Andrushevka - Commemoration of Jewish Victims

By the early 1960s, Jewish survivors from Andrushevka, who had returned to the village after spending the war in the Soviet interior, had apparently managed to erect tombs over the Jewish mass graves, fence them off, and put up inscriptions with the names of some of the victims. By the early 2000s, some former Jewish residents of Andrushevka, including the Balshins family, had apparently begun to search for the names of the other victims. Thanks to their efforts, which were supported by the local authorities and some local businesses, several memorial boards with a list of the victims' names were set up at the mass grave of the Jewish women and children in the forest. A menorah-shaped sculpture was also erected there. The county women's council initiated the creation of a new monument named "Mother and Child." Made of black marble, it commemorates the murdered Jewish women and children. It replaced the previous monument, which had been erected at the mass grave in the forest in 1965. The entire memorial complex – including the monument, the boards with the names, and the menorah sculpture – was opened on August 19, 2009, at a large ceremony attended by the local authorities, members of the Andrushevka Jewish community, and residents of the Andrushevka County. The Russian-language inscription upon the monument quotes a stanza from Ilya Ehrenburg's poem "Babi Yar":

My little child, my rouge and powder,

And my innumerable kin!

From every pit, from every gulley,

I hear your voices calling me….

The Ukrainian inscription on the lower section of the monument reads: "Here, on August 19, 1941 [sic], in the years of the Great Patriotic War, 252 women and twenty-five children were shot."