Labun

During the Polish-Soviet war (1919-1921) several Jews were murdered in a pogrom staged in the village by Polish troops. Under Soviet rule in the early 1920s a Yiddish three-year elementary school operated in the village. Labun had a Jewish rural council and a Jewish kolkhoz that was established in 1934. In 1923 952 Jews were living in the village.

On July 5 or 6, 1941 Labun was occupied by the German army. According to one testimony on the same day Germans troops drove some old Jewish men to the village square, where there was a statue of Lenin, forcibly tore or cut off their beards, and made them to scrub German military vehicles and boots of the soldiers with toothbrushes. Photographs were taken of them doing this humiliating work. On August 14 a group of Jewish men was shot to death in the Berezanskyi forest outside the village. According to the same testimony, on August 29 another group of Jews, including women, children, and elderly people, was shot to death in the Treshanskyi forest also outside Labun. This testimony reports that afterwards Jewish property was looted by local Ukrainians and that the Jews who were still living in the village were forced by Ukrainian auxiliary policemen and Germans to pay a ransom in gold and valuables. Those who could not pay were shot to death at the Jewish cemetery. Apparently in late autumn 1941 the remaining Jews of Labun were taken to the ghetto of Polonnoye and murdered, along with the Jews of the town, on June 25, 1942, near Polonnoye.

Labun was liberated by the Red Army in January 1944.