1 Killing site(s)
Ivan B. : "I know that the 180 Jews of Gnivan were shot near the woods on a military land. They had been rounded up during the night." (Witness N°1004, interviewed in December, 2010)
"The German occupation began in the July of 1941 in Gnivan. The first days after the occupation, the German gendarmerie gathered a group of civilians ( women, children and elderly people) in order to bring them in an administrative building. They hit them in this building, then they took them to the woods to shot them with machine-guns." [Act of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission, RG-22.002M/7021-54/1252 ]
« I saw the pit that had been dug, which measured 5x2.5m. I could no longer guess the depth of the pit as it had already been filled with bodies. The civilians covered the pit with soil. I couldn’t estimate the number of shot Jews who were still moving in the pit. I guess, according to the size of the pit, there must have been about 20-30 victims. The pit was situated on the edge of the forest, more precisely about several meters away from the forest. The place was situated about ten-fifteen minutes away from Gnivan.” [Deposition of Karl K., B162-7366]
Gnivan is a small city along the Bug river, located 20km south of Vinnytsia. There were 360 Jews living in the city before the war, 11% of the total population. The city was under German occupation from 1941 to 1944.
Shortly after the start of the occupation, a group of Jewish men of Gnivan was shot in a military field. The rest of the Jews living in Gnivan were registered and forced to perform various kinds of hard labor. In the summer of 1942, about 90 Jews were murdered together with the Jews from neighbor villages in the same place. Today, the place of the shooting is on the grounds of a military base.
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