• Memorial to the murdered Jews near Chukiv
Near the village of Chukiv, a memorial remembers the murdered Jewish prisoners of the forced labour camp that the SS operated there in 1942 and 1943.
Image: Chukiv, 2019, View of the mass grave with the new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Chukiv, 2019, View of the mass grave with the new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Image: Chukiv, 2019, Detailed view of the new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Chukiv, 2019, Detailed view of the new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Chukiv is a village six kilometres south of Nemyriv, which was occupied by the German Wehrmacht on July 21, 1941. A few kilometres south of Chukiv was the border to Transnistria, the Romanian occupied territory of the Ukraine. In spring 1942 the SS set up a forced labour camp in Chukiv for Jewish prisoners. A whole series of such camps was set up in order to advance the construction of the strategically important »Transit Road IV« (in German »Durchgangsstraße IV«) from Przemyśl to Dnepropetrovsk (today: Dnipro) and Stalino (today: Donetsk) in the east of Ukraine. Since most of the Jews in the German-occupied territories had already been murdered or their murder was already being planned, the SS resorted to Jews in Romanian ghettos in Transnistria. Since the living conditions for Jews in the ghettos there were usually extremely bad, many believed the German promises and volunteered for work. Many also took their family members with them.
The SS housed the camp in Chukiv in an old school building and fenced it with barbed wire. The living conditions were catastrophic and the work without sufficient equipment was hard and dangerous. Diseases spread. From September 1942 onwards, SS units repeatedly shot prisoners from the forced labour camps, especially children and elderly people, as on September 14, when the SS murdered up to 300 Jews near Nemyriv. In early February, the SS carried out selections in five forced labour camps along the road construction project: all those classified as »unfit for work« and all those over 40 were deported and shot near an airfield near Chukiv on February 5, a total of approximately 300 people. In spring the SS shot another group of about 200 Jews at the cemetery of Chukiv. Probably the murder operation was connected with the dissolution of the forced labour camp in Chukiv, which took place at the same time.
Image: Chukiv, 2019, View of the mass grave with the new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Chukiv, 2019, View of the mass grave with the new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Image: Chukiv, 2019, Detailed view of the new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Chukiv, 2019, Detailed view of the new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
During 1942 and 1943, German units murdered hundreds of Jewish forced labourers and their family members in Chukiv. Most of them came originally from the Romanian territories Bessarabia and Bukovina. At the airstrip of Chukiv alone, the SS murdered about 300 Jews at the beginning of February 1943.
Image: Chukiv, 2019, Mass grave and new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Chukiv, 2019, Mass grave and new memorial, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Image: Chukiv, 2019, The outline of the mass grave, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Chukiv, 2019, The outline of the mass grave, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Only very few prisoners managed to escape from the camps of the »Transit Road IV«. One of them was Rachel Milner from Czernivtsi (Czernowitz), who wrote a short report about her experiences there shortly after the war. This report was to appear in the »Black Book« which the two writers Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg intended to publish about the fate of the Soviet Jews. However, the book was never allowed to appear in the Soviet Union and was only published decades later.
For a long time there was no sign of remembrance at the mass graves at the former airfield in Chukiv. Even after the independence of Ukraine, no one felt responsible for the killing sites, presumably because the victims were not from the area. Still, the area where the graves are located was not used for agriculture, so that trees were allowed to grow over the graves.
As part of the »Protecting Memory« project, which is based at the Berlin office of the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, non-invasive archaeological investigations were carried out in 2016 and 2017. It was established that there are at least three mass graves at the former airfield. The next step was to erect a memorial there and to make the outlines of the mass graves visible with the help of stones. In addition, a stele in Ukrainian, English and Hebrew informs about the fate of the Jewish prisoners in the forced labour camp Chukiv. The memorial was inaugurated in September 2019.
Image: Chukiv, 2019, Information stele, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Chukiv, 2019, Information stele, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko

Image: Chukiv, 2019, New memorial at the mass grave, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Chukiv, 2019, New memorial at the mass grave, Stiftung Denkmal, Anna Voitenko
Name
Пам’ятник для вбитих євреїв у Чукові
Web
https://www.erinnerungbewahren.de/tschukiw/
E-Mail
info@erinnerung-bewahren.de
Open
The memorial is accessible at all times.