2 Execution site(s)
Vasyl F., born in 1927, an eyewitness to the shooting :
”All the Jews were marked with yellow six-pointed stars. So, it was easy to recognize a Jew in the street. Together with my friends, we saw the Jews being rounded up. They were taken in groups of 20-25 people in the trucks. In all, there were four trucks who brought the victims towards the site. The execution was conducted by about twenty Germans, but only two of them finished off those who were still alive inside the pit.” (Witness n°2651U, interviewed in Stara Pryluka, on September 11, 2019)
“On December 1, 1944, we civilians of Novaya Priluka village [today Nova Pryluka], Turbov district, […] established that during the German occupation, in 1941, the German barbarians murdered 2,500 civilians of Novaya Priluka, Turbov district, Vinnitsa Region. The purpose [of this murder] was the annihilation of the Jewish population, namely: [Note: follow a long list of the Jewish victims]”. [Act drawn up by Soviet State Extraordinary Commission (ChGK) on December 1, 1944; GARF 7021-54-1257, pp.90-94]
Pryluka, founded in 1146, is a village located 24km (15mi) north east of Vinnytsia. The first records about the Jews go back to the 18th century. From the beginning of the 18th century, the village was divided into two villages: Nova Pryluka (Note: New) and Stara (Note: Old) Pryluka. Nova Pryluka has become a commerce center. As a result, all the Jews from Stara Pryluka moved to Nova Pryluka. In 1897, 2,011 Jews lived in Nova Pryluka making up almost 80% of the total population. Most of Jews owned shops and small industries in the village. For instance, a brickyard was managed by a Jew, Guershko Dudnik. Some of the Jews were artisans, such as shoemakers, tailors, and ironsmiths. Many Jews from the village suffered from the Civil War and a wave of pogroms conducted in 1918 in the region. There was a Yiddish school in 1920s-1930s, but it was closed in 1936. Due to immigration to the bigger towns, the Jewish community decreased. In 1926, only 55% of the total population was Jewish.
Nova Pryluka was occupied by the German troops in mid-July 1941 and remained under the German occupation until January 1944. Before the occupation, the Nova Pryluka Jews managed to evacuate to the East. According to the historian Martin Dean, about 500 Jews remained in the village. Shortly after the occupation, all the Jews were registered and marked with yellow distinguishing marks in the form of Stars of David on their chests and backs. One week after the start of the occupation, on July 31, 1941, 70 Jewish men were rounded up and taken to be shot out of the town. A short time afterwards, about 110 local Jewish women and children were shot to death. The remaining Jews were resettled in a ghetto created in September 1941. The ghetto was liquidated in November 1941. During the liquidation about 2,500 Jews, men, women, children and elder people, were rounded-up and taken to the village of Stara Pryluka, located 3km away across the Desna River, where they were murdered. Before being shot, the victims were forced to strip and lie down in ditches (created and used before the war by a collective farm to store vegetables), and then they were shot dead. The exact date of this massacre is unknown. The massacre was conducted by the members of Einsatzkommando 5 of Einsatzgruppe C who were helped by local auxiliary policemen. Those who were spared and those who managed to hide during the liquidation were found out and shot on July 24-25, 1942, in a forest near the village of Lisova Lysiyivka, 12km west of Nova Pryluka.
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