'This is how they are rest in peace at completely foreign country': Evacuation and the Holocaust of the Jews of Nadiyne

• In Event: Jewish, German, and Romanian Entanglements in Ukraine

Abstract

Yurii Kaparulin (University of Michigan/Kherson State University)

The territories of modern Ukraine became one of the first places of mass murder of Jews during the Second World War. Today, there are hundreds of (un)marked Holocaust sites where Jews were murdered or deported from neighboring European countries. Ukraine's Jewish losses are primarily studied through the murders that took place on Ukrainian soil, while the fate of Jews evacuated to the east of the Soviet Union is mostly considered in the context of the theme of rescue.
In this paper, the author examines cases in which evacuation did not always mean salvation for Jewish residents of Soviet Ukraine, and their murders took place outside of the country in the east. The paper focuses on the fate of the residents of the village of Nadiyne (present-day Zaporizhzhia oblast, Ukraine) who were evacuated to the village of Balabanovka (former ethnic German colony; present-day Rostov oblast, Russian Federation) and murdered by the German military after a failed second attempt to evacuate further into the USSR east in the summer of 1942. The central story is that of Semen Dikenstein, one of the few surviving Jews of Nadiyne, whose interview was recorded in the 1990s by the Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive.

Author

• Yurii Kaparulin, U of Michigan / Kherson State U (Ukraine)