Book of Sorrows Introduction

Book of Sorrow Ukraine, Khmelnitskiy Oblast

Книга скорбоTи України, Хмельницька область

The Book of Sorrow volumes contain lists of people who perished in the Holocaust, Ukrainians, Jews and other nationalities.
There are four volumes for the Khmelnitskiy Oblast, see links to find what other Raions are in each volume.

"Книга скорботи України", Хмельницькая область (literally "The Book of Sorrow" of Ukraine for the Khmel′nit︠s︡kaya oblast′) is а Memorial book listing civilians from the Khmel′nit︠s︡kaya oblast′ of Ukraine who died during World War II as a result of the Nazi invasion. Such books were published in all parts of the Ukraine in the first decade of 21st century. This Book contains four volumes, which give the detailed information for every raion of the Khmel′nit︠s︡kaya oblast′ according to modern Ukrainian administrative divisions. Data on victims include surnames, first names and patronymics, places of residence, gender, age, often profession or occupation, and usually the time and circumstances of the victims' murder, and also the places of their burial. The presented, victims' of raions', data are preceded with a short essay dedicated to the special situation in each raion during Nazi occupation. Because it was planned to present only the Jewish martyrs' names of Krasilov and vicinities on this web site, we selected their names from the large amount of victims' names which belonged not only to the Jews but also to the Ukrainian natives of Krasilovskiy raion. Many of non-Jews were cruelly murdered: shot and killed, hanged, burned in their own houses, etc. for the robbery of German food and weapons, for hiding fugitive Russian POWs, for connection with partisans, etc. Also many of the Ukrainians were transported as slaves to Germany and perished there because of horrible conditions and hard slavery labor. But a rather considerable part of non-Jewish population survived the war. Only Jews were annihilated completely and were severely persecuted before their martyr death. And only Jews were "liquidated" under supervision of SS officers by the German gendarmes and Ukrainians of the local police forces in the terrible "actions". During such "actions" the whole Jewish population, residents of ghettos and camps were assassinated in huge groups, at distant forests, over one or two days.

The lists which can be found in the “Book of Sorrow”, are mainly based on data which were collected by the local municipal authority right after the end of the war or even before its end, as soon as the Ukrainian territories were freed by the Red Army. So their quality in the sense of completeness and reliability of collected information depended on the administration: what initiative it took, and how trustworthy it was. Unfortunately, the authors did not use the lists of the Yad-Vashem Archives, nor the data of the recently opened German Archives, nor the data presented in the interviews of the Holocaust survivors which were video recorded for VHA (Steven Spielberg foundation). So we hope that additional volumes with new data will be published in future. We will have more full and exact information as a result.
E. Sheinman, Edited by B. Chernick

місто хмельницький
Volume 3 pages 239-297
City of Khmelnitskiy (Proskurov)

List of names is not translated to English.