Rovno Ghetto

The Rovno Ghetto (also: Równe or Rivne Ghetto, Yiddish: ראָװנע)[1][2][lower-alpha 1] was a World War II Nazi ghetto established in December 1941 in the city of Rovno, western Ukraine, in the territory of German-administered Reichskommissariat Ukraine. On 6 November 1941, about 21,000 Jews were massacred by Einsatzgruppe C and their Ukrainian collaborators. The remaining Jews were imprisoned in the ghetto. In July 1942, all remaining 5,000 Jews were trucked to a stone quarry near Kostopol and murdered there.[1][3]

Rovno Ghetto
Location of Sosenki (Сосонки) Forest massacres of the Rovno Ghetto prisoners, 2014
Rovno
Ghetto's location at Rovno (Równe in pre-war eastern Poland)
Rovno (Rivne)
Rivne in modern-day Ukraine
LocationNear Rivne in western Ukraine (Równe in pre-war eastern Poland)
DateOctober 1941
Incident typeForced labor, mass shootings
PerpetratorsEinsatzgruppe C, Order Police battalions, Ukrainian Auxiliary Police
OrganizationsSS
Ghetto5,000–7,000 population
Victimsabout 23,000 Jews

The ghetto was liquidated on July 13, 1942. Only a handful of Jews managed to escape deportation.

Background
Further information: Jewish ghettos in Europe

The city of Równe was the largest agglomeration in the province of Volhynia (Wołyń) of the Second Polish Republic. About 25,000 Jews lived in Równe, Wołyń Voivodeship in 1937.[3] The town was a center for Jewish education with many Jewish schools including a Hasidic religious school (yeshiva).[4]

Located in the south-eastern region of Kresy, about 80 kilometres (50 mi) west of the interwar border between Poland and the Soviet Union, Równe was occupied by the Red Army upon the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 and incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR.[5]

When German troops invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the city fell to the Wehrmacht on June 28, 1941. On August 20, 1941, Rovno was declared the capital of German Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Jewish ghetto in the city of Rovno was set up by the German administration soon after the Reichskommissariat Ukraine was formed.[6]

At the beginning of the German occupation, around 23,000[3] Polish Jews resided in Rovno along with refugees from western Poland,[2] which made up half the population of the city.[7]

When the Nazis captured the city from the Soviets, they carried out several executions of its Jewish population in order to inflict terror and fear for the sake of coercion.

Creation and liquidation

The ghetto or "Jewish residential area" was created in December 1941.[3] It was an open ghetto[8] created in the Wola neighborhood, on the edge of Rovno.[2] 5 200 Jews initially lived there.[3] The destruction of the Jewish people of Rovno occurred in three phases. [1]

  1. About 3,000-4,000 Jews were killed in July and August. On 9 and 12 July 1941, the Einsatzkommando 4A of Einsatzgruppe C, a death squad, shot 240 Jews; in the official German report, the victims were dubbed 'Bolshevik agents' and 'Jewish functionaries'. On August 6, Order Police battalions conducted a second campaign in Rovno, in the course of which about 300 Jews were shot.
  2. The most bloody shooting took place on November 6–7, 1941, where 15,000-18,000 adult Jews were killed. The operation was led by the Commander of the Order Police led by Otto von Oelhafen[1] with the assistance of Ukrainian Auxiliary Police and members of the OUN in the Sosenki forest near Rovno ('Sosenki' which means 'Little Pine Trees' in Polish). Jews were shot by Police Battalion 320 in coordination with the Einsatzgruppe 5th Division.[9] 6,000 children were also executed at a killing site close to the adult one.[1]
  3. The ghetto was liquidated in July 1942. On the night of July 13, 1942 at 22:00, the liquidation of the ghetto was carried out when a "shared" division of the SS and Ukrainian police units surrounded the ghetto, positioned spotlights around it and turned them on. Brigade SS and Ukrainian police were divided into small groups, broke into houses and pushed the people out, herded them into a freight train which took them to Kostopol (or Prokhurov) where they were shot to death in small Aktionen.[1] 5000 Jews were killed in this manner.[2][10] Several Aktionen took place in the neighbourhood afterwards.[1]

The ghetto was declared "Judenrein" end July by the Reichskommissar Eric Koch.[1]

The remaining 5,000 Jews who possessed skills which enabled them to hold professions that were deemed essential to the administration of the occupation were taken away from their families and placed in the ghetto.

It is estimated that 22,000-23,000 Jews were killed in Rovno.[3]

On February 2, 1944 Rivne was liberated from German troops by Soviet troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front during the Rovno-Lutsk operation.[11]

Life in the Ghetto

The ghetto had a Judenrat which consisted of 12 people. The two men who were appointed to head the Judenrat were Moses and Jacob Bergman (Leon) Suharchuk. They both committed suicide at the end of 1941 because they did not want to follow the Nazis' demand to turn over a group of Jews.[3] The Jews living in the ghetto had to pay levies to the German authorities . In one operation to seize the money, the Jews were required to pay the German authorities the exact sum of 12 million Rubles. Also, the German authorities confiscated any gold, jewelry, furniture and clothing which remained in the Jews' possession. At the time of the operation, the Jews were selling clothes in order to get some food. The most valuable items were sent to Germany, the rest of them were given to German soldiers and Ukrainian policemen or they were sold to them for symbolic prices. In the ghetto numerous restrictions were imposed on the Jews, including the obligation to wear a distinctive sign.

Resistance

Underground organizations operated in the ghetto and accumulated weapons.

150 Jews were saved by an engineer working for the local Reichsbahn, Hermann Graebe, as the ghetto was being liquidated.[12] [13] The Jews who managed to escape deportations joined the partisans and later took part in the liberation of Rovno by the Red Army in the Battle of Rovno, in February 1944. The surviving Jews began to gather in the city after the arrival of the Red Army, and by the end of 1944, some 1,200 Jews were accounted for in Rovno; among them, future author David Lee Preston (The Sewer People of Lvov) and his family.[14][15]

Post war

A memorial was created in 1992 on the site of the Sosenski massacre.[16] On June 6, 2012, the memorial was vandalized, allegedly as part of an antisemitic act.[17]

gollark: Oh, that got found?!
gollark: Literally like, yo.
gollark: Okaaaay.
gollark: Spanning Tree Protocol™
gollark: Ridiculous prices ≠ SCAMMINGERRRWRRING

See also
Aktionen: mass killing operations of Jews in neighboring settlements
  • Mizocz Ghetto (30 kilometres (19 mi) distance)
  • Trochenbrod (Zofiówka) (40 kilometres (25 mi) distance)
  • Łuck Ghetto (50 kilometres (31 mi) distance)

Notes
  1. The name Równe is from the Polish language. In the Holocaust literature, the modern city of Rivne is known predominantly as Rovno, from the Russian language.

References
  1. Burds, Jeffrey (2013). Holocaust in Rovno: The Massacre at Sosenki Forest, November 1941 (PDF). Northeastern University. Sponsored by the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, New York. ISBN 978-1-137-38839-1 – via Internet Archive, direct download 6.6 MB.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  2. Altman, Nolan (January 2010). "Równe (Rovno) Victims Killed in the Kostopol Forest". JewishGen.org. Introduction. Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. Megargee, Geoffrey P., ed. (2009). The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum encyclopedia of camps and ghettos, 1933–1945. Volume II: Ghettos in German-occupied Eastern Europe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 1147–1152. ISBN 978-0-253-35599-7.
  4. YIVO, Rivne. Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe.
  5. Teicher, Leah (2012). "Rivne History". JewishGen, Inc. Alternate names: Rovne (ואװנע) [Yid]; Rivne (Рiвне) [Ukr]; Rovno (Ровно) [Rus]; Równe [Pol]. The Równe Ghetto survivors & descendants; with maps and photographs of the 2012 Równe visit.
  6. Jewish Telegraphic Agency (February 8, 1942), All Jews Expelled from Zgierz; Nazis Introduce Ghetto for Jews in Rovno.
  7. Yad Vashem (2012), Volhynia and Rovno. Historical Background, via Internet Archive.
  8. "Types of Ghettos". encyclopedia.ushmm.org. Retrieved 2020-04-03.
  9. Burds (2013), pp. 22, 49 (39, 57 of 151 in PDF).
  10. A Forgotten Story: The Race Against Time to Unearth the Holocaust by Bullets – 1941-1944. ActiveHistory.ca.
  11. Askey, Nigel (2014), The Lutsk-Rovno-Dubno-Lvov Border Battle. OperationBarbarossa.net.
  12. World War II today (2017). "Horror of the 'liquidation' of the Rovno ghetto". From the evidence of Hermann Graebe, during “The Einsatzgruppen Case”, Nuremburg, 1947. Around 23,000 people were murdered shortly after the German invasion in June 1941. Between 5,000 and 7,000 Jews remained in the ghetto which was established there.
  13. "Hermann Friedrich Graebe | www.yadvashem.org". graebe.html. Retrieved 2020-04-13.
  14. Burds (2013), Acknowledgments, xiii.
  15. Musiał, Bogdan (October 1999). Bilder einer Ausstellung: Kritische Anmerkungen zur Wanderausstellung "Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944. Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. 47. Jahrg., 4. H. pp. 563–581. ISBN 978-0712622790. JSTOR 30195546. "David Lee Preston collection." See: David Lee Preston, The Sewer People of Lvov.
  16. "Memorial to the murdered Jews of Rivne". Information Portal to European Sites of Remembrance. Berlin, Germany: Stiftung Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas. Retrieved 2020-04-13.
  17. "В Ривне вандалы осквернили место массового расстрела евреев. Фото". Mignews.com.ua. 2012-06-07. Retrieved 2020-04-13.
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