1 Execution site(s)
Dmytro M., born in 1930: “YIU: Do you remember when the Germans arrived?
W: Yes, I do. The first Germans arrived on horseback. They arrived calmly. At that moment I was playing on the street and I remember seeing them passing by. They had big, beautiful horses. It was the first time that I had seen such horses. All the population came out of the houses to see the Germans. Some of them even brought them milk as a greeting. The Germans didn’t stay;, they just passed by.” (Witness n°2768U, interviewed in Yalanets, on August 31, 2020)
Yalanets is located 160km (99mi) southeast of Vinnytsia. Little information is known about the prewar Jewish community. According to the witness interviewed by Yahad, several Jewish families lived in Yalantes. They were mainly merchants. The community did not have a synagogue or cemetery. A big Jewish community lived in Bershad, a town located 10km away. In 1853, 2,941 Jews lived in the town. In 1900 the Jewish population numbered 4,500 people comprising 64% of the total population. The community possessed synagogues, several houses of prayer, and a Jewish cemetery. The Yalanets Jews didn’t evacuate before the war and continued to live in the village.
Yalanets was occupied by German and Romanian forces at the end of July 1941. The village remained under the Romanians and became part of Transnistria in September 1941. Shortly after, a ghetto was created where the Jews deported in the fall of 1941, from Bessarabia and Bukovina, were confined. According to the witness interviewed by Yahad, the Jews were dispatched between three collective farms. One group was placed in the pigsties that belong to the Karl Marx farm, another group was herded to the cowshed from the Chkalova farm, and another one in the building that belonged to the collective farm ‘Piatiletka’. Under the occupation 340 Jews died from starvation and diseases. Only 88 of them managed to survive.
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