| Rovno Ghetto | |
|---|---|
 Location of Sosenki (Сосонки) Forest massacres of the Rovno Ghetto prisoners, 2014 | |
  Rovno Ghetto's location at Rovno (Równe inpre-war eastern Poland) | |
  Rovno (Rivne) Rivne in modern-day Ukraine | |
| Location | NearRivne inwestern Ukraine (Równe inpre-war eastern Poland) 50°37′N26°15′E / 50.617°N 26.250°E /50.617; 26.250 |
| Date | October 1941 |
| Incident type | Forced labor, mass shootings |
| Perpetrators | Einsatzgruppe C,Order Police battalions,Ukrainian Auxiliary Police |
| Organizations | SS |
| Ghetto | 5,200 to 7,000 Jews |
| Victims | about 23,000 Jews |
TheRovno Ghetto (also: Równe or Rivne Ghetto, Yiddish: ראָװנע)[1][a] was a World War IINazi ghetto established inDecember 1941 in the city ofRovno, western Ukraine, in the territory of German-administeredReichskommissariat Ukraine. On 6 November 1941, about 21,000 Jews were massacred byEinsatzgruppe C and theirUkrainian collaborators. The remaining Jews were imprisoned in the ghetto. In July 1942, the remaining 5,000 Jews were trucked to a stone quarry nearKostopol and murdered there.[1][2]
The ghetto was liquidated on July 13, 1942. Only a handful of Jews managed to escape deportation.
The city of Równe was the largest agglomeration in the province ofVolhynia (Wołyń) of theSecond Polish Republic. About 25,000 Jews lived in Równe,Wołyń Voivodeship in 1937.[2] The town was a center for Jewish education with many Jewish schools including aHasidic religious school (yeshiva).[3]
Located in the south-eastern region ofKresy, about 80 kilometres (50 mi) west of the interwar border between Poland and the Soviet Union, Równe was occupied by the Red Army upon theSoviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 and incorporated into theUkrainian SSR.
WhenGerman troops invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the city fell to the Wehrmacht on June 28, 1941. On August 20, 1941, Rovno was declared the capital of GermanReichskommissariat Ukraine. TheJewish ghetto in the city of Rovno was set up by the German administration soon after theReichskommissariat Ukraine was formed.[4]
At the beginning of the German occupation, around 23,000[2]Polish Jews resided in Rovno along with refugees from western Poland, who made up half the population of the city.[5]
When the Nazis captured the city from the Soviets, they carried out several executions of its Jewish population.
In December 1941[2] an open ghetto[6] was created in the Wola neighborhood, on the edge of Rovno, and 5,200 Jews initially lived there.[2] The destruction of the Jewish people of Rovno occurred in three phases.[1]
The ghetto was declared "Judenrein"at the end of July by theReichskommissarErich Koch.[1]
The remaining 5,000 Jews possessed skills deemed essential to the administration of the occupation were taken away from their families and placed in the ghetto.[citation needed] An estimated 22,000-23,000 Jews were killed in Rovno.[2]
On February 2, 1944 Rivne was liberated from the Germans by Soviet troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front during the Rovno-Lutsk operation.
The ghetto had aJudenrat of 12 people. The men appointed to head the Judenrat were Moses and Jacob Bergman (Leon) Suharchuk. They both committed suicide at the end of 1941 because they did not want to follow the Nazis' demand to turn over a group of Jews.[2] Jews living in the ghetto had to pay levies to the German authorities, in one operation, 12 million rubles. German authorities also confiscated any gold, jewelry, furniture or clothing that remained in Jews' possession. At the time of the operation, Jews were selling clothes to get food. The most valuable items were sent to Germany, the rest either given to German soldiers and Ukrainian policemen or sold to them for symbolic prices. In the ghetto numerous restrictions were imposed on Jews, including a requirement to wear a distinctive badge.
Underground organizations operated in the ghetto and accumulated weapons.
150 Jews were saved by an engineer working for the localReichsbahn,Hermann Graebe, as the ghetto was being liquidated.[9] The Jews who managed to escape deportation joined the partisans and later took part in the liberation of Rovno by theRed Army in theBattle of Rovno, in February 1944. The surviving Jews began to gather in the city after the arrival of the Red Army, and by the end of 1944, some 1,200 Jews were accounted for in Rovno; among them, future author David Lee Preston (The Sewer People of Lvov) and his family.[10]
Amemorial was created in 1992 on the site of the Sosenski massacre.[11] On June 6, 2012, the memorial was vandalized, allegedly as part of anantisemitic act.[12]
On December 13, 2019, at the site of the former ghetto entrance, a monument to the victims of the Rivne ghetto was unveiled by the NGO Mnemonika in partnership with the Jewish community ofDüsseldorf. It consists of a half-destroyed wall built from bricks from one of the houses in the ghetto territory, a suitcase as a symbol of the forced eviction to the ghetto and the hardships of the Holocaust victims, and amenorah as a symbol of Jewish tradition.[13][14]
Around 23,000 people were murdered shortly after the German invasion in June 1941. Between 5,000 and 7,000 Jews remained in the ghetto there.
