Grosulovo

The town under occupation

German and Romanian troops took the village on 7 August 1941. Five days later, on 12 August, soldiers shot 124 Jews, thirty-five of them children, gathered in the local cemetery. The Odesa Genocide Museum names the unit responsible as Sonderkommando 11b and places the shooting in the area of the village of Boguslavka near Grosulovo. Romanian authorities took over the administration in September 1941 and romanianised the name of the town. Its affairs were placed in the hands of the prefect of Tiraspol, Colonel Georgescu Pompiliu, and his sub-prefect Alexandru Smochină. The Soviet local history records the occupiers looting the collective farm and the cultural and educational institutions and closing the schools, while private shops, taverns and the church reopened. Over the occupation 114 people were taken from the village for forced labour in Germany.

The town was a district centre before the war and remained one under the occupation. A Hrosulove raion of eleven village councils had been created in 1922, and the encyclopedia entry places the wartime camp in the Grosulovo raion of Tiraspol judeţ, in the south-western part of Romanian-controlled Transnistria. Căpitan Ioan A. Ionescu was chief of Tiraspol’s municipal police and Fimareta Grigoriencu headed the judeţ’s labour office, with Ioan Călin as her deputy. That chain of Romanian authority, rather than any German agency, is why the camp appears in Romanian records although its site lies in Ukraine.

Sabotage was real in the district, which is the context for the prisoners in the depot. The same local history records a group of fifteen operating in the town from May 1942 to April 1944, led by a Soviet soldier who had escaped captivity and lived under a false name. The group was in touch with the Odesa underground, distributed Soviet news bulletins and leaflets, organised sabotage of agricultural work in the raion and disabled tractors, and on 6 November 1943 one of its members hung a red flag on the water tower.

Deportation and the first camp

The camp was established in autumn 1941 after the Axis occupation. Most early Jewish deportees were sent farther east towards the Southern Bug; some technical specialists remained to work locally. The camp’s position within Romanian-controlled Transnistria explains its appearance in Romanian records, although its site lies in Ukraine.

Within a few months the Jewish population of the whole Tiraspol district had been reduced to almost nothing. Official registers for April 1942 listed no more than twenty-seven Jews, six men, eighteen women and three children. Those who stayed at Grosulovo were kept for their skills: three Jewish accountants worked in the raion at the wine factory, the milk collection points and an egg incubator, and a Jewish doctor worked at the medical centre. By the count of 1 September 1943 only two Jews from Bukovina remained in the town.

The Ukrainian prisoners

For most of the occupation the depot was a camp for Ukrainians. The survivor who arrived from Vapniarca in October 1943 recorded that the building had been a camp for Ukrainians suspected of connections with partisans and of sabotage, that at times it had held several thousand detainees, and that Romanian gendarmes had gradually handed most of them to the Germans, who took them to labour camps near the Bug or shot them. By October 1943 only 200 men and women were left.

Those who remained occupied a large hall on the ground floor. They had set up a rough workshop making lighters, pocket knives and other small objects, which they gave to the guards as presents or exchanged for food and cigarettes. The encyclopedia entry states that these Ukrainian prisoners were moved to another location after the Vapniarca group arrived. Where they were sent, and what became of them, is not established by any source consulted.

Sharing the tobacco depot

The Vapniarca transfer took place on 14 October 1943. Accounts of its size differ: the encyclopedia gives about 450, or 564 in other reports, while the survivor account gives a convoy of 564. A few dozen more Jewish deportees were brought from the Slivina disciplinary camp on 20 October. A Romanian return of November 1943 recorded 706 Jews in the Grosulovo camp, counted separately from the 49,927 then registered as deported to Transnistria.

The arrivals from Vapniarka were placed upstairs. Work parties cleaned the neglected building, repaired windows and doors, arranged sleeping places and dug a latrine. An improvised infirmary followed. The new arrivals included people weakened by imprisonment and illness, making basic shelter and nursing immediate priorities.

Prisoners organised their own representation and cultural activities. A clandestine radio brought news of the front. The account describes greater freedom to organise everyday life than at Vapniarka, while the camp remained guarded.

The camp administration allowed some religious observance and a theatrical performance in the winter of 1943. The infirmary mattered because many arrivals had been poisoned at Vapniarca by a fodder pea served as food there.

The commandant and the guard

The camp was guarded by Romanian gendarmes and its last commandant was Colonel Sabin Motora, a career officer of the gendarmerie who had also commanded Vapniarca; the encyclopedia entry spells his forename Savin. The volume published by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania with the Elie Wiesel National Institute gives his dates as 1892 to 1970 and describes him as an officer in the Romanian gendarmerie and commandant of the camps at Grosulovo and Vapniarka. A Romanian newspaper report of a gendarmerie remembrance service at his grave in 2013 adds that he entered the gendarmerie corps as a captain in 1920 and commanded the gendarmerie training centre at Lugoj between 1934 and 1937.

The Romanian Final Report on the Holocaust and the same Romanian volume both state that Motora took steps to evacuate the prisoners from Vapniarca to Grosulovo, closer to the Romanian border, contrary to the order he had been given to move them eastward and hand them to the Germans, and that he did so at risk to his military career and his life. The Final Report lists him among the Righteous under Yad Vashem file 2394.

How the prisoners were reached from Romania is only glimpsed. The Final Report records that an undersecretary of the Romanian railway authority, the engineer Constantin Paunescu, allotted special wagons for the carriage of parcels to Jews at Moghilev, Balta, Vapniarca and Grosulovo, a detail reported in the Bucharest press in January 1945.

Evacuation across the Dniester

In the spring of 1944, as the Red Army came closer, some Romanian authorities wanted the prisoners moved deeper into the German-controlled part of Transnistria or handed to the Germans. The camp commandant, Colonel Motora, who had also been the last commandant at Vapniarca, decided instead to take them west towards the Romanian border. On 10 March 1944 the group left Grosulovo on foot for Tiraspol. The survivor account records his order to the escort before they set out, that it was not their business to watch the prisoners but to protect them, and that the gendarmes were told to keep off the main roads to avoid withdrawing German units.

On the second day the column was stopped by an armed group of Soviet deserters serving the Germans. Motora arrived, ordered the escort to close ranks around the prisoners and marched them out of range. Learning that the administration of Transnistria was to pass to the Germans at midnight, he moved the exhausted column on again from Tiraspol to the Dniester bridge, where permission to cross was obtained after several hours. They reached Tighina on the western bank at midnight on 13 March 1944. The federation’s account credits his actions with saving about 600 Jewish prisoners. These evacuation totals describe the group present in March 1944 and are not counts of Ukrainians, nor a population figure for the camp as a whole.

Crossing the river did not bring freedom. Benditer’s testimony has the convoy quarantined at Tighina for three weeks, boarding a train on 31 March, reaching Bucharest on 1 April and held in the railway carriages, and on 4 April detained again at Târgu Jiu, the camp from which many had been deported to Transnistria two years earlier. Colonel Motora was recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations in 1983 for what he did for prisoners, Jewish and non-Jewish, including members of persecuted religious minorities.

Liberation and the name

Troops of the 3rd Ukrainian Front took the village on 6 April 1944 after three days of fighting, in which the Soviet account says more than 200 Red Army soldiers died. The village was renamed Velyka Mykhailivka soon afterwards; the Soviet local history of 1969 gives the date as January 1946.

The two registers of the occupation do not describe its victims in the same terms. The Soviet local history counts 124 inhabitants of the village killed, thirty-five of them children. The encyclopedia entry, drawing on the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission’s own report, gives the same figures for Jews shot in the cemetery on 12 August 1941. Nothing found in this research records a memorial at the tobacco depot or any marking of the camp on the site.

The town keeps its former name in one public institution. A travel guide to the settlement describes the Velyka Mykhailivka historical and local lore museum, known as the Hrosulovo Museum, after what the village was called before the renaming.