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Ghetto in Mogilev-Podolsky, Ukraine

On the eve of the war, Jews constituted 39.8% of the population of Mogilev-Podolsk. With the outbreak of hostilities, part of the Jewish population tried to leave the city. However, the single-track line leading to the Zhmerinka junction turned out to be overloaded with retreating troops. There was not a single carriage at the Mogilev-Podolsky station. During the retreat, Soviet troops blew up 115 km of the railway.

The roads from Mogilev were also filled with retreating. As a result, some of the Mogilev Jews returned to the city, and some were caught by German and Romanian troops in nearby settlements.

The city was occupied on July 19, 1941. On the very first day, the invaders killed more than 60 Jews. Mogilev-Podolsky ended up in the Romanian zone of occupation. A Judenrat was created in the city, and the Romanian authorities obliged Jews to wear distinctive signs.

In mid-August 1941, the Romanian authorities created a ghetto on the territory of Grecheskaya, Pushkinskaya, Sovetskaya, Stavisskaya streets and Bazarnaya square. At the end of the summer, the Dniester overflowed its banks and flooded part of the ghetto territory.

In addition to local Jews, there were 15,000 Jews deported from Romania, Bukovina and Bessarabia to the ghetto. They arrived only with things that they were allowed to take during the eviction, did not know the Ukrainian language and could not find a common language with the local population. In total, in September 1941 - February 1942, through Mogilev-Podolsk, which served as a transit camp, the Romanian military drove out more than 50 thousand Jews.

In the winter of 1941, the prisoners survived a famine and a typhus epidemic. The Judenrat created a hospital in the building of a former polyclinic on Bolnichnaya Street. According to the Romanian authorities, 1.2 thousand ghetto prisoners died of typhus. Initially, those who died from the disease were buried in the Jewish cemetery, and then buried in ditches and ravines in the area of ​​Pushkinskaya Street.

From the fall of 1942, the Romanian authorities began to deport ghetto prisoners to a concentration camp located 100 km from Mogilev-Podolsk in Pechera, Vinnitsa region. Some of them died on the road.

Since 1942, ghetto prisoners began to receive assistance from the Jewish community in Romania. In December 1943, about 3 thousand Jews from the Mogilev-Podolsk ghetto received permission to return to Romania. In March 1944, the Bucharest community obtained permission to remove 1,400 orphans from Mogilev-Podolsk. On March 19, 1944, the city was taken by Soviet troops.