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Murder Story of Gorodok Jews at the Yarmolintsy Military Barracks

Murder Site
Yarmolintsy Area
Ukraine (USSR)
Military barrack (near the Yarmolintsy railway station) where the Jews from Gorodok and the surrounding towns were held before their murder. Photographer: Eugene Shnaider, 2013.
Military barrack (near the Yarmolintsy railway station) where the Jews from Gorodok and the surrounding towns were held before their murder. Photographer: Eugene Shnaider, 2013.
Genesis Philanthropy Group project, Copy YVA 14616138
At the end of October 1942, in the early morning, most of the inmates of the Gorodok ghetto (including Jews from Kuzmin) were driven out of the houses by Ukrainian auxiliary policemen and members of the Gendarmerie and collected on the town's square. They were told that they would be sent to Palestine and taken under guard to the military area near the Yarmolintsy railway station, located about 20 kilometers of Gorodok. After the Jews left the town, the local Ukrainian population looted Jewish houses and property. In Yarmolintsy the victims were held for about three days in the former military barrack, that was fenced off with barbed wire, without food or water and some of them committed suicide. After three days the Germans, assisted by the Ukrainian auxiliary police, began to take people out of the barracks to the nearby shooting site. Many people refused to leave the barracks and an armed resistance was put up during which some Ukrainian auxiliary policemen and Germans were killed by the Jews. The Germans suppressed this resistance. There were some who chose to take their own lives rather than be shot to death. Upon their arrival at the murder site, the victims were stripped naked, divided into groups, ordered to lie down in the pit, and then shot to death. Gebietskommissar (regional commissar) Emil Mertes was in charge of this murder operation. Soviet prisoners of war were shot to death and buried at this site as well.
Related Resources
Itzhak Novik, who's family members were murdered in Gorodok, related in 1979:
… For the beginning I would like to relate the story of how all my relatives were killed: my mother, father, brother, sister, and their families as well as [my mother's and father's] brothers, sisters, and their wives and children, over 70 people. All of them were living … near the border between Poland and the USSR… On the second day of the war the Germans were already near this border and several days later they entered this town named Gorodok, to which the Germans drove all the Jews from the nearby towns…. In 1943 [sic for 1942] (the 22nd of the Jewish month of Heshvan) at 3 a.m. the Germans, assisted by Ukrainian policemen, forced old people, women, children out of their homes. [The Germans] collected from the peasants many carts, put some [of the victims] onto them, others went on foot 20 kilometers to the Yarmolintsy railway station. The military barracks were standing empty there and all the Jews… were driven inside without food or water. Near these barracks [several] large pits had been dug. When the Germans and the Ukrainian policemen began to take the people out of these barracks, the people already knew that they were being taken to be shot. So they refused to get out, then several "people" of these bandits entered the building, the Jews captured two of them and didn't let them go alive. Then the Germans set fire to straw in the lower floors of the building in order to smoke up the building where the people were being held. When the people began to suffocate, they had to get out. I was told about this by several eyewitnesses who managed to get out [by climbing down] a drain pipe and to escape from this hell. There, at that site, all my close relatives perished.… I would like to add that when the Jews were taken to the Yarmolintsy railway station, they were told that they were going to be sent to Palestine. The peasants from the nearby towns were already waiting with sacks [for the victims to leave]: when the Jews were taken away, they burst into the [Jewish] houses and took all that had been left, they broke through the walls with a shovel, looking for hidden Jewish valuables.…
YVA O.33 / 1542
Yarmolintsy Area
military barracks
Murder Site
Ukraine (USSR)
49.166;26.566
Evgeniia Dantsis was born in 1925 in Kuzmin, a town near Gorodok
USC SHOAH FOUNDATION, 32340 copy YVA O.93 / 32340