A small settlement Poninka is located 7 km away from the district center Polonny in the north of Khmelnitsky region. Prior to the war Jews lived here together with Ukrainians and Poles. Most of them worked at a local paper-mill.
During the occupation in autumn 1941 Nazis exterminated the entire Jewish population of the settlement - they failed to depart eastwards escaping the brown plaque. Fascists brutally killed nearly one thousand persons, chiefly women, children and the aged in the depth of the woods.
Only three persons survived: a Jew Yakov Bogula was saved by the neighboring Ukrainian family of Rybachuk and a Pole Anton Baginsky saved his wife Yevgeniya and daughter Galina. Six huge communal graves guard the ashes of the killed. One of the graves became the last resort for, as witnesses assert, the Jewish children killed by fascist fiends.
After the liberation the workers of Poninkov paper-mill created a monument in the death place of Jews-martyrs. In 1953 the local council established cast iron figure sections around the monument instead of a former wooden hence and tidied up the burial territory.
In early July local inhabitants got alarmed at the news brought by the forester V.Shvorob. He was the first to discover the traces of vandalism.
People without honesty (unfortunately, they can be found everywhere) had decided to earn from metallic fence around the communal graves located it the heart of the forest. They broke the peace of the sacred place, dismantled and took away part of the cast iron fence - 30 sections. Chairman of the local council V. Malinkovsky was informed about the incident, a corresponding act was drawn up and directed to the law enforcement agencies of the Polonsky district. |