By 5 July 1941, Nazi Germany occupied the Khmelnitsky Oblast and Labun'.  From 1941 to 1942 Jewish people in the shtetls were placed in ghettos, starved, and tormented.  Most were placed in a ghetto in a former rock quarry in Polonnoye.  At gun point Jewish residents were forced to desecrate their own cemeteries in Labun and Polonnoye by rolling grave stones from one place to another.  Those who were deemed uncooperative or caught trying to escape, were shot on the spot.  Periods of imprisonment, starvation and torment were broken up by mass shootings on September 1941, 25 June 1942 and 10 September 1942.  Some of these events were orchestrated and carried out by local accomplices of the Nazis. 

A few Jewish residents escaped to the Soviet Union, Israel, the United States and other countries.  Others escaped within Ukraine and Eastern Europe, hiding out with the help of their non-Jewish neighbors until the war was over.  Unfortunately, not all Ukrainians were as courageous or righteous.  By the time the Nazi's occupied this area, pursuit of the "Final Solution" did not mean slow death at concentration camps, but mass slaughter at gun point.  The Jewish populations in many shtetls in this region vanished into burial trenches in a matter of days.  The few who remained were liberated by Soviet troops on 4 January 1944.