Our Town Stepan (Ukraine)

Stepan is a town in western Ukraine situated on a plain along the Horyn River. The name came from a King of Poland, Stefan Boturi, who drove off the Russians in the late 16th century after they tried to expand their influence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of which Stepan was then a part. But like many of the towns in the region, Stepan would change hands many times, returning to Russian rule in 1795 after the partition of Poland, where it stayed until that country was reconstituted after World War I. The Polish period ended in 1939 with the Nazi invasion at the start of World War II. After its liberation, it emerged as part of Ukraine.

In 1775, 521 people lived in town. That grew to 1,717 Jews by1847 and, in the Russian census of 1897, there were 5,137 people, of whom 1,854 were Jews. On the eve of the Holocaust, about 1,300 Jews lived in Stepan, which amounted to about a third of the local population.

Among the highlights of Stepan's Yizkor book:

In "Our Fathers' Homes," the book's contributors recreated a list of all families in the town according to their dwelling place at the time of the German occupation. The editor of the book saw this as testimony that the town and its residents still lived in the hearts, and memories of those whose lives were cut short.

"Stepan Before World War I and the Period of the War" introduces the reader to the beauty of the town's setting and the pleasures its people enjoyed along the river and in the forests before pivoting to recount the hardships that followed the outbreak of the war and the increasing antisemitism that was stoked by Ukrainian nationalists.

"Death and Sorrow" and "The Ruins of My Town," are parts of a long section on the Holocaust. They detail the years of terror and turmoil that followed the German invasion and occupation, the establishment and liquidation of the ghetto, and the escape of the author, with his mother and sister, to the forests. They fled just as most of the town's Jews were being put on "death carts" to take them to pits that had been prepared near the town of Kostopol. Many tried to escape along the way; few succeeded. The rest were brutally murdered. For the author, his escape was the start of a long and perilous bid for survival on the run, during which his mother died in his arms.

From the book's epilogue: "With the editing of the material that the remnants of the town of Stepan wrote and collected for the book, we became aware of the town itself, its history, its people and its scenery. And it seems that we were born in Stepan, we walked in its streets, we prayed in its synagogues, we washed ourselves in the Horyn River and in its forests we sought concealment and protection from the gentile soldiers that wanted to destroy us."