On this day in 1942, in Chortkiv, in what is now western Ukraine, German Schutzpolizei and local police gathered about two thousand Jews and put them on trains to the Bełżec extermination camp. Roughly five hundred more, the sick and the children, were killed in the town itself. The operation went on into the following day.
Jews had lived in Chortkiv for centuries. There was a synagogue of stone by the river, and the town gave its name to a Hasidic court whose followers reached well beyond Galicia. Sabbath candles had been lit there, and children taught their letters there, for longer than most European states have existed. In two days that was ended.
Eighty-four years ago today. Most of the names are not recoverable; some are, in memorial books compiled by the few who survived and by their children. I do not have anything to add to the count.
Thank you, Miriam. The testimonies gathered after the war, taken down in displaced persons camps and later by families, did preserve a good many of the names — not all, but more than would otherwise have survived, and each one entered by someone who remembered the person.