The territory of the Jewish ghetto (July-October 1941)
On 30 September the ghetto was already moved to another place, to the embankment of the Dubrovenka river, a small tributary of the Dnieper.
Jewish families were brought to the ghetto from all parts of the city. They were allowed to take with them only what they could carry in their hands, and they were placed in liberated houses and houses where Jews were already living. These were mostly women, old people and children, i.e. the men who were to be conscripted were already at the front or in the militia. In the first days, several groups of youths and teenagers escaped from the unguarded ghetto. Only a few of them survived by crossing the front line. Dozens of people lived in wooden houses with a few rooms. Overcrowding, humiliation, hunger and helplessness, an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear must have made it impossible to organise any resistance.
The ghetto did not solve any economic, labour, housing and urban problems. The isolation of the Jews was probably necessary to organise their extermination.
The ghetto existed for such a short time that it probably did not make sense for the Nazis to impose any special laws and restrictions. They simply chose a place where there were many empty houses. Before the war, this was a neighbourhood where Jews lived for the most part. The "Russian" population had been temporarily evicted. The ghetto was also not fenced and initially had no special protection.
On the photo, the flood of 1942 can be seen.
On 10 April 1942, the small river Dubrovenka, on the banks of which the Jewish ghetto was located, turned into an unstoppable water avalanche that swept away everything in its path. Archival documents and people's testimonies allow us to reconstruct the picture of the tragic event. The flood occurred due to the mistake of repair workers and bombers. The ice formed over a large hole with water was blown up. An avalanche of water with ice shards rushed between the banks of Dubrovenka, taking with it into the Dnieper the houses from the whole street, torn from their foundations, along with furniture, people and animals, and uprooting trees. The flood lasted only 22 minutes, but the destruction and casualties were enormous.
The flood raged and destroyed everything in its path in the very place where the condemned prisoners of the Jewish ghetto had suffered a few months earlier. There is still a legend in the city that the Dubrovenka River, which witnessed the destruction of the Jewish ghetto, was overflowing with human suffering, and that the flood was nature's response to human cruelty and the punishment of the townspeople for their indifference to the deaths of their compatriots.
