Compiled by Martin Davis © 2010- 2012  

The Nazi Invasion of Kamenets

The Germans entered the town on July 11, 1941 and immediately placed formal restrictions on the Jews of the area. A ghetto was established on July 20 and local Kamianets-Podilskyi Jews, 11,000 Hungarian Jews plus others from Czechoslovakia, Poland and Holland were by then resident in the area, having been deported from their home countries. Initially, the large number of Hungarian Jewish people were spread out among the Jews of Kamianets-Podilskyi and the nearby towns. As the few survivors relate, the Hungarian Jews were received with open arms and the local Jews shared their meagre rations and their living-quarters with them. The public buildings including the synagogues and schools were made available to the deportees by the local Jews [1].  A ghetto was erected in the summer of 1941 and when it was established, tens of thousands of Jews from the city and the entire area (including the Hungarian Jews) were concentrated there. The first and biggest mass-murder of the Shoah (Holocaust) was carried out on 27-28 August, 1941 (4-5 Elul 5701), in a forest clearing near Kamenets. In those two days, 23,600 men, women and children were murdered. Eye-witnesses reported that the perpetrators made no effort to hide their actions from the local population. The massacre was begun on 27 August by the SS mobile extermination units of Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, Higher SS and Police Leader (Höhere SS - und Polizeiführer) of the region. During the operation, a Hungarian military convoy rode through the city. Most of the drivers were Jewish. One of them, Gábor Mermelstein, heard gunshots. When he was informed about the massacre from weeping local women, he drove further towards the forest near the city: "We saw hundreds of people undressing there ... we were passing a row of maple trees-practically over the mess of naked corpses ... suddenly we glanced at a square-shaped ditch, at all four sides of which people were standing. Hundreds of innocent people were machine-gunned down. I'll never forget what I saw and felt: the scared faces, the men, women and children marching into their own graves without resistance. I felt fear, outrage and pain simultaneously." The Jewish drivers watched the massacre crying. A German officer tried to calm them down as follows: "Don't worry, there are enough Jews left in the world."[3] Jeckeln's soldiers murdered 23,600 men, women and children, of which 10,000-15,000 Jews had been deported from Hungary [4]. The Final Murders After the procedural murder of the majority of the Jewish people living in Kamenets, the remaining Jews with specified skills, from the town and from neighbouring settlements, were concentrated in a labour camp within the ghetto. In January 1942, a further 4,000 people were murdered and sometime later 500 children (aged 4–8) were murdered; in January 1943 another group of 2,500 people were executed and the final group of 2,000 Jewish people were killed in February 1943. “The most tragic page in the history of the Kamenets Jews came with World War II . The Kamenetskoy Commission, [established after 1945] to investigate crimes of the Nazi invaders, discovered seven mass graves for the Jews [in the area], including a grave with the bodies of 500 children” [5].