Murder Story of Khmelnik Jews in Ugrinovka

The two largest murder operations took place at Ugrinovka. On Friday, January 9, 1942, early in the morning, the Germans and Ukrainian police drove the Jews from their homes; not all of them even had enough time to dress. Many Jews tried to flee in the turmoil of the operation; some of them were killed on the spot. The rest of the assembled Jews were driven across the Southern Bug River to the village of Ugrinovka. There, at the site of a former Soviet military base, under a heavy frost, they were told to undress their children and themselves. They were then shot in previously prepared ditches. The Soviet State Extraordinary Commission estimated the number of those killed on January 9 at 5,800 or 6,300: both of these estimates appear to be exaggerated. Many of Khmelnik’s Jews had underground shelters, so the police failed to find all of them. The murder operation was repeated the next Friday, January 16, 1942. Before the second massacre, the Nazis separated “specialists” out of the crowd of Jews; the rest were killed at the same site in Ugrinovka. The Soviet State Extraordinary Commission estimated the number of those killed at 1,240. The “specialists” and their families were ordered to resettle to an improvised ghetto on Shevchenko Street, or “Judenstrasse,” as the occupiers called it. On June 12, 1942, the Nazis declared a “new registration” of Jews, during which 360 women and children were separated and later murdered at Ugrinovka. According to some accounts, a Hungarian military unit took part in the operation. The Khmelnik ghetto was liquidated in two murder operations, on March 3 and June 26, 1943. The operation of March 3 was also veiled as a “new registration” of Jews; after it, the ghetto was reorganized into a labor camp in which the 340 remaining Jews were placed. In both cases, the victims were brought to the “pine grove” (i.e. Ugrinovka), by truck.