Dzerzhinsk - Commemoration of Jewish Victims

After the war Jews from Dzerzhinsk and elsewhere whose relatives and friends were murdered near the town came almost every year on August 25 to commemorate the victims. In 1982 Jews erected a high-relief monument with the figure of a mother and a child at the clay pit murder site. The inscription said: “To the residents of Dzerzhinsk who were murdered at the hands of the German-fascist occupiers during the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945.” In the mid 1980s a trial of Nazi collaborators was held in Dzerzhinsk. Probably in the context of this trial, in 1986 the bodies of Jews were exhumed from two or three graves in the area of the public garden and were reburied at the clay pit murder site. The unmarked murder sites were vandalized on more than one occasion. Between 1997 and 2002 former Dzerzhinsk Jews and their relatives, along with the last Jewish family in Dzerzhinsk, that of Garri Feldman, erected monuments at the four known murder sites and fenced them all in. Some of these temporary monuments were later replaced by permanent ones. The monument at the forest murder site has the following inscription in Ukrainian: “We remember the five thousand civilians of the county, including four thousand Jews from Romanov-Dzerzhinsk, who were murdered by the German-fascist occupiers between 1941 and 1942. To the innocent murder victims from all of us [who remain] alive.” In Yiddish there are the additional words: “We remember.” On the monument at the Romanovka murder site is a Ukrainian inscription that reads: “Eternal memory to the 168 Jewish civilians from the Dzerzhinsk area who were murdered there on December 7, 1941 by the German-fascist occupiers.”