The Holocaust in Zdolbuniv: Preconditions, Course, and Commemoration

We invite you to a lecture by Petro Dolhanov and the presentation of his book The Life and Death of the Jewish Community of Zdolbuniv, which will take place as part of the public program "Source as a Choice".

On August 28-31, 1942, a meeting of the commissioners of the Volyn-Podillya district, one of the units of the German occupation administrative-territorial department of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, took place. At this meeting, an implementing decision was made to kill all the Jews in the region within the next five weeks. This is one of the key points in the chronology of the organization of the genocide of Jews in western Volyn, which included both unsystematic acts of violence against Jews committed by German soldiers, einsatzgruppen, and local police, as well as organized actions to eliminate ghettos and mass shootings. The history of the Holocaust in Zdolbuniv follows both the general trends characteristic of the region and falls out of this regional context.

For example, after the acts of violence against Jews in the summer of 1941 committed by German army soldiers, Sicherheitsdienst units, and local police, which were typical for the entire region, no mass murder of Jews occurred in the town until the end of the summer of 1942. Although ghettoization in western Volyn began in October 1941, a ghetto did not appear in Zdolbuniv until early June 1942. Despite the differences in the local dynamics of the Holocaust, the final stage and consequences of the genocide for this region and for occupied Europe as a whole meant the mass murder of almost all Jews. The Zdolbuniv ghetto was eliminated on October 13, 1942. Only a very few Zdolbuniv Jews managed to survive the Nazi occupation.

The lecture will focus on the peculiarities of the course and social dynamics of the Holocaust in Zdolbuniv, which led to the murder of almost all Jews in the town. At the same time, it will show the ways in which Jews survived, the choices and actions of non-Jewish residents of the town and its environs, the trajectories of the postwar fates of those Jews who managed to survive, and the peculiarities of postwar memorialization. The talk will address the question of why so few Jewish residents of Zdolbuniv survived.

The lecture is based on many years of experience in researching the microhistory of the Holocaust in western Volyn and the book The Life and Death of the Jewish Community of Zdolbuniv (2024), which traces the history of the city's Jewish community in the first half of the twentieth century, shows the coexistence of Jews, Ukrainians, Poles, and Czechs, and recreates in detail the main stages of the organization of the genocide in the city, including an almost hour-by-hour description of the liquidation of the Zdolbuniv ghetto on October 13, 1942.

The event will be part of the Center's public program "Source as a Choice," organized by the Center for Urban History in cooperation with EHRI. During the meetings, researchers will share their work with various sources on war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The choice to create and preserve sources can be one of the tools for embodying this violence or, on the contrary, for opposing it. Our choice to talk about these events through the prism of certain sources creates a field in which the complex past will live on in the present and future.