the Pikov Ghetto

Pikov In July 1919, a Ukrainian gang murdered some fifty Jewish Pikov townspeople in a pogrom. During the Soviet period, a number of Jews in Pikov became farm hands while others took on white-collar jobs. Most, however, continued to work as artisans and, until the early 1930s, as merchants. The townlet had a Jewish Ethnic Soviet that operated in Yiddish and a government school that taught in Yiddish. Shortly before the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, there were about 1,600 Jews in Pikov, accounting for roughly half of the population. After the German invasion, a few Jews managed to evacuate to the east. The Germans occupied Pikov on July 16, 1941, and concentrated Jews from the vicinity together with the local population. Local Ukrainian police immediately set about pillaging Jewish property and abducting Jews for forced roadwork and farm labor. An eight- or ten-member Judenrat headed by Yankel Yosevich was appointed, mainly to supply forced laborers. In September 1941, the Jews of Pikov were concentrated in a ghetto in Novyi Pikov. Although the ghetto was not fenced, anyone who attempted to leave its confines was severely punished. Its inhabitants were forced to wear a white armband with a yellow Star of David. In early 1942, when Pikov’s Jews discovered that the Jewish population in the area was being liquidated, a group of youths organized in the ghetto for resistance. They revealed their plan to the Judenrat, which opposed it on the grounds that the Ukrainian authorities had vowed to leave the Jews of Pikov unharmed. Nevertheless, the resistance group remained active and attempted to establish contact with Soviet POWs that were working in the area as well as partisans that had begun to operate nearby. On May 30, 1942, altogether 960 inhabitants of the ghetto were murdered in an operation carried out at the cemetery. The ghetto was liquidated in two additional operations, on June 6 and 11, 1942, when 120 more people were murdered.