Barashi (Barasze) | Zhytomyr

/ A local house ©Victoria Bahr/Yahad-in Unum A building where the Jews were confined prior to the shooting. The wooden building remains the original ©Victoria Bahr/Yahad-in Unum Yahad team goes to the execution site.©Victoria Bahr/Yahad-In Unum The execution site of about 100 Jews from Barashi, located in the middle of the field, about 2-3km away from the village. The place is known as the Serbinka ravine. ©Victoria Bahr/Yahad-in Unum

Execution of Jews in Barashi

1 Execution site(s)

Kind of place before:
Field
Memorials:
No
Period of occupation:
1941-1943
Number of victims:
About 100

Witness interview

Lyubov S., born in 1931, remembered: “There was an elderly Jewish couple living not far from my house. They also lived in a building with all the other Jews and I saw them in that column. When they had arrived to the pit they were forced to stand on the edge and were shot in such a way that they fell directly into the grave. Some of them were shot, some wounded, but they all fell into the pit. We were watching from the brushes. I saw that elderly couple; they were holding each other in an embrace and fell like that into the pit.” (Testimony n°1637, interviewed in Barashi on April 25, 2013)

German archives

“The remaining 100 Jews of Barashi were crammed into one building. At the end of October-beginning of November 1941, three Germans arrived in Barashi. The Ukrainian policemen of Barashi and Nepiznanychi were ordered to take 100 Jews to a bushy field 3 km east of Nepiznanychi. There young Jews had to dig a pit. All victims were forced to undress. There, the victims in groups of 7 to 10 persons were shot in the pit by SS officers armed with submachine guns.” [A closure report; B162-7362]

Historical note

Barashi is located 69 kilometers northwest of Zhytomyr. The village was populated by the Ukrainians, Germans, Poles and Jews. They all studied at the same school. The majority of Jews lived off of small scale businesses and craftmanship . Before the war, 320 Jews lived in the village making up 10% of the total population. The village Barashi was occupied by the Germans on July 12, 1941. Around 30% of the pre-war Jewish population remained in the village at the beginning of the occupation.

Holocaust by bullets in figures

Shortly after the German arrival, all Jews were registered and marked with armbands; they were also required to perform heavy labor. In the summer of 1941 an opened ghetto was established in the village and existed until early November 1941. At that time, about 100 remaining Jews, including those who were brought from nearing villages, were killed. The Aktion was conducted by SS units the German gendarmerie 

Jewishgen

Go to the Townpage on JewishGen Ukraine SIG website

Other links

Nearby villages

To support the work of Yahad-in Unum please consider making a donation

Do you have additional information regarding a village that you would like to share with Yahad ?

Please contact us at contact@yahadinunum.org
or by calling Yahad – In Unum at +33 (0) 1 53 20 13 17