Possible Fourth Jewish Mass Grave Reported in Rohatyn

Last Thursday, Marla and I made another trip to Rohatyn to check the status of the Jewish burial sites, both cemeteries and both mass graves. We are pleased with how all of the sites look now; all are being cared for very well this year, with cutting and maintenance when the grass becomes tall. We are grateful to our workers at these sites, Ihor Zalypko and Vasyl Yurkiv, for their steadfast watchfulness and efforts.

Ця сторінка також доступна українською.

Our main purpose for traveling to Rohatyn on this occasion was to interview an elderly man who has information from 25 years ago about a possible Jewish mass grave site in the city, at a location which was not previously known to us. At the end of July, Ihor Zalypko reported to us through our colleague Vasyl Yuzyshyn that he had spoken with the man not long before, and he believed we should speak with him also. Ihor made the arrangements for us to meet the man and see the site during our visit.

As background to the visit this week, we are aware of two marked Jewish mass graves in Rohatyn, both with memorial monuments from a survivors and descendants project in the late 1990s, and both with information signs from our work with ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative earlier this year. These two sites were surveyed in late spring of 2017 with non-invasive ground-penetrating radar (GPR) equipment in an effort to determine the physical boundaries of the grave pits; a report on the results of those studies was published by the archaeologists who conducted them in autumn of 2017, and we summarized their report for our website as well.

Less scientific but no less valuable to reconstructing the wartime history of Rohatyn are eyewitness reports, including the memoirs of Jewish survivors of the Rohatyn ghetto, oral testimonies of Ukrainian witnesses to the local killings and burials (most of whom were children at the time), and the accidental discoveries of hidden grave sites by local people in the decades since the Holocaust. For example, the work of the archaeologists in 2017 was aided by an interview they made during the survey at the north mass graves in Rohatyn, when a worker described unearthing human remains while scooping clay for brickmaking at the rear of the vodokanal facility some years earlier. A previous manager of the vodokanal site told Marla and me during an interview in early 2018 about another accidental exposure of remains when trenches were dug during the 1980s for a planned building foundation outside of the 2017 GPR survey; the ground was closed again and the building was never constructed, so the archaeology team returned to Rohatyn in 2019 to survey again, and confirmed the presence of a grave in that location.

A third Jewish mass grave site in Rohatyn, unconfirmed by archaeology survey but clearly and unambiguously described in a Jewish memoir of the war years, is somewhere within the new Jewish cemetery. The 2017 GPR survey failed to determine where exactly on the cemetery grounds this grave pit was created (there may be more than one), though there are possible visual clues in the 1944 Luftwaffe aerial photo of Rohatyn, and Rabbi Kolesnik of Ivano-Frankivsk has proposed a specific location (based on the profile of the terrain and other clues) during his visits to the site with us in past years. In his memoir of the years before, during, and after the war in and around Rohatyn, Borys Arsen described from first-hand knowledge the ghetto deaths from starvation, typhus, and freezing especially of very young and old Jews, whose bodies were carted en masse to the new Jewish cemetery for burial in pits there.

Our meeting this week brings a possible fourth Jewish mass grave site to light. The man who reported this information is Mykhailo Ivanovych Makoida (Михайло Іванович Макойда), a Rohatyn resident who was born in the village of Klishchivna (about 12km north of Rohatyn), and who is currently 82 years old. According to his oral reporting and his answers to questions we posed during the interview, in the 1990s he worked as the director of a meat and produce storage facility in Rohatyn which served an agricultural cooperative. In 1999 he was operating a bulldozer on an undeveloped part of the facility in order to level and prepare the ground for asphalting and the construction of more warehouses.

Suddenly his bulldozer slumped downward by more than a meter and became stuck in a newly-formed depression. Men and machines were needed to extract the bulldozer, and in the process human remains were discovered at the bottom of the depression. Mr. Makoida says that the activity attracted onlookers, and an elderly man who lived on a hill just north of the site walked down, and said that during the wartime occupation Germans killed Jews on the site and the corpses were buried there; Mr. Makoida stressed that he could not verify this man’s information himself, and that the man is now deceased. Continuing his report, Mr. Makoida said that the Rohatyn Mayor’s office was contacted about the find, with the suggestion to exhume the remains and move them to one of the Jewish cemeteries, but the Mayor’s office opposed that idea so the bulldozer was used to fill in the hole with soil, then compact and level it. Eventually a service road through the area was created with a layer of asphalt, and light buildings were constructed around it.

Today the extent of the original storage facility is still faintly visible in outline in satellite images of the area, north of Vasyl Stus Street in Rohatyn. A few buildings still stand in one corner, including a co-op which continues to operate on the western part of the facility. Ownership of the facility’s land is unclear now; Ihor Zalypko told us he would inquire at the city office and let us know. Although the land and surrounding views were clear in 1999, most of the land of the original facility is now taken over by trees and wild grasses, including the eastern part of the facility which Mr. Makoida identified as the location where the grave was seen 25 years ago. A thin layer of broken asphalt still remains where we stood while discussing the history of the site.

We captured the GPS coordinates of the possible grave where we stood as 49.4054, 24.6210; you can see the coordinates linked to satellite images on Google Maps and on Bing Maps by clicking the links here. While we do not know the date or circumstances of the killings and burials at this location, we note that zooming out either of the maps linked here shows that the site is on the route that Jews were marched from the ghetto on 20 March 1942 in the first major aktion in Rohatyn. The site is also near the Rohatyn train station, where Jews were rounded up in two aktions in September and December of 1942 for deportation to the death camp at Bełżec; many of the victims were killed in the ghetto and at the station during those events before ever being forced onto trains.

Mr. Makoida estimated from memory that the size of the pit into which his bulldozer dropped was slightly larger than the outline of the machine, so perhaps 4 meters by 6 to 8 meters, and around 1.5 meters deep; the full grave size may be still larger. Mr. Makoida’s clear memory of the discovery on the day 25 years ago makes Marla and me confident of the presence of a mass grave in that location, and we believe that the tale told by the elderly neighbor in 1999 plus the absence of other explanations strongly suggest the victims were Jewish. To respect Jewish religious traditions, only non-invasive techniques could be used to identify the grave boundaries, and no excavations should be made to try to determine the circumstances of their deaths. We will discuss possible options for protection and commemoration with our colleagues in Rohatyn Jewish Heritage, the City of Rohatyn, and the experienced coordinators of the former Ukrainian/German Connecting Memory program, before assessing any next steps.

Marla and I would like to express our gratitude to Mykhailo Makoida for speaking publicly about this important history and for meeting with us, to Ihor Zalypko for alerting us to the information and for arranging and facilitating the meeting, and to our friend Alex Dunai for transporting us to Rohatyn for the meeting and interpreting for us all through the interview.