Photograph from The Valley of the Communities, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, Israel, a monument with names of over 5,000 Jewish communities engraved on stone walls. Each name recalls a community that existed for hundreds of years and memorializes a thousand years of Jewish communal life destroyed during the Holocaust.
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The Holocaust in Starokostyantyniv, 1941-1944
The Holocaust in Starokostyantyniv, 1941-1944
In 1939, just prior to the start of World War II, 6,700 Jews lived in Starokostyantyniv, about one-third of the town's total population.
Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, occupied Starokostyantyniv on July 8th and immediately implemented a systematic series of anti-Jewish actions. This was the beginning of nearly the end of Jewish life in Starokostyantyniv.
Initially all Jews in the town were required to wear distinctive markings, first an armband with a Star of David and then a yellow circle sewn onto the front and back of clothing, and they were forbidden to use the sidewalks. Persecution quickly escalated, and Jews were subjected to forced labor.
In August, less than one month after the Nazi occupation of the town, Jews were forced to a military camp where 439 were executed, about 800 Jews were murdered in the nearby Novogorodskiy Forest, and a ghetto surrounded by barbed wire was established, holding about 5,000 people who received little food. The ghetto was relocated to a larger area in the winter of 1942, where people were again confined in overcrowded, unsanitary conditions resulting in high mortality rates from starvation and disease.
Murders continued throughout the occupation in several areas of the town. The two main murder sites were the Novogorodskiy Forest located about one mile outside town and a field by the nearby military camp. Mass murder by shooting carried out by Nazi officials and local collaborators that occurred at sites like these throughout the Soviet Union has been termed the "Holocaust by bullets." In May 1942, over 5,000 people imprisoned in the ghetto were shot in the forest, including Jews from Starokostyantyniv and the surrounding towns Hritsiv, Ostropol, Stara Sinyava, and Polonnoye. The ghetto was “liquidated” in November 1942, a euphemistic term that denotes the destruction of remaining prisoners, and about 4,000 Jews from the ghetto were shot in the forest.
When the Soviet Army liberated Starokostyantyniv on March 9, 1944, the centuries-old Jewish community was in ruins.
Shoah Names Database This Yad Vashem database includes information about Jewish victims of the Holocaust including those who were were murdered, many whose fate has yet to be determined and some who survived. On authoring this KehilaLinks page, the search of the database for Jews from Starokostyantyniv resulted in 6,089 names using the location option Before the War, and 5,257 names using During the War.
The Genealogy Resources page on this KehilaLinks site provides additional sources to locate names of individual Holocaust victims and survivors.
The Ancestral Town Visits page on this KehilaLinks includes a description of Testimonial Lists of Jewish Holocaust Victims from Starokostyantyniv.
The memorial in memory of the victims of the 1942 mass murder at the site of the Novogorodskiy Forest in Starokostyantyniv.
The original caption on the photograph reads: On this territory, German Fascist beasts tortured, murdered, and buried alive 5200 Jewish families in the city of Starokonstantinov in 1942.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Froim Arie Leib Lisak was born in Starokostyantyniv in 1906 to Ephraim and Sheva. He was a physician, and was killed in action during his army service in 1942.
Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem
Rafail Poleshchuk, born in Starokostyantyniv in 1917, attended Yiddish school as a child. In the late 1920s, he participated in Zionist meetings, and Jewish youths congregated at the family home with his sister and her husband, who were ardent Zionists. While fighting in Austria, his division participated in the liberation of a labor camp. He was promoted to lieutenant colonel and survived the war.
Photo courtesy of jewmil.com, an online project to perpetuate the memory of Jewish soldiers
Jews in the Red Army, 1941-1945
This Yad Vashem research project identifies Jews who served in the Soviet Army during the Holocaust years. The project database can be searched by name or town and may include biographies, information from wartime articles, letters to family during the war and postwar memoirs.
Yad Vashem indicates that between 350,000 and 500,000 Jews served in combat roles in many branches of the Soviet Army and were also translators, physicians, and political officers. Jewish women served in relatively large numbers, mainly as doctors, nurses, or translators, but also in combat units as pilots or artillery soldiers.
Many Jews were drafted into the army while others, despite growing antisemitism, volunteered for military service at the start of the war. In 1943 and 1944 some Jewish partisans, along with Jews who had survived the Holocaust by hiding or using false identification papers, joined the army after liberation of the western Soviet territories. In addition to the war that they shared with others, "Soviet Jews had their own war to fight, their own score to settle with the Nazis."
These brief stories provide examples of soldiers from Starokostyantyniv who are identified in the database.
Mikhail Vainshtein was born in 1926 in Ostropol. In 1930, the family moved to Starokostyantyniv, where Mikhail's father was appointed the manager of a mill. In 1932, his father was arrested by the Soviet political police. Only after the war did the family learn that he had died in a camp in 1941.
Mikhail was conscripted into the Soviet Army in 1943 and served in combat roles until the end of the war. He returned to Starokostyantyniv to learn that his mother and 74 members of his extended family had been killed in 1943, together with other Jews of the town and of Ostropol.
Survivor Testimonies
Survivor Testimonies
Testimonies of survivors provide firsthand, eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust experienced by Jewish victims. Written and filmed testimonies that can be accessed on the websites of Yad Vashem, the USHMM, and the USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive include accounts of imprisonment in ghettos and camps, in hiding, or attempting to live as a non-Jew with false documents.
Starokonstantinov Eye Witness Statements on the Krasilov KehilaLinks site include English language translation of nine interview statements by survivors provided during post-war investigations into Nazi war crimes.
Yahad-In Unum eyewitness testimony to executions in Starokostyantyniv at the two major mass killing sites, the Novogorodskiy Forest and a military camp.
Example of survivor testimony on the Yad Vashem database associated with Starokostyantyniv: Testimony of Avraham Goltzman, born in Ostropol, 1923: Life under the Soviet regime; German occupation; deportation to the Starokonstantinov Ghetto, March 1942; mass murder in an open field, Hanukkah (04 December) 1942; liberation, struggle to make aliya to Israel; aliya with his family, 1974.
Righteous Among the Nations
Righteous Among the Nations
In contrast to the majority of people who were indifferent to persecution or active collaborators during the Holocaust, Yad Vashem recognizes and pays tribute to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. Nazi officials posted announcements warning that aiding Jews was a crime punishable by death.
The Righteous Among the Nations database can be searched by rescuer, rescued person, town and country. Many types of rescue activities are described, including hiding, providing forged documents, and arranging safe shelter for Jews.
The stories below are examples of rescuers identified in the database who aided Jews in Starokostyantyniv.
Pelageya Kozhushko lived in Starokostyantyniv with her 15-year-old daughter, Lidiya, and worked in the town's sugar factory. Among her neighbors and friends was Anna (neé Kogan) Petrova, a Jewish woman, who had also worked at the factory. Her husband was drafted to the Red Army and died in combat.
Anna and her one-year-old son Viktor were imprisoned in the Starokostyantyniv ghetto. Anna's five-year-old son Leonid was entrusted to the care of the Kozhushkos, who hid the boy in their house and barn, and sometimes in the nearby forest, and cared for him devotedly. When Viktor died in the ghetto, Anna’s friend Georgiy Bruyevich, who was not Jewish, bribed some of the guards and Anna was able to escape. Georgiy took Anna to rural areas far from Starokostyantyniv, where they lived as husband and wife. When neighbors suspected that Anna was Jewish, they had to flee, and Georgiy retrieved Leonid from the Kozhushkos. Anna, Leonid, and Georgiy were liberated near Kiev in November 1943. After the war, Anna and Georgiy married. Yad Vashem recognized Pelageya Kozhushko, her daughter Lidiya Dubova, and Georgiy Bruyevich as Righteous Among the Nations.
Photographs Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem
Georgiy Bruyevich
Georgiy Bruyevich
Lidiya Kozhushko Dubova
Pelageya Kozhushko
Olga Galina and Valentina Chentsova (not pictured) were sisters living in a house rented from the Gladshtein family in Starokostyantyniv. Galina, a German language teacher, was recruited to work as a translator when the Nazis occupied the town in July 1941.
Galina used her position to help save Jews: She secretly took and forged official forms from her office and gave them to her Jewish friends and other people being persecuted.
In spring 1942, Galina and Valentina contacted their friend Chaya Gladshtein, who was imprisoned in the local ghetto and who begged them to save her fourteen-year-old daughter Polina and three-year-old cousin Sheyndla. The Nazis had already murdered Sheyndla’s parents and Polina’s father and brother.
At the end of May 1942, shortly before a large-scale “action” on June 23, the Chentsovas brought the two Jewish girls to their home. A few weeks later, with false identity papers, Polina moved to the home of a friend of the Chentsova sisters, Olga Targonya in Shepetovka, who lived alone and worked as a secretary in the local civilian hospital. Olga took care of Polina for one year, during which time she introduced her to people as her niece. In the fall of 1943, the two of them joined the partisans.
Sheyndla, whose name was changed to Lyuba, stayed with the Chentsovas, who told their neighbors that they found the child abandoned at the railway station. In 1943, Galina managed to register her as her daughter and, thanks to the decency of the neighbors who knew about her true identity and kept it secret, the Chentsovas were able to save the life of the young child.
After liberation, Sheyndla was adopted by her relatives. Polina Gladshtein survived and married.
Galina Chentsova died in 1946. Her sister Valentina was accused of anti-Soviet activities and exiled to Siberia for ten years. Olga Targonya Kolomiyets married and moved to Kiev.
Yad Vashem recognized Galina Chentsova, Valentina Chentsova, and Olga Kolomiyets, as Righteous Among the Nations.
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