews died during the occupation of Transnistria, and 90,000 of the 150,000 deported Jews died. According to the data of the Extraordinary State Commission in 1945, it was established that 8,755 Jews died in 10 villages of the Kopaigorod district. The Romanians took the best houses for their own needs. The former ghetto prisoner, M. Kalika said that in their large stone house measuring 9 by 12 meters, the Romanians set up a stable, and they had to huddle in a small house with neighbors. Any shack house was occupied by many people, as ten to fifteen people lived in one room.

At the entrance to one of the buildings in Kopaigorod are sandstone statues of reclining lions. The artist who made them probably did not really know what the king of beasts actually looked like. These lion statues have funny round faces and sawtooth teeth, and their manes are very similar to feathers. Previously, these lions decorated the entrance arch of the landowner's manor in the village of Snitkiv, Murovani Kurylivtsi district. Rather, the lions guarded the estate. A chain was set between the teeth of the lions, and some system raised or lowered this chain. After the revolution of 1917, the lions were removed from their pedestals and were no longer needed. In the spring of 1943, they were transported to Kopaigorod by the Romanian occupiers and installed on the doorstep of the gendarmerie. After the war, the Military Commissariat was located in this building. After the liquidation of the district, a school used the place until a new building was constructed.

Entrance arch with lions to the estate in the village Snitkiv. These lions were installed by Romanians in Kopaigorod. Photo source: http://mur-kur.in.ua/gallery/category/4-retro.html

Lions at the entrance to the house

Former school Principal E. Basenko met Germans and Romanians with bread and salt. He was appointed the head of the town and was a controversial personality. On the one hand he maintained order in the town, and on the other, he sometimes helped the Jews. So, in 1943 a German Sonderkommando arrived in Kopay to shoot the Jews. Basenko managed to convince the Germans that there were no Jews in Kopaigorod and so the Jews were saved. In 1944, after the liberation of Kopaigorod, the Jews defended Basenko before the Soviet authorities. Yevhen Vitaliyovych Basenko (born in 1899) a native of Odessa, was arrested on April 28, 1944 and charged under Art. 54-1 A of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. According to the resolution of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Vinnytsia region, the case was closed on November 19, 1946. His further fate is unknown.

An underground partisan organization that operated in the Kopaigorod ghetto was formed in July 1942 and led by Aron Serber. This group included M. Hetsilevich, who remained in town to carry out underground work, as well as Lischuk, who was caught by the Romanians in 1943 and shot. The group managed to organize the production of postcards at the city printing house with the help of Shteinman, a Jew, who worked in the city printing house before the war. Two postcards composed by the teacher, Koveman, were released in February 1943. These postcards came out in editions of 120 and 180 copies; the underground stole some of the necessary equipment they required from the printing house. The activities of the underground were hindered by the Jewish ghetto police, who “repeatedly warned and demanded to stop such gatherings and readings.” Nevertheless, the underground partisans were not brought to the attention of the Romanians.

There was a weapons depot in the town where Jews were sent to sort artillery shells and rifle cartridges. My mother also worked there for a while. The Jews learned how to imperceptibly remove gunpowder from cartridges when the Romanians were not around. The ghetto prisoner Y. Shteiman told about the activities of the partisans in January 1944. “One day the partisans launched a balloon into the sky with a metal object - an iron kettle attached to it. The Romanians first fired at the balloon, and when the kettle fell from it, they rushed into the forest to catch partisans and returned with losses: one wounded and one killed.”

In the village of Popivtsi in the Kopaigorod district there was also an underground group of 19 people led by Katsman. These groups kept in touch with each other. In addition to Katsman's group, there was an OUN group (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) in Popivtsi. There is information about this group from the Mohyliv gendarmerie:

Inspector of the branch of Transnistria. Mohyliv Gendarmerie Department, November 15, 1942. Service note No. 1604. As a result of the information collected by the staff of the security bureau of this region, I state that Popivtsi of Kopaigorod district is the seed of the organization of the group of the Ukrainian national movement. Considering that this area is located a short distance from the border in the north of Transnistria, some of those interested cross the border illegally into the territory of Ukraine to relatives or acquaintances and bring from there various data related to the national struggle and the organization of the Ukrainian army. Because of this information, they awaken the national feelings of those who listen to them, which leads to the organization of the masses. At this time, it was found out that the following people belong to this category: Mykola Batkovsky, Ivan Levitsky, Vasyl Melnyk and others (8 people in total, all from the village of Popivtsi). An order was issued to the gendarmerie post to establish surveillance along the border and try to catch them during illegal border crossing and bring them to court. Commander of the Mohyliv gendarmerie department.

And even at the beginning of the war, a part of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN, the Bukovina Kuren was sent to Kopaigorod. But the German commandant's office of Kopaigorod was warned about the arrival of the Bukovyna group and did not allow the members of the kuren to stay in the town. This group was forced to go immediately to Bar, where it remained.

The journalist and Doctor of Economic Sciences, M. Shteinman, described the events in Kopaigorod and the underground work of the Jews in the following way:

The work of printing leaflets was entrusted to my father who was a former head of a printing house. He was well versed in the skills of a typesetter, printer and meter-page and any typographic work. My father, who was not a communist, assisted the Sixth Partisan Detachment named after Khrushchev of the Leninist Union. He managed to remove and bury, partly in the forest, and partly in the yard of the house where we lived, about 20 kg of fonts, black printing ink and other materials that were needed for partisan work behind enemy lines. This story had an unexpected outcome. The father was brought in for questioning at the local branch of the Sigurantsi, the Romanian secret political police, located in Transnistria, to fight the partisan movement. He was required to explain in detail why he took the fonts and printing ink from the local printing house, and why and to whom he gave the materials. Despite the fact that the father knew about the denunciation against him, he firmly adhered to his position that he knew nothing about it. Only many years later, in the 1980's, my elder brother Borys, an honored journalist in Ukraine, managed to obtain some materials related to our father from the archive of Vinnytsia region. In particular, he came across materials related to the father's denunciation. It turned out that the person who denounced my father was his student, and an assistant printer of a printing house. This man was a disgrace to the Jews. He wanted to gain favor with the authorities and wrote many denunciations against my compatriots. In my father's file in the regional archive there are also texts of leaflets he printed as well as a certificate about the work of the Kopaigorod underground organization, signed by the deputy chairman of the district executive committee and the head of the NKVD RO (district organization). In particular, the document states that 150 copies were secretly printed by my father together with M. Doroshenko to commemorate the victory of the Red Army at Stalingrad and 100 copies of the song, To the Day of the Red Army. Liaison Klara Moskal from the Shargorod underground organization received 15 copies of the song, To the Day of the Red Army, from the Kopaigorod organization and handed them over to the Shargorod newspaper, Red Partizan. Ya.M.Shizman, who lived in the ghetto in Kopaigorod, was a liaison with the Shargorod underground.

The following Jews participated in World War II: Ya.Sh. Shtelman, H.Sh. Shtelman, S. Fishylevich, Ya. Fishylevich, G.N. Kaplan, V. Livshits, Nakhmen Oksman. Nakhmen's son, Semyoj Oksman became a famous illustrator in the USSR after the war. Fishl Abramovych was in a partisan unit, and died in February 1943, A. Bidny, P. Bidna and many other Jews of Kopaigorod also perished (see appendix). Once upon a time, one famous people's artist of the USSR told Semyon Nakhmenovich Oksman: “Well, you should change your patronymic! Let's say, to Nikolaevich”. To which he replied: “Even if your title is given to me someday, although I am sure that it will never happen, I will not deny my middle name. My father Nakhmen Oksman - a participant of the defense of Stalingrad and Leningrad, was commissioned three times due to the serious wounds and three times volunteered to catch up with his unit and continued to fight for the freedom of the country in which he was born.”

The tailor Abram Moiseyovych from Kopaigorod was the head of the military tribunal of the rifle division. He died of an illness in 1944.

A story about Velvla Vinokur from Kopaigorod, a Red Army soldier who was captured on June 30, 1941, was published on the Internet:

Velvl Zinovy Vinokur. June 22, 1941 In memory of my late uncle, who managed to survive in the conditions of hell. Dedicated to the 70^th anniversary of the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. That night was quiet. Velvl, whose Russian name was simply Volodya, was quietly snoring in his bunk in the army barracks. He was dreaming of his native home in the small town of Kopaigorod, his 4 brothers and a sister, his parents and friends. At that moment, the guttural sounds of someone else's speech woke him and the other soldiers. The Germans entered the barracks with rifles and machine guns on their heads. One of the enemy soldiers shouted that the command was forming. Then an officer came and informed them that they had been captured by ‘soldiers of the valiant Wehrmacht army', and from then on they received the status of prisoners of war. Then they were told to form a column and move. So, they were chased the whole, longest day of the year. In the evening, they found themselves in some Polish village, where they were locked in a huge barn. Everyone collapsed from exhaustion and soon fell asleep, and in the middle of the night Volodya was woken up by a soldier who whispered: “Tomorrow I will be free when I hand you over, Jew, and that's it… He's a political trickster!” Volodya crawled up to the policeman and whispered a few words to him. Not even a few minutes passed, as the potential traitor gave a death gasp and fell silent forever. Then there were the filtration camps where prisoners were kept before going to prison. But it seemed that he was born under a lucky star: a few weeks later, Volodya ended up with a German farmer. Knowledge of the Yiddish language helped him. When a German in the camp asked in German who knew how to handle horses, Volodya understood and got out of the way. So, the long days, weeks and months of half-starved hell dragged on. It was necessary to work a lot, but they were given little. Years passed. It was already 1945. One spring day, the host said to Volodya: “I know that you are a Jew. You are free and you can go. If you go west, you will come to the Anglo-Americans; to the east, to the Russians.” Volodya went to the East.

In another interesting story, a former prisoner of the Kopaigorod ghetto, J. Gilsker recalled:

With the help of the Red Cross in January 1944, the Jewish community collected orphans under the age of 14 who had been deported, took them to Romania, and from there to Palestine. We stayed in the Mohyliv-Podilskyi orphanage for several days, and then we were taken to the railway station. A Romanian officer compiled a list of the children. We were put on a train and sent to Romania.” (In the fire of Catastrophe (Shoah) in Ukraine. Testimony of Jews - prisoners of concentration camps and ghettos, participants of the partisan movement / edited by P. Agmon, I. Malyar. - Kiryat-Haim, 1998. - p. 141).

It was said that the famous partisan commander, Ivan Klalshnik was present during the occupation of the village. Once, disguised as a German officer, he obtained 1.5 tons of oil for the partisan unit from the local oil factory. In Vinnytsia, there was also a time when he drove to a meat processing plant, got all his goods there, loaded a full car and drove off.

The legendary partisan was the embodiment of heroism and courage. The fame of this partisan avenger resonated far beyond the Vinnytsia region. His bold actions terrified the Nazis. Kalashnikov was fluent in German and repeatedly dressed up in the uniform of a fascist officer, causing a commotion among the occupiers. He was a real hero. He created a flying squad and fought throughout the Vinnytsia region. He even wrote in a postcard: “I'm coming out of the underground into an open battle.” His picture and rewards for his head hung on all the posts. A play by Dmytro Ostrovsky, published in 2016 in Boston, described the events in Kopaigorod during the occupation, and the life and struggle of Jews in the ghetto in the spring of 1943. The play, entitled “Glik and Zyvyk {Happiness and Fate} or Secrets of Transnistria. ”

And the play Domino, in Yiddish, written by a team of authors of the Kherson Center named after V. Meyerhold in 2012) was a story about the Jews of Shargorod and Kopaigorod, who until recently, one generation ago, made up the demographic majority. For example, there was Moshko (Mykhailo) of Kopaigorod who was called Kopaigorodsky because his grandfathers were from Kopaigorod. If you were from Kopaigorod, Shargorod, Tulchyn, then you were called Kopaigorodsky, Sharhorodsky, Tulchynsky. Kopaigorodskyi came before the village council to announce that his son wanted to study, and it was necessary to change his son's name from Moshko to Mykhailo.Well, if you have to, then you have to. Moshko was crossed off of the document and Mykhailo written in its place. That's it, there is no more Moshko, Mykhailo Ilyich Kopayhorodsky appears to the world.

This is a story without any secrets, a story of friendship and the quarrel of neighbors that you don't notice until they disappear. And together with them, the culture of the town, the spirit of the town in general slowly disappeared. This is not only the story of Shargorod or Kopaigorod. This is the story of the small towns of Ukraine, of which there were many in Podillia. Unfortunately the Jewishness of the towns was not preserved, although perhaps they could have.

The Romanians organized a sewing workshop in the ghetto to repair uniforms and tailor clothing. The seamstresses also repaired the clothes of the ghetto prisoners. Of course, they did it at the risk of their lives.

There was also a brigade of tinsmiths, to which my father belonged. They were allowed to go to work outside the ghetto. They repaired roofs, made various baking pans, moonshine machines and performed other tin works. In addition, the Romanian authorities issued patents for artisanal production. It was mainly received by Jews from Bessarabia. (DAVO R. 2385, op. 2, file 48-182; R. 2895, op. 5, file 2).

In the ghetto in Kopaigorod, as Borys Tkach related to us, the bazaar was organized by the local population, who also experienced violence from Romanian guards. Borys sold cigarettes. (Tkach B., BF “Center for the Research of the History and Culture of Eastern European Jewry”, interview card of the project “Jewish Destinies of Ukraine”, Slavuta, 1997)

This photo illustrates the kind of certificate issued to prisoners of the Kopaigorod ghetto upon leaving the ghetto for various jobs. The photo shows the identity card of the Shargorod ghetto from the Romanian zone of occupation.

The restoration of the monument at Kopay station began in January, 2011. Olena Tayenchuk's letter, We Have a Short Memory, was published on the website of the All-Israel Association Concentration Camps and Ghetto Survivors. Olena addressed the letter to A. Braverman, who published it online. The text of the letter follows:

Sasha, hello!

Today is World Holocaust Remembrance Day. I am writing about this because this memory has been haunting me for many years.

I haven't lived in Ukraine since 1968, and my mother stayed there until 2003. We lived at the Kopay station near the forest itself. Before the war, there were military barracks in this forest. These barracks were bombed by the Germans in 1941. A concentration camp existed in this place during the war.

The Romanians guarded it, and the Germans drove by for inspections. The poor inmates sat in hunger and cold behind barbed wire. Occasionally someone was released on bail when other relatives exchanged some things for food. I don't know what they had as everything valuable was taken away immediately. My mother once witnessed a young pregnant woman walking along the road from the camp, and the Germans, driving a tank, specifically ran her over.

People often went to the camp to try to throw some food over the wire. My mother also did this, but one day the guard caught her and hit her with a whip that left her with scars.

When I was still at school, they were building an office building for the Leskhoz, the Forestry office, and they decided to dig up blocks for the foundation on the site of the camp. There were solid remains of people in these blocks. After that, relatives came from all over, and they made a kind of tombstone. When I was in Kopaigorod for the last time in 2003, all of this was already being destroyed. People had dispersed and there was no one to look after this mass grave. Maybe you have friends in Kopaigorod who could go there and restore everything?

I remember that some time in the 1950's there were continuous trenches and graves in the forest along the railway. For some reason everyone remembered that among the residents there were looters who stripped the dead, one of them even was in the prison, but no one even thought of reburying the soldiers. When I grew up and I learned about all of this, the hillocks from the graves had been made level with the ground. During one of my vacation visits, I learned that only one person had been found and reburied. And there were many of them there. The railway was a strategic area of great importance for the Germans as all trains from the border went through our station, from Brest, Budapest, Bucharest, Sofia, etc., and our soldiers seemed to defend it to the last breath.

I see these places constantly before my eyes. About 400 people who were innocently killed found eternal rest there. Among those shot there were Naum Horodetsky, his wife Maryam, their daughter Anya, the Kaprynsky family - Golda, Sofya, Roza, Mikhail, Hana and Iosif Krakopolsky and many others. These are not only residents of the town, but also the Jews deported from Romania, Bukovina and Bessarabia. That's all I wanted to write and tell you, because I don't know what to do with this memory.

This letter was discussed at the community council of the town of Kopaigorod in Israel, and a decision was made to allocate funds for the restoration of the monument at the place where the prisoners died in the camp. The money for the restoration of the monument was transferred to Kopaigorod resident Olena Shelepalo, who together with her husband, restored the monument according to the drawings sent to them by the community. Sincere gratitude to them!

During the restoration, the search for the names of the people buried in this grave began. There are lists of dead Jews in the community, as well as in Yad Vashem. The search continues.

Monument before restoration

The restored monument to memorialize those Jews who died in the concentration camp at the Kopay station, 2016

The plan of the area of the town where the Memory Square is located, street names from the 1970's, blue - residential buildings, green - the Memory Square, red - the library.

Schematic plan for the location of the monument to the dead Jews in the camp at Kopay station. Holocaust researcher Ihor Braverman spoke about his recent findings. Traces of dugouts near the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust were discovered in the forest belonging to the Kopaigorod village forestry in the Vinnytsia region, in Prymoschanytsia village, in December 2021.

According to local residents, Jews hid from the Nazis in these dugouts. Some people who witnessed this said that their parents shared food with the Jews who lived in the dugouts.

Now only a pit is visible there. Ihor Braverman noted that the history of these dugouts is vague. All of the information available at this time is based on the words of local residents who told the researcher their family stories.

The memorial on the site was erected to remember the Jews who were shot and killed by the Nazis. It is regularly cared for despite the fact that it is in a deserted place. Ihor Braverman said that the monument and the surrounding area looked well-kept.

The 40^th anniversary of Zhovtnia str. is now called Soborna, str. Lenin str. is now Tsentralna.

The newspaper, Vinnytsia, published an article in 2011 that noted the opening of a monument memorializing the murdered Jews of Kopaigorod, Bessarabia, Romania, as well as the Red Army soldiers who had been captured and killed during the war, approximately 400 individuals in all. One-hundred-sixty-eight residents of Kopaigorod died on the fronts of the Second World War, including many Jews. Mykhailo Smirnov, Lazar Shpigel and others who died on the first days of the war in a bunker near the village Maryanivka are buried in the mass grave. Soldiers who died during the liberation of the villages of Chervone (now Grabovtsi), Perepilchyntsi, and Pryvitne are also buried here. The commander of the 133rd Smolensk Rifle Division Mykhailo Zurabovich Kazishvili is also buried here.

At the opening of the monument to the dead Jews at Kopay station

Diagram of the location of the monument at Kopay Station

Soldiers who died liberating the town from the fascists are buried in the Memorial Square. The names of those Kopaigorod residents who did not return from the war are carved in the stone. The monument was designed by the Kyiv Art Fund and approved by the Vinnytsia Regional Department of Culture in 1946.

Information about soldiers who died during the liberation of Kopaigorod

colonel	Mykhaylo Zurabovich Kazishvili	soldier	Abdrashytov Mukhamedzha
sergeant	Sergiy Mykhaylovich Lavrentyev	soldier	Mykola Dmytrovych Khalamedin
sergeant	Mykyta Izherovych Lazapnychenko	soldier	Nestor Fedorovych Tsvigun
sergeant	Illia Olexandrovych Ragulin	soldier	Andriy Kostiantynovych Butkov
junior sergeant	Ivan Onysymovych Udovytsky	soldier	Oleksiy Tymofiyovych Brenzylo
junior sergeant	Ivan Ivanovych Bratchenko	soldier	Yosyp Zakharovych Yogel
junior sergeant	Leonid Mykolayovych Pevchov	soldier	Petro Stakhovych Fiyalo
junior sergeant	Romanovych Suhin Moisey	soldier	Ivan Grygorovych Gusiev
junior sergeant	Petro Yakovych Kurochenko	soldier	Petro Stepanivych Krupeynikov
junior sergeant	Lazar Yosypovych Shoygel	soldier	Olexandr Ananiyovych Kioresko
corporal	Kostyantyn Trokhymovych Nabykin	soldier	Mukhtar Akhedovych Osadov
soldier	Leontiy Feodosiyovych Davydenko	soldier	Kaunar Umarovych Tadzhekulov
soldier	Mykola Vasyliovych Buldakov	soldier	Ivan Mykytovych Shypoganov
soldier	Ivan Mykhaylovych Bunin	soldier	Oleksiy Andriyovych Lupu
soldier	Semen Nastasiyovych Vlasenko	soldier	Afanasiy Demyanovych Semchuk
soldier	Stepan Ilarionovych Doroshenko	soldier	Pavlo Yerofiyovych Ryzhenko
soldier	Ivan Khomych Kot	soldier	Igor Yuriyovych Ramadanov
soldier	Fedor Pylypovych Lysymchuk	soldier	Mykhaylo Makarovych Smyrnov
soldier	Ivan Kuzmych Kuzmin	senior sergeant	Mykola Mykytovych Zhymkov

Thousands of ordinary people in Nazi-occupied countries saved Jews from destruction at the risk of their own lives. In acknowledgement and gratitude for these heroic deeds, Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, established a program called, The Righteous Among the Nations, to pay tribute to these individuals. A special public commission, initiated in 1963, carefully studies and documents rescue activities brought before them, to award the saviors of Jews, and add their names to the list of Righteous Gentiles. These individuals are awarded medals, their names are engraved on the Wall of Honor, and trees are planted in their honor on the campus of Yad Vashem. As of January 1, 2021, the names of 2,673 citizens of Ukraine bear the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations, 18% of whom were residents of the Vinnytsia region. Holocaust researcher and deputy director of the Vinnytsia Regional State Archives, Faina Vynokur, identified the fact that the largest number of righteous Ukrainians lived in Vinnytsia, as well as in the Nemyriv, Khmelnytsky and Bar districts. Ukraine ranks fourth place among forty-three countries in terms of the number of Righteous.

The Righteous of the world are saviors! There are no monuments erected to honor you. There are no streets in towns named after you, but you are remembered with gratitude by those whom you saved and by their descendants. In February 2021, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted a resolution establishing May 14 as the Day of Remembrance of Ukrainians who saved Jews during World War II. On November 20, 2021, the Jewish community of Vinnytsia installed a monument to the righteous of the world, those who risked their own lives to save and hide Jews during the Second World War, on a site provided by the Vinnytsiazelenobud, an organization involved in the city landscaping. Local resident Anastasia Horbulska hid several Jewish families in her house. Anastasia Ivanovna grew up among the Jews of Kopaigorod and knew Yiddish as well as her native Ukrainian. She married the shoemaker, Ivan Gavrylovich in the early 1930s. They lived in Kyiv for a while, but returned to Kopaigorod where Anastasia Ivanovna owned a two-story house. Shortly before the beginning of the war, Horbulska returned to Kopaigorod from Siberia where she had lived in forced exile. She helped many Jews imprisoned in the ghetto, among them were: the Kramer family; Leib Wasserman, his parents and daughter Dvoira; Samuil Fishylevich; the Belenky family - Rivka and Gedal, their children - Fanya and Semen; families of Romanian Jews - Zillierg, Naftals, Kok and many others. In November 1992, Anastasia Ivanovna Horbulska was awarded her place among The Righteous, by Yad Vashem.

Anastasia Ivanivna Horbulska with her grandson Alik

Oleksiy Demianchuk, his wife Matryona Demianchuk, and their twelve-year-old daughter Olga, lived in the town of Kopaigorod. The Demyanchuks often came to the fence of the concentration camp at the Kopay station with items needed by the inhabitants. They met Elizaveta Khaimska, their former neighbor, on one of those days at the fence. At the end of 1941, Elizaveta Khaimska, who was in the ghetto with her mother and elder sister, fled from there and went to the Demianchuk family. After bathing and feeding Elizaveta, Matryona dressed her in peasant clothes, and from that day until the liberation of Kopaigorod from the Germans in March 1944, the girl remained with the Demyanchuks. Elizaveta Khaimska helped her saviors in the household as much as she could, and in calmer periods she even went out to work in the collective farm fields together with Matryona. During raids on Jews, partisans or local youth, with the aim of deporting them to work in Germany, Oleksiy took Elizaveta to the forest, where she hid until the situation stabilized. When she stayed in the forest, Olga visited her every day, brought her food and told her news.

After the war, Elizaveta Khaimska married and settled in Vinnytsia. She kept in touch with the Demyanchuks for many years. On November 8, 1999, Yad Vashem awarded Oleksiy, Matryona Demianchuk, and their daughter, the honorary title of “Righteous Among the Nations.” In 2015, Olga Yegmenova said:

My grandfather and grandmother Demianchuk saved Elizaveta Markivna Khaimska and her sister Tsilya. My mother was 11 years old when the Romanians or Germans came. Grandma dressed Liza and Tsilia in wide skirts, tied handkerchiefs on their heads and gave them a makitra (clay pot) and a makogon (a pestle, which in Ukraine was used to crush flax seeds, grind poppy seeds, cottage cheese, butter) to prepare the seasoning for borscht, while mom sat on the stove to stay warm. Liza and Tsilya were ordered to remain silent in order to not give them away. Then grandma took Liza and Tsilia to the beet field with her and covered them up as best as she could. Then she crossed them and sent them to Vinnytsia. This story is in the regional archives. We have a certificate from Yad Vashem naming my grandparents as Righteous Among Nations. My grandparents sometimes received rations and attended special meetings in restaurants. I can't even put everything into words.

The rescue of the Jews of Kopaigorod is also described in the book, My Village is My Cradle, by G. Ogorodnik. “Our fellow villagers during the Great Patriotic War saved not only their families, but also helped Jewish families from Kopaigorod. “From the memoirs of Glushko (Dolyna) Maria Feodosiivna we learn:

Before the war, the Kopaigorod district union bought plums in our village and dried them in drying rooms in the garden of my mother, Dolyna (Makova) Anastasia Samuilievna. Boys were paid 20 kopeks each for helping to pick plums, and girls 10 kopecks each. Plum picking was an ancient Jewish occupation. The dried plums were packed in wooden containers called antals, and sent abroad, probably to Palestine. At that time, a Jewish boy, Hetsilevich Moisha, worked as a watchman at the dryers. In 1938, Moisha married Fana, and I married Glushko Mykola, who was from the village of Stepanka. We both gave birth to sons at almost the same time. My son is Vasyl, and in the Jewish family, the son was Yasha. Soon after, the Great Patriotic War began. In 1941 the Kopay station became overcrowded with Jews incarcerated there who came from many places, including Bukovyna and Kopaigorod. The Getsilevich family somehow managed to escape. They reached our village through the valleys, and my mother hid them in the attic, where they lived for more than a month. Moisha, together with the boys who remained in the village, was a partisan in the rear; he did demolition work and performed other tasks. Thus, grandmother Nastya, without thinking about her own safety, saved the lives of people who, after the end of the war, still gave life to two sons. The Jewish family never forgot about grandmother Nastya, who, unfortunately, is no longer among us. Moisha and Fanya died a long time ago, but their children remembered the kindness and helped grandmother Nastya Maria's daughter in every possible way (unfortunately, she has also died). They visited her more often than usually their own children visit their parents.

Donya, a resident of the town of Ivashkov, saved a Jewish family. Yosyp Shteiman (born in 1936) spoke about his family's experience:

Mother lay crying, with me in her arms. Ivaskov, an elderly man who was a church deacon, was walking along the river and spotted my mother. His sons were in the Red Army. He calmed mother somewhat, questioned her, and left her to ask his daughters-in-law to hide us. The sisters-in-law allowed us to come for one night, and we settled down to spend the night in their hay shed. Then they agreed to let us hide further. They fed us and brought milk for me. We stayed with them for about a week. Nearby, one or two houses away, the Ukrainian owners allowed Aunt Polya, Aunt Shlyma and their daughter and grandmother to hide in the tall straw in their barn. I remember the owner's son, Grisha, nicknamed Katsap, who was my age. There was a mutual agreement that if the Jews were caught, the owners would say that they did not know or see that strangers had entered their barn. Only my mother knew about this place then. One of the daughters-in-law became a liaison between us and the grandmother. The Romanians decided to take a certain number of Jews to clean and take care of their household needs, for black work {dirty, unwanted work}, from the camp behind the Kopay station in the ghetto. Fortunately, they went to the ghetto alone, without an escort. We joined their group and returned to our house. From that day on, we lived in the Kopaigorod ghetto until liberation.

Boris Pryshkolnik, who lives in the United States, confirmed the rescue of grandmother Shlyma, mother and aunt Polya in Kopaigorod. As a child, he heard this story from his grandmother and mother and recalled his grandmother's stories about these events. Aunt Polya's savior was her classmate who was in love with her, and this also contributed to the salvation of the family. Polya and Shlyma and their daughter survived those difficult conditions. Shlyma's daughter told her own son and daughter about how her family's life was saved. Shlyma's grandson, Borys Pryshkolnik, expressed his gratitude to the descendants of these wonderful individuals, who are Righteous of the Nations.

S. Dodik wrote in his article, Fate of the Jews of Transnistria about how they survived in those difficult conditions:

A group of twelve Jewish people were sent by the Jewish community of the city of Kopaigorod to the village of Mateykov in the Bar region in the fall and winter of 1942-1943. Among those in this group were eleven people who had fled from the shooting in German territory and one Bessarabian Jew. The group consisted of two, 16-year-old teenagers, including the author, two young women, four artisans, one 12-year-old boy, and three adult handymen. Forester Goletsky treated us well and sympathized with us. He settled us in an empty house and did not force us to work long and hard in the forest (the local villagers harvested the forest for half of the harvested wood), and allowed us to cut down trees in order to heat our house. Let me remind you that this was the time after the Battle of Stalingrad. Jewish craftsmen worked at the peasants' homes and, in addition to themselves, they fed the child and both women, with whom the two became friends. The other five people, including the author, went to the houses of local peasants and offered all kinds of small items, like needles and pins, as well as help with work in exchange for food, mainly potatoes. As a result, everyone survived. In the village Mateykov and in neighboring Malchevtsy, Jewish women knitted clothes for the peasants. In Mateykov, the local Jew Yosya Berchenko, who often visited our house, also lived with his pre-war Ukrainian “friend” Domka, in view of the whole village. He also survived.

From the memoirs of ghetto prisoner Klara Korbut:

During the war, there was a small market in Kopaigorod inside the ghetto. Whoever could, worked there for a meager sustenance. One day policemen came from neighboring towns, where there were no longer any Jews, and started a pogrom in the ghetto market. Everyone rushed in different directions in panic and ran into their houses. My neighbor's son and I climbed out the window and ran to call for help. Local policemen and Romanian soldiers came and dispersed these policemen, and we were saved. But they saved us not out of pity, but only because strangers came to their territory.

I would like to remember the residents of Kopaigorod who saved the family of Dora Elbert. Dora lived in Chernivtsi before the war and was deported to our village. The local policeman, Arsen, allowed her to leave the ghetto. Dora met Nina Kruk, her husband Oleksandr Petrovych and her children outside of the ghetto, and she hid with them for some time. Nina Antonivna helped bury Dora's mother in the Jewish cemetery according to Jewish rites. Neighbors of the Kruk family, Palazhka Mazii, Ivan Kotsiubynskyi, and Stepan Astishevskyi always warned when there was going to be a roundup of Jews and helped them to hide. After the war, Dora returned home and maintained friendly relations with Nina Kruk. Dora and her family moved to Israel in 1992.

Meeting of Dora Elbert in Kopaigorod in 1982 with Nina Kruk and her neighbors Second from the left is D. Elbert, fourth from the left is N. Kruk

The head of the ghetto came and ordered a sheepskin coat. Everyone tried to please this monster, to hopefully get the right to leave the ghetto. Even our uncle decided to help Yasha's older brother to sew this coat. Then, the expected did occur. My uncle simply said that he wanted to be paid for such tailoring. And then the German said: “You will get it, you will definitely get it.” And with a sign, he called the soldier standing on the side. “Give this Jew 20 rams… with the right to enter the village twice a week.” Immediately, in front of our eyes, the fascist began to hit my uncle with a ramrod. After this, they poured cold water over him, took the coat, and left. Uncle's whole back was streaked with bruises from the blows. Miraculously, our uncle survived. One day, a soldier gave us a long-awaited pass for the right to visit nearby villages. The incident with my uncle motivated my elder brother Yasha, to decide to run away, using this pass. We went to a distant village where some of the locals knew our family and helped us hide from the Germans and the police. They took us, one by one, from neighbor to neighbor, from basements to attics, to abandoned sheds, so that the Germans could not find us. We hid from the fascists, and we waited for liberation from the executioners. After liberation, the brothers became soldiers of the Red Army and went to the front. Yasha reached Berlin, became a sergeant, earned military orders and medals, but David died in battle. We received a death certificate for him. Avrum went missing.

Shmil Schwarz, a resident of the Kopaigorod ghetto recalled his family's experiences:

I was born in 1938. I only remember what my parents told me. When we were driven to the ghetto in October 1941, I was three and a half years old. When the Romanians came to Bessarabia, we were all rounded up. And we lived in Brychany then. They took us to the Kopay railway station. Then they drove another 8 km into the forest to the village. For two and a half years we were in the ghetto which was in the zone of occupation of Romania. The Romanian regime was a little weaker than that of the Germans. Check in the morning, in the evening too. If someone was not there, then as soon as they were caught, they were shot, even if they were late for the inspection, they were tortured. No one fed us, we looked for work and income for ourselves. My father was a carpenter. Mother was a seamstress. They always had earnings. My elder sister caught typhus and died in the ghetto. The grandfather was also beaten to death and the coats were taken away - the goods that the old man made and sold. And in general, half of the people I saw at the beginning of the settlement did not return from the ghetto. We stayed there until March 1944, when we were liberated by Soviet troops. From there we returned to Brychany on foot.

After escaping from the fascists in Murovani Kurylivtsi, Borys Weitzman went to Kopaigorod with his father. He recalls:

My father and I walked about 25 kilometers through fields and forests and reached the border beyond the Romanian controlled territory. We had to cross the river and after we traveled another 15 kilometers, we reached the Kopaigorod ghetto. Honcharuk, the road foreman and an acquaintance of my father, lived 100 meters from the border. We made our way through the gardens to his house, but at that time a patrol was passing along the highway along the river. We hid under the chicken coop, and 15 minutes later, father crawled up to the window and quietly knocked. Honcharuk recognized father and took us to his house to feed us. Dad asked him to help us cross the border river as soon as possible without delay. Honcharuk left to find out where the sentry was, to avoid that area, and when he returned, he took us to Kopaigorod. He gave us a couple of apples on the way. We said goodbye to him five-hundred meters from the ghetto. He returned home, and we sneaked into the ghetto. We were placed in the house of two old men, where my mother's sisters and their families already lived. All of us together, twenty-two people, lived in one, 30-meter room. Hidden under the sofa was a hatch that opened to the basement in which all the men hid during the roundups carried out to find men to send them to work at logging. Those who fell into these logging operations disappeared without a trace. This is how we lived from September 1942 to March 1944. Everyone in the ghetto was starving, suffering from the cold, diseases and beatings.

The children of this Honcharuk live in the village of Kotyuzhany, where their father lived. At that time, the border ran along the Lyadova River near their house.

J. Shteinman, who was five years old at the beginning of the war, recalls:

Across the road, not far from the ghetto, there was a house where we obtained milk for our baby sister from good Ukrainian people, Fedon husband and wife. My parents sent me for the milk, as I was small and agile. I had to run back and forth across the street along the border of the ghetto, when the police were not watching. Among those who helped us was a teacher, the wife of the former director of the school, V. Basenko, who at that time had been appointed headman by the Romanians. Often his wife sent a housekeeper to my mother with a mug of milk.

As we can see from all of these examples, the Ukrainians provided a good deal of help to the Jews during the occupation.

My father told me that when he escaped from the concentration camp in Trykhaty and made his way back to Kopaigorod, a woman helped him to hide in the area of the village Mytky of Bar district. She helped him to move to Romanian territory in Kopaigorod. Unfortunately, the woman's last name has been forgotten over time.

There were residents of the village Karishkiv, not far from Kopaigorod, who saved the Liebman family who were originally from Bessarabia, during the war. Efrosinia, born in 1922, lived with her sister Marfa on the outskirts of the village of Karyshkiv, Kopaigorod district. On the eve of the war, Efrosinia married fellow villager Adam Humenyuk. The spouses Leib and Riva Libman, their children Semyon, Buzya, Yakov, like many other deportees, were sent to a camp for Jews in Karyshkiv. Several hundred men were placed in a pigsty and hardly fed. Prisoners died from cold, malnutrition and diseases. Those who survived risked being caught when they went outside of the camp to beg from the local residents. In the second half of 1942, the Liebman family turned to Yefrosinia and her sister Marfa for help. Despite the fact that they themselves lived poorly, they shared everything they could with the Liebmans. Thanks to their support, the Liebman family survived the occupation. After liberation in March 1944, Adam Humenyuk died in battle at the front. After the war, the Liebman family returned to Moldova and continued to communicate with Marfa (married name Pylypchuk) and Yefrosinia Humeniuk. Buzya and Yakov Libman emigrated to the United States in the 1990's. On February 2, 2010, Adam and Yefrosinia Humenyuk, and Marfa Pylypchuk, were granted the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations, by Yad Vashem. Efrosinia Humenyuk lived a long life. She died at the age of 98 in December 2020.

S. Khomenko, at 91 years of age, still lived in the town of Kopaigorod. In 2020, a French journalist, in the midst of writingbook about the Nazi genocide of Jews came to interview Sofia Matviyivna. The woman told him how she and other children, hiding from the occupiers, and afraid of the shepherds, threw beets and potatoes into the Jewish ghetto through the barbed wire, even though they themselves had nothing to eat. And when the Jews were sent to the concentration camp, the girls ran behind the column of the doomed and cried. She showed the guest the place where the victims of Jewish executions were buried in Kopaigorod (from the information of V. Zelenyuk, a correspondent of the “Vinnychchyna” newspaper).

An important moral lesson of the history of the Holocaust is illustrated through the deeds of the Ukrainians, the Righteous Among the Nations, who, at the risk of their own lives and the lives of their relatives, saved the Jews from the Nazi genocide. The Holocaust is gradually becoming a component of Ukrainian historical discourse, in which Ukraine plays a positive role.

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