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The Rovno Ghetto (also: Równe or Rivne Ghetto, Yiddish: ראָװנע) was a World War II Nazi ghetto established in December 1941 in the city of Rovno, western Ukraine, in the territory of German-administered Reichskommissariat Ukraine. On 6 November 1941, about 21,000 Jews were massacred by Einsatzgruppe C and their Ukrainian collaborators. The remaining Jews were imprisoned in the ghetto. In July 1942, the remaining 5,000 Jews were trucked to a stone quarry near Kostopil and murdered there.Jeffrey Burds (2026). 9781137388391, Northeastern University. Sponsored by the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, New York. . ISBN 9781137388391
The ghetto was liquidated on July 13, 1942. Only a handful of Jews managed to escape deportation.
Located in the south-eastern region of Kresy, about west of the interwar border between Poland and the Soviet Union, Równe was occupied by the Red Army upon the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17, 1939 and incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR.
When Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the city fell to the Wehrmacht on June 28, 1941. On August 20, 1941, Rovno was declared the capital of German Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The Jewish ghetto in the city of Rovno was set up by the German administration soon after the Reichskommissariat Ukraine was formed.Jewish Telegraphic Agency (February 8, 1942), All Jews Expelled from Zgierz; Nazis Introduce Ghetto for Jews in Rovno.
At the beginning of the German occupation, around 23,000 Polish Jews resided in Rovno along with refugees from western Poland, who made up half the population of the city.Yad Vashem (2012), Volhynia and Rovno. Historical Background, via Internet Archive.
When the Nazis captured the city from the Soviets, they carried out several executions of its Jewish population.
The ghetto was declared "Judenfrei"at the end of July by the Reichskommissar Erich Koch.
The remaining 5,000 Jews possessed skills deemed essential to the administration of the occupation were taken away from their families and placed in the ghetto. An estimated 22,000-23,000 Jews were killed in Rovno.
On February 2, 1944 Rivne was liberated from the Germans by Soviet troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front during the Rovno-Lutsk operation.
150 Jews were saved by an engineer working for the local Reichsbahn, Hermann Graebe, as the ghetto was being liquidated. The Jews who managed to escape deportation joined the partisans and later took part in the liberation of Rovno by the Red Army in the Battle of Rovno, in February 1944. The surviving Jews began to gather in the city after the arrival of the Red Army, and by the end of 1944, some 1,200 Jews were accounted for in Rovno; among them, future author David Lee Preston ( The Sewer People of Lvov) and his family.
On December 13, 2019, at the site of the former ghetto entrance, a monument to the victims of the Rivne ghetto was unveiled by the NGO Mnemonika in partnership with the Jewish community of Düsseldorf. It consists of a half-destroyed wall built from bricks from one of the houses in the ghetto territory, a suitcase as a symbol of the forced eviction to the ghetto and the hardships of the Holocaust victims, and a Temple menorah as a symbol of Jewish tradition.
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