Kiev, Ukraine — A mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine, a Jewish community representative says.
WWII Jewish Mass Grave Uncovered
Kiev, Ukraine — A mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine, a Jewish community representative says.
The grave was found by chance last month when workers were digging to lay gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community, said Tuesday.
The Nazis established two ghettos during World War II near the village and brought Jews there from what is now the nearby nation of Moldova as well as Ukrainian regions including Odessa, Shvartsman said. In November 1941, they set up a concentration camp in the area and killed about 5,000 Jews there, he said.
“Several thousand Jews executed by the Nazis lie there,” Shvartsman said.
Shvartsman said the Jewish community had known about the mass killing in the area, but had not known exactly where the bodies were left.
Yitzhak Arad, a Holocaust scholar and a former director of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, said he was not surprised by the discovery because the village was a known site of mass executions of Jews during the Holocaust. He said some 28,000 Jews were brought to the area from surrounding towns in November 1941, and put the death toll at 10,000, with 500 people dying every day.
Holocaust expert Efraim Zuroff, director of the Israel office of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he did not recall Gvozdavka-1 specifically, but was not surprised by the reported finding.
“I’m not surprised that, even in these days, there are discoveries such as these. It underscores the enormous scope of the plans of annihilation of the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe,” Zuroff said.
Hundreds of mass graves exist in Ukraine, likely with many yet to be uncovered, Zuroff said. “Ukraine was an enormous killing field, hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered,” he said.
Anatoly Podolsky, director of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, said there are believed to be some 250-350 mass grave sites from the Nazi occupation, during which some 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews are believed to have been killed — including those massacred near their homes and those deported to camps elsewhere.
Podolsky said most of the sites had been discovered, many since the 1991 Soviet collapse, but that there were still some left to find.
Ilia Levitas, the head of Ukraine’s Jewish Council, put the number of mass Jewish graves in the country at more than 700.
According to Shvartsman, the names of 93 Jews killed at the Gvozsdavka-1 site have been established. He said Jewish community members planned to conduct studies at the newly found site to identify victims.
“We must figure out their names. It is our debt before victims and survivors,” he said.
Odessa’s chief rabbi, Shlomo Baksht, has voiced plans to put a fence around the site and erect a monument to the victims this year.
Ukraine’s Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust. Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital, Kiev, where the Nazis slaughtered some 34,000 Jews over two days in September 1941, is a powerful symbol of the tragedy.
About 240,000 Jews were killed by the Nazis in the Odessa region, according to Shvartsman. He said a mass grave with remains of about 3,500 Jews was found in the region last year.
we want n-eNow!!!!!!
R”L
how in the world do they figure out who these ppl r?
n’eNow!!!!!!
shalom goldberg
Thank you for posting this.
Ske
Someone should forward this article to Ahmadinejad.
Remember Them
Yiskerai Elokeinu L’Tovah
Charles R. Cabiac
Thank you for publishing this important story and the full-color satellite map of that section of the Kodyma River Valley that includes Gvozdovka and the neighboring village of Yasenovo, where my grandfather, Usher Zalik Kogen, was born. He and his two brothers came to the United States about 1909, but it’s likely that I have a number of relatives buried in that hallowed ground in Gvozdovka.
It’s amazing, as I’ve read in the mainstream press, that “regional Jewish leaders” know that the Romanians, placed in charge of Transnistria by the Nazis, set up a “concentration camp in Gvozdovka, where about 5,000 Jews perished”, yet none of the major Holocaust publications, both printed and on the Web, make any mention of this place nor is it shown on any map of camp sites, ghetto sites, and massacre sites. And now we learn that “villagers say the mass grave is one of at least four in Gvozdovka”!
The closest previously described death camp site was in the town of Krivoye Ozero, just east of Gvozdavka on the banks of the Kodyma River. In fact, readers interested in the subject of the Holocaust in Ukraine are led to believe that there were only three death camps of significance, i.e., Domanevka, Akmechetka, and Bogdanovka, all three east of Gvozdovka and south of Pervomaysk, in the Golta District of Transnistria. Golta is now the city of Pervomaysk, on the banks of the Pivdennyi Bug (formerly the Yuzhny Bug) River, just east of where the Kodyma enters its mother river.
Krivoye Ozero (Kryve Ozero), a town of 8,577 inhabitants and the site of a death camp, is on the superhighway (M-20) between Odessa and Kiev. The city of Balta (19,962) is west of Gvozdovka on the banks of the Kodyma. Pervomaisk (Pervomaysk), a city of 70,170 inhabitants, has a synagogue and a resurgent Jewish community led by the Chabad Lubovitch Rabbi Levi Yitshak Perlstein and Rebbetzin Chana Perlstein, from Israel. Check out their website:
http://www.fjc.ru/pervomaisk
On March 10, 2007, The Tiraspol Times published a timely article by Alex Holt, “Transnistria, the artificial name for ‘the Romanian Auschwitz’”. It’s an excellent summary of the horrific events of which the Gvozdovka massacre was a part.
http://www.tiraspoltimes.co…
shula wenig
THANK YOU FOR ALL THE DETAILS AND LIKNKS YOU MENTIONED. I was searching for some understanding of my mother and family’s wereabouts during that time in the section of mogilev-podolski…are you familiar with anything about that?
with great appreciation, shula
RUDIGER NITZSCHMANN
THE ARTICLE CLEARS UP MANY QUESTIONS RELATED TO TRANSISTRIA. ALTHOUGH, MUCH MORE WORK NEEDS TO BE DONE IN AREA.
KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
Alvin Glazerman
October 5, 2012. My father and his family lived in Krivoye Ozero. Other relatives lived in the next town, Gvozdovka. My father’s brother was killed in a pogrom in, I believe, 1919. My father, a cousin and my uncle’s surviving family went to Romania and then to the U.S. where they settled in Philadelphia and Lawrence, MA. My father’s parents and some siblings remained and were probably killed by the Nazis. I have learned that the Nazis established death camps in both Gvozdovka and Krivoye Ozero.
If anyone knows of any geneological groups dealing with this area or of sources of historical information, I would appreciate hearing about them.