Before the Holocaust, the Jews had lived in Iampol for several centuries, advancing the hypothesis that their presence in the locality dates back to the 16th century, with the settlement of the Jews in Podolia. In the 18th century, a new cemetery was put into use in the city because there were no more free spaces in the old burial place. In the 1802 census, 1,850 Jews were mentioned as inhabitants of the city, and in the 1897 census their number was 2,823. In the city, there were at one time four synagogues. In 1939, the number of Jews in Iampol was 1,753, which represents 24.4% of the city’s population, and that of Jews in Iampol district was 3,248. The occupations of the Jews were in the fields of crafts or viticulture. In the city, in 1827, there were three guilds of merchants, whose members were mostly Jews, and in 1852 of the 79 craftsmen in Iampol, 66 were Jews.
Persecutions
After the occupation of the city on July 18th, 1941, units of the German army launched operations to kill the Jews in the region. By August 19th, 1941, 4,425 Jews had been killed between Hotin and Iampol by the Einsatzgruppe D - German special forces tasked with identifying and exterminating Jews. In September 1941, the city came under the administration of the Romanian authorities, becoming the capital of Jugastru County.
During World War II, the city of Iampol was one of the most important crossing points of the Dniester. Until September 1942, through Iampol, 35,276 Jews were deported from Romania. In the city, convoys of deportees arrived after long marches, and most had been robbed of goods on the way, beaten and abused by the soldiers of the guard troops. Their establishment in the city was forbidden. Usually, Iampol was a stop for them for a few days, as they were accommodated in the former garrison of Soviet border guards. After a few days, the convoys set off again to the east, towards the Bug.
Before entering Iampol, some of the Jews were brought to their knees on the Romanian bank of the Dniester, facing Iampol, after which they were photographed by Romanian border guards. According to some testimonies, during such sessions to immortalize the suffering of those deported, some of the Jews were beaten. One victim was one of the deported rabbis, whom “the gendarme platoon leader Burtă mistreated […], beating him until his blood flowed, after which he snatched his beard and favourites”.
As a result of these convoys, dozens of dead remained in Iampol. Most were old men, who no longer had the physical strength to continue on their way.
For reconstruction works in the city, the Romanian authorities allowed a number of 350 Jews to remain in the city, most of them, craftsmen. For their accommodation, a ghetto was improvised on the territory of several streets in the city. The houses they lived in were dilapidated, with no doors or windows. Jews worked in the city’s tailoring, carpentry or shoemaking workshops or did various jobs for local authorities. For a year, Ukrainian Jews who survived the July-August 1941 assassinations lived on a street outside the ghetto, where the headquarters of the Romanian gendarmerie and Ukrainian police were located. After that, they were all relocated to the ghetto, along with the Jews deported from Romania. From that moment, the ghetto was surrounded by barbed wire.
Exit from this concentration camp was possible only for getting supplies from the market in the city or for bringing water from the only pump in the locality. Exits were made on the basis of a permit. Those caught outside the camp without an exit permit were killed by Ukrainian police or Romanian gendarmes. Such an assassination took place on January 27th, 1943, when 72 Jews were executed. In November 1942, 600 Ukrainian Jews were transferred to the Ladijin Stone Quarry in Tulcin.
According to the available information, as long as the prefect Gheorghiade was in charge of the county, and the commander of the gendarmes legion was Colonel Ulman, the treatment of the Jews in the ghetto was correct. The two demanded that the Jews taken to work be paid in money or food for their activities. However, the treatment of the Jews worsened after their removal.
Existing data mention that in March 1943 there were 500 Jews in the ghetto, and in September their number was 504. Of these, 348 were from Bukovina and 156 from Bessarabia. In addition to the Iampol ghetto, between April and September 1943, there were other deportees in Jugastru County. Thus, at the level of the entire county, in April 1943 there were 1,097 deportees, and in September 1,625. From December 1943, the repatriation operations of the Jews from the Iampol ghetto began. Among those repatriated were 65 orphans, aged 1 to 15, who were sent to Romania. In March 1944, the city was occupied by the Soviets, and all Jews still in the ghetto were liberated.
Sources:
Jean Ancel, Transnistria, vol. I, București, Editura Atlas, 1998, pp. 103-104.
Ovidiu Creangă, Iampol, în Geoffrey P. Megargee (general editor), Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933-1945, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2018, pp. 691-693.