Kozin

Jewish settlement in Kozin dates from the mid-16th century. During the uprising of Bogdan Chmelnitsky (1648-1649), the Jewish community of Kozin was destroyed. However, it eventually recovered, and by 1897, while under the rule of the Russian Empire, the town was home to 972 Jews, who made up one half of the total population. After World War I, Kozin was incorporated into the independent Polish state. The census of 1921 recorded 550 Jewish inhabitants in Kozin, and in 1931 there were 599 Jews living in the town. The Jews of Kozin traded in agricultural produce and were petty merchants and artisans. Several Zionist parties (HaMizrahi and others) and youth movements (Beitar and HeHalutz) were active in the town, and a Talmud Torah operated there. After September 17, 1939, with the arrival of the Red Army in the town, following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, Kozin became part of Soviet Ukraine. In mid-1941, the town was home to an estimated 650 Jews. The Germans occupied Kozin on June 24, 1941. A few days later, they ordered all the town's Jewish men to assemble, and local Ukrainians identified those whom they considered Soviet activists. These men were then shot dead. A few weeks later, the Germans set fire to the synagogue and its Torah scrolls, and twenty Jews were murdered. In the summer and fall of 1941, the Germans introduced a series of anti-Jewish measures in Kozin: Jews were required to wear armbands with the Star of David (replaced later with a yellow circular patch); they had to perform forced labor with little or no compensation, and they were forbidden to leave the town's limits. In late May 1942, the German authorities established a ghetto in Kozin, which housed Jews from the town itself and from the surrounding villages. Eight days later, following a selection in which the skilled workers and their families had been singled out and allowed to remain in the ghetto, about 400 Jews were killed by a German unit in the nearby village of Hranówka, just southeast of Kozin. Some Jews avoided this murder operation by hiding in the ghetto. Once the operation was over, many of those who had hidden outside the ghetto returned to the ghetto, under the illusion that those who were working would not be killed. In early October 1942, the Kozin Ghetto was liquidated, and its remaining inmates were killed by German units outside the town, near the same village of Hranówka. On the eve of this murder operation, several dozen Jews succeeded in escaping from the ghetto, but many of them were subsequently caught by the Ukrainian auxiliary police and shot dead. Kozin was liberated by the Red Army on March 19, 1944.