Talalayevka

Prior to the Russian Revolution, the Talalayevka County lay in the eastern part of the Pale of Settlement. For this reason, the village was home to relatively few Jews, compared to other areas of the Sumy District. Following the German invasion of the USSR on June 22, 1941, numerous civilian evacuees, including a sizeable contingent of Jews from the western regions of Soviet Ukraine and Belarus, arrived in the Talalayevka County. The Wehrmacht occupied Talalayevka on September 16, 1941. The German military rounded up the local Jews (both the natives and the recent evacuees), imprisoned them, and sent them to perform forced labor. On January 19, 1942, the local police murdered fifty-nine civilians and Soviet POWs, including at least thirty-five Jews, and buried them in a pit in the forest on the outskirts of the village. The Red Army liberated Talalayevka on September 16, 1943.