Litin

Jews are first mentioned as living in Litin in the early 17th century. The Jewish community of Litin was destroyed during the uprising of Bogdan Chmielnitsky (1648-1649) and, later, by the Haidamaks during the uprising of 1768-1769. In 1897 3,874 Jews lived in Litin, comprising 41.1 percent of the total population. The Jews of Litin suffered greatly from the calamities of the revolutionary years and civil war in Russia. In the waves of pogroms carried out in Litin between 1917 and 1919 several hundred Jews lost their lives and Jewish property was severely damaged. During this period many Jews have left Litin in search of protection from the violence directed against them. The Jews of Litin were hit hard by the ban imposed by the Soviet authorities on all forms of private economic activity. During the early Soviet period some of Litin's Jewish families turned to agriculture, establishing a Jewish agricultural cooperative, which in the late 1920s-early 1930s became a Jewish collective farm. Between 1923 and 1938 there was a Yiddish school in Litin. Many Jews, especially younger ones, left Litin in the 1920s and 1930s in search of new educational and vocational opportunities in larger towns and cities. In 1939 Litins's 1,410 Jews comprised 27.8 percent of the town's total population. After the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 a number of Jewish refugees from Poland arrived in Litin. German and Hungarian troops occupied Litin on July 17, 1941. Very few Jews managed to flee the town before the arrival of the occupation forces. Assaults on Jews by German and Hungarian soldiers and by Ukrainian nationalists startedimmediately after the start of the occupation. Jews were beaten, elderly Jews had their beards cut off,and women and girls were raped. The entire Jewish population was registered and forced to deliver "contributions" in kind and cash; hostages were taken to ensure timely payment. On orders of German and local collaborationist authorities Jews were prohibited from visiting the market. They had to wear white armbands with the Star of David and, later, yellow Stars of David on their backs and chests. The Jews of Litin were also ordered to mark their houses with Stars of David. In the fall of 1941 all of Litin's Jews were registered according to their professions. The murder of Jews began about a month after the start of the occupation. About 60 male Jews of Litin were shot in mid-August 1941, while the majority of the Jewish population of Litin, between about 1,800 and about 2,000 (according to Soviet sources) Jews were shot in mid-December 1941. Skilled workers with their families, who were spared these massacres, and Jews who had avoided the roundups (totalling about 300 people), were forced into a ghetto consisting of about 20 houses surrounded by barbed wire along a single street, Internatsionalnaya ulitsa. About 100 ghetto inmates who did not have work certificates were shot in late December 1941. The ghetto was administered by a Polish refugee named Nute and a local Jewish tailor named Lyulkis, both of whom made great efforts to protect the ghetto inmates. Nevertheless, the ghetto inmates were forced to perform various types of grueling work, being assigned, inter alia, to construction of Highway IV, a road planned to link Lvov and Taganrog. The skilled Jewish workers were forced to teach non-Jews their trades so that the later could replace them after their teachers were murdered. Litin, which was located not far from the Romanian occupation zone of Transnistria, was an important transit point for Jews attempting to escape from the German- to the Romanian-occupied area. At that time the Litin ghetto was viewed as a relatively safe haven for Jewish survivors from surrounding towns and villages. Due to these factors the Jewish population of Litin increased. Germans, Hungarians, and local Ukrainian auxiliaries regularly carried out murder operations in the Litin ghetto, killing all those considered unfit for work. About 1,000 victims were murdered in a series of massacres carried out between the summer and fall of 1942. The last, approximately 130, Jews of Litin were murdered in the summer or early fall of 1943. About 250 inmates of the labor camp established in Litin on the territory of the Litin military barracks, mostly Romanian, Hungarian and Czech Jews but also several local Jews, were also murdered in late 1943. Litin was liberated by the Red Army on March 20, 1944.