Sarny

Jews were officially permitted to settle in Sarny in 1903, after the town had become an important railway hub. This permission was given by a ministerial decree issued by the Imperial Russian authorities. During the Russian Civil War, the local Jews suffered from the depredations of Symon Petliura's Ukrainian army and other gangs. The Jewish residents of Sarny were abused by General Haller's Polish soldiers during the Polish-Soviet War. After World War I, Sarny was incorporated into the Second Polish Republic. In 1921, the town was home to 2,808 Jews, who made up 47 percent of the total population. In the interwar years, the Jews of Sarny made their living from carpentry and from trade in lumber, agricultural produce, leather, and furs with central and western European countries. The town also had Jewish-owned flour mills and edible-oil factories. Traditional charitable and welfare institutions, such as a Jewish orphanage and a TOZ clinic, were active in Sarny. Jewish children and youths were educated in a range of institutions: a Hebrew-language Tarbut kindergarten and elementary school, an ORT vocational school, a Talmud Torah, and a Yeshiva. Local political organizations included cells of the Bund, the Communists, and the various Zionist parties and their youth movements (such as Dror, Beitar, Gordonia, and HaShomer Hatzair). Members of the "HeHalutz" movement were among the founders of the Zionist training facility in Klesów, and they later immigrated to the Land of Israel. In 1937, Sarny had 4,950 Jewish residents, who comprised 45 percent of the total population. Following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, many Jewish refugees from the Nazi-occupied western and central Poland arrived in Sarny. After September 17, 1939, in the aftermath of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Red Army entered the town, and Sarny became part of Soviet Ukraine. Under Soviet rule, Jewish communal property was confiscated, and the Jewish institutions were closed down. More than 1,000 refugees from western and central Poland, who had refused to accept Soviet citizenship, together with a few local Jews accused of "crimes against the state", were deported into the Soviet interior. An estimated 6,000 Jews lived in the town in June 1941. The Germans entered Sarny on July 6, 1941. During the first three days after the departure of the Soviets, local Ukrainians looted the property of their Jewish neighbors. They also assaulted the Jews. Almost immediately upon their arrival, the German authorities set up a Judenrat (Jewish Council) under the last chairman of the town's organized community, S. Gershunok. However, because of Geshunok's advanced age, the Judenrat was administered de facto by its secretary, Neumann, a German-speaking refugee from Kalisz (Central Poland). A Jewish Order Service (police) was also set up, under the command of Yona Margalit. A regime of forced labor was imposed on the Jews: The men were put to work clearing the destruction at the train depot and repairing the railway tracks that had been blown up by the retreating Red Army; the women had to clean latrines. Initially, the Jews were ordered to wear blue-and-white armbands with an identifying Star of David. On October 1, 1941, the armbands were replaced with a circular yellow patch on the front and back of their clothes. In addition, the Jews were prohibited from leaving the town limits, and were subject to a curfew. The synagogues were seized and converted into stables and warehouses. In the fall of 1941, the German military administration was replaced with a German civil administration, and Sarny became the administrative center of the Gebiet Sarny, which, apart from the Sarny region, also included the regions of Klesów, Włodimierzec, Dabrowica, Rafalowka, and Rokitno. Kameradschaftsfuehrer Huala was appointed Gebietskommissar (regional commissar) of the Sarny County. As additional Germans arrived, their demands increased. They required new quarters with fine furnishings. On October 28, 1941, the German Economic Office (Wirtschaftskommando) in Sarny issued an order to the Jews, giving them until October 31 to hand over all their livestock. In December 1941, all fur coats had to be surrendered for the use of frontline German soldiers, and in 1942 the German authorities demanded 36 kilograms of gold from the Jewish population. Around Passover, in early April 1942, a ghetto was established in Sarny. The area was surrounded with barbed wire, and Ukrainian guards were posted around it. That same month, Jews from the outlying villages of Niemowicze, Czudel, Głuszyca, Horodec, Antonówka, Bielatycze, Lubikowicze, Cepcewicze, Strzelsk, and Luchcze were forcibly resettled in the ghetto. Some Roma people (about 200-300 in total) were also moved there. There was a separate ghetto for artisans and their families, and it was liquidated together with the main ghetto. In June 1942, when the ghetto inmates received reports about the mass murders in the region, three resistance groups were formed, with the assistance of the head of the Judenrat. One of the units was headed by Yona Margalit. The groups were able to procure small quantities of firearms and other assorted weapons, as well as flammable materials. They planned to blow up the power station, set fire to the ghetto when it was about to be liquidated, break through its fences, attack the guards, and create confusion, to enable the inmates to flee into the nearby forests. But Neumann, the secretary of the Judenrat, threatened them with arrest and prevented them from taking any action. On August 25, 1942, the Nazi authorities summoned the Judenrat and demanded a third "assessment'' of 7 gold rubles per person. The inmates, who had no way to raise this sum, had to surrender the gold in their teeth to fulfill the quota. On August 26, 1942, the inmates were taken from the ghetto to the Poleska camp, which was already inhabited by Jews from the nearby localities of Dąbrowica, Rokitno, Klesów, Bereżnica, and Tomaszgorod (approximately 14,000 people in total). On August 27-28, the Germans began to take the inmates of the Poleska camp to the nearby forest to be shot. Members of the resistance groups cut through the barbed wire surrounding the camp and urged the Jews to escape. Several barracks in the camp area were torched, with people still inside. Thousands of inmates tried to flee, but many were shot while crossing the fences and in the streets of the town. The remaining Jews were shot by various German units in the Poleska camp forest near Sarny. Of those Jews who had managed to escape from the ghetto before and during the murder operation, many were captured in hiding and killed by the Ukrainian and German police shortly thereafter. Some of them were murdered in the town's Jewish cemetery. Sarny was liberated by the Red Army on January 12, 1944.