Kamenets-Podolsk and its surroundings (Kamyanets Podilskyy, Ukraine) (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781962054102)

Kamyanets Podilskyy is a town in southwestern Ukraine that was the historic center of the Podolia region which was ruled in turns by Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and Turkey until it returned to the hands of the Russian empire in 1793. Like many towns in the area, it changed hands again several times due to the upheavals of World War I, first as part of Austria-Hungary and then the briefly-lived Ukrainian People's Republic until the Soviet Union occupied it in 1921. The Germans captured the town in World War 2 until the Soviets liberated it. It remained part of the Soviet Union until Ukraine declared its independence in 1990.

In the Russian census of 1897, there were 16,211 Jews in Kamyanets who constituted forty percent of all residents. In the twenty years after this census, the Jewish population in the city grew and, according to an estimate, totaled half of the city's population by the end of World War I. But those numbers waned due to the turmoil of the Russian revolution of 1917 and the change in regimes and governments in the wake of the war which resulted in the Jewish population looking for ways to escape from oppression and hardship, some by internal migration around Russia or Ukraine and some by emigration abroad.

The book includes chapters on the neighboring towns of Kamyanets: Balin, Dunayivtsi, Zamechov, Zhvanets, Minkovitz, Smotrych, Frampol, Kupyn and Kytaihorod.

It also has two chapters - "Holocaust Victims in Alphabetical Order" and "A Memorial Plaque to the Victims of the Holocaust" that contain many names of those who died as well as some notes on their families.

Kamyanets was invaded by German forces on June 22, 1941. In August, the Nazi SS murdered 23,600 people, including 10,000-15,000 Jews who had been deported from Hungary, according to their Nazi accounts. It was the first execution of that magnitude carried out during the Holocaust and was a stepping stone on the road to the "Final Solution." The Jewish community did not revive after the war.