Komsomolskoye

A Jewish presence in the village of Makhnovka, which in 1935 was renamed Komsomolskoye (in honor of the Communist youth organization), is first mentioned in 1611. The Makhnovka Jewish community was completely destroyed in 1648 during the uprising of Bogdan Chmelnitsky. In 1897 2,435 Jews lived in Makhnovka, comprising 45.6 percent of the town's total population. World War I and the calamities of revolutionary years and of the civil war in Russia hit the Jewish community of Makhnovka hard. During the Soviet period there was a Jewish ethnic council that held its deliberations in Yiddish. From the early 1920s to the early 1930s Makhanovka had a 7-year Yiddish school. In 1920s and 1930s many Jews, especially younger ones, left for larger towns and cities in search of new vocational and educational opportunities. 843 Jews lived in Komsomolskoye in 1939, when they comprised 15.7 percent of the total population. Komsomolskoye was occupied by German troops on July 14, 1941. Hardly any Jews left the town before the arrival of Germans. From the very beginning of the German occupation local Jews were subjected to brutal violence and were forced to perform various types of hard labor. In the first half of September 1941 almost all the Jews of Komsomolskoye were murdered by German and Ukrainian auxiliary policemen in a forest several kilometers from Komsomolskoye. Only about 20 skilled workers survived this massacre: they were concentrated in a ghetto at the territory of the former Yiddish school which was surrounded by barbed wire. About 80 Jews, mostly specialists and children from the mixed marriages, from the surrounding villages were also taken to this ghetto. The ghetto inmates had to wear yellow patches on their clothes and to carry out various jobs. Most of them were murdered in two massacres, one in August and the other in December 1942. Komsomolskoye was liberated by the Red Army on January 7, 1944.