Ignatowka

Ignatowka (Lozishtsh in Yiddish) was founded as a Jewish village in 1838 under Tsar Nikolai I by Jewish settlers from the Volhyn and Polesye Regions. Along with agriculture its residents were engaged in leather production and small trade. In 1897 567 Jews were living in Ignatowka. At the beginning of the 20th century emigration to the United States and Argentina roughly its total population of 1,204 by approximately on half. During World War I some local farms were seriously damaged but, due to the assistance from the JOINT (the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) and World ORT (the Association for the Promotion of Skilled Trades) organizations, they were reconstructed. After the war, in 1918, as a part of the Volhyn Region, Ignatowka was incorporated into the Polish state. While during the 1920s and 1930s many Jews left the town due to the economic situation and growing anti-Semitism, others continued to live in the town, some of them taking active part in political activities, especially of the Beitar Zionist movement. In September 1939, following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the German and Soviet invasions of Poland, Ignatowka became part of Soviet Ukraine. In the fall of 1939 several hundred Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland took refuge in the town. During the first days of the war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union Ignatowka was bombed. After the German captured the town in late June 1941, its Ukrainian residents staged a pogrom. The Germans ordered the Jews to wear yellow stars on their chests and backs. In early July a Judenrat (Jewish council), headed by Waisman, was set up in the town. Healthy Jewish men were forced to perform forced labor in agriculture. Skilled producers of leather goods who were working for Germans at the local leather factory received special treatment. At the end of July or early August, 1942 Ignatowka's Jews were rounded up by Ukrainian auxiliary policemen and taken to Zofjowka for a "public meeting." Afterwards the leather workers and their families were ordered to move to the nearby locality of Szaliszcze to set up a workshop. The rest of the Jews, including those from the nearby village of Marjanowka, were ordered to return home, pack a small bundle of personal items and return to the ghetto in Zofjowka within several hours - in order to obtain work certificates. The elderly and sick Jews who were unable to move quickly were shot on the spot. Several days later the liquidation of the Zofjowka's ghetto, where the Jews from Ignatowka were confined, began. Several thousand Jews, mainly women, children, and old people, were taken to a field outside the town, where they were shot to death by a German murder squad. During the murder operation some youngsters managed to escape to the nearby forest. Apparently sometime afterward, Ignatowka and nearby Zofjowka were burned down and proclaimed "Judenrein" (German for "free of Jews"). Ignatowka was liberated by the Red Army in early February 1944. Today the town no longer exists.