Holocaust is a terrible word denoting the genocide of the Jewish people in the territories of Germany and the lands they captured in 1933 - 1945. During the Holocaust, 60% of Europe's Jews, or a third of all Jews in the world, died. These people were burned in the ovens of concentration camp crematoria, shot and buried in ditches, and starved to death. One of the most effective, if this word can be applied to the mechanism of killing people, methods of reprisal against Jews was placing them in ghettos - in isolated parts of the city where only Jews lived. From there they were then taken to concentration camps or simply shot outside the city.

Today we will talk about the ghetto in the city of Zhmerynka. One of hundreds and hundreds on the territory of the German Reich. About one drop of the tragedy of the Jewish people, and these drops are the ocean.

On the morning of July 17, 1941, residents of Zhmerynka were awakened by the roar of engines - German troops burst into the city. Behind them came the SS in their terrible black uniforms and skulls on the cap badges. Just a week later, a ghetto was established here. It was located on several streets surrounded by barbed wire. Opposite was the commandant's office building. Exit from the ghetto was only with passes.

Jews were evicted from their houses and apartments and herded there.  The abandoned houses were inhabited by Germans or local residents who went into the service of the occupiers. They put on armbands with swastikas, ran around the apartments and shouted: “Get ready, Jews, you will be shot!” Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina were also brought to the Zhmerynka ghetto.

For the slightest offense there was only one punishment in the ghetto - execution. There was a shortage of food. Hunger forced people to do desperate things. One father of a large family, trying to get food, dared to go outside the ghetto and was shot by a German officer in front of everyone.

Every morning, able-bodied men and women were sent to hard work under escort. One of the girls, Semelshtern-Grinshpun Betya, who survived that hell, recalled that she and other girls cleared the wagons of manure after transporting the horses. The guards tried to rape one of the girls. She desperately resisted and was killed.

People in the ghetto tried to survive. Any little thing could cost them their lives. For example, if they noticed that the Germans were gathering near the commandant’s office, this meant a quick raid and looting. Therefore, it was necessary to hide somewhere. And then the raid began. The Germans and local police, often drunk, broke into houses, robbed, raped and killed.

But the Zhmerynka ghetto was still... lucky. In the fall of 1941, Zhmerynka and some other territories were transferred to the management of the Romanians in accordance with the agreement signed in Bendery on August 30, 1941. After this, the Romanian dictator Antonescu from these lands founded the so-called Transnistria with its capital in the city of Tiraspol.

The Romanians, fortunately, were not eager to finally resolve the Jewish question, so the terror against the inhabitants of the ghetto decreased significantly. They even created their own administration, headed by the Romanian Jew Gershman, nicknamed Doctor. They also had their own Jewish police.

Not everyone wanted to join this administration or the police. Ghetto resident Moisha Moikher was flogged with ramrods, but they could not break him. The Jew Ochakovsky was thrown into the basement and kept there, without food or water, until he died.  And other Jews were marched to work past this basement so that they could hear the screams, pleas, and then the howl of a dying Jew.

But if the terror subsided somewhat (at least Jews were no longer killed for the slightest offense, but were only mercilessly flogged with ramrods, for example, for not having a yellow Star of David on their clothes), then hunger continued to rage. Igor Desner, who survived the horrors of the Zhmerynka ghetto as a teenager, recalled that one morning, when his mother was already at work, he and his brothers and sisters woke up and began asking their bedmate: “Manechka, we want to eat.” The answer was silence. A neighbor came running to the hungry children's roar and told the children that “Manechka died.”

But Jews from the German occupation zone still sought to enter this Zhmerynka hell. Because there wasn’t even hell anymore, but simply death, always painful.   After the occupation, the ditches of Brailov, Nemirov, Pechora, Khmilnyk were excavated near Zhmerynka, filled with the bodies of thousands of Jews - women, old people, children. The entire territory up to the Southern Bug River was “Cleared of Jews” - the Jews were completely exterminated.

Therefore, the crowding in the Zhmerynka ghetto was terrible. Two, three, or four people slept on a bed.  Lice, dirt, diseases...

The Zhmerynka ghetto ceased to exist on March 20, 1944, when Soviet troops entered the city. The offensive was so rapid that the retreating German troops simply did not have time to shoot the Jews who were there.