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The Holocaust swept into Dzygivka with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941.
The area of Ukraine in which Dzygivka was located was the southernmost portion of the front line. It bordered on Romania, a member of the Axis alliance.
German troops came in preceded by waves of aerial bombardment. The German units were fast-moving Panzers who moved relentlessly eastward. The administration of occupied Ukraine was overseen by Germans with support from their Romanian allies. An area called "Transnistria" was established on the eastern bank of the Dniester River. Tens of thousands of Jews were interned there, many of them moved there from elsewhere.
Dzygivka was in Transnistria. It was turned into a concentration camp of sorts, a ghetto. It was not a site of mass killing or extermination, rather it was a place where casual murder was common, and starvation and disease took a separate grim toll.
Yad Vashem has an entry on Dzygivka. This entry has three links, one of which is in Hebrew. The translation, provided by Rena Borow of the Jewish Theological Seminary:
On
the eve of the German invasion of the
USSR, there were fewer than 1,000 Jews
in Dzygovka. During the Russian civil
war (1918-1920) Jews were plagued by
pogroms and many left the town. In the
early 1920's most Jews made their living
in agriculture, some in trade and
manufacturing. Under Soviet rule, Jewish
agricultural cooperatives were formed.
In the mid-1920's a Jewish
administrative authority which conducted
its business in Yiddish was established,
as well as a Yiddish school. The Germans
entered Dzygovka on July 18, 1941 and
within a few days the Jews were rounded
up into a ghetto. On September 1, 1941
the town was annexed and came under
Romanian rule. 100 or so Jews from
Bukovina and Bessarabia were transferred
into the ghetto. Jews were forced into
slave labor and a group was conscripted
for bridge building in Nikolaev. When
the town was liberated in mid-1944, a
few hundred Jews remained.
Yad Vashem has a map showing Dzygivka as the site of a ghetto. [Scroll to page 7.]
Yad Vashem also will provide a listing of names of Holocaust victims from Dzygivka. Enter Dzygivka, Ukraine in the box marked "Permanent Place of Residence or Birthplace" then click Search.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has links to additional testimonies from Dzygivka.
In the heart-rending book "Holocaust in the Ukraine," edited by Boris Zabarko, published by Vallentine Mitchell and part of The Library of Holocaust Testimonies there is a testimony from Mikhail Burd of Dzygivka, who was born in 1932. It is a two-page memoir of the ghetto entitled "A lot could be recalled but the memory is very painful."
Also worth consulting is the Holocaust section of the Yampol KehilaLinks website, which contains photos of the Transnistrian deportation.
According to the book The Destruction of the Jewish Population of the Ukraine in 1941-44 some 450,000 Jews were killed in the onslaught from June 22, 1941 to December 31, 1941. In 1942, another 726,000 died. In total, 1.4 million Jews were murdered in the Ukraine.
When the compiler of this website visited Ukraine in 1996, he spoke with Ida, his first cousin once removed.
I
asked Ida her memories of the war. She
was in the Dzygivka ghetto with Joseph
and Sarah, her mother and father. She
remembered the Rumanian commandant as an
old man who didn’t want trouble, and who
didn’t need to impress the Germans by
killing Jews. Dzygivka was a small,
out-of-the-way place. The current nearby
highway hadn’t been built. The railway
was some miles away. The village’s
remoteness and obscurity saved the
Jewish inhabitants if they did not
venture beyond the ghetto walls.
Because Dzygivka was a relatively “safe” ghetto, thousands of Jews sought refuge there. Four or five families would live in a single small house.
There was clearly
horrendous brutality in Dzygivka, as
Burd's memoir attests. Ida's aunt was
herself murdered by German soldiers when
she ventured out of the ghetto to see what
had become of her home in the nearby
shtetl of Yampol. Because Dzygivka was a relatively “safe” ghetto, thousands of Jews sought refuge there. Four or five families would live in a single small house.