Holocaust in Bolekhiv information

During the Holocaust, the Jewish population of over 3000 in Bolekhiv (Yiddish: Bolechov, בולוחוב or באלעכוב, Polish: Bolechów) in 1940, with additional thousands of Jews brought in from the surrounding villages and towns in 1941 and 1942, was mostly annihilated, brutally, by the Germans with local Ukrainian collaborators. Only 48 of Bolekhiv's Jews were known to have survived the war.^[1]

A wealth of documentation exists about the atrocities committed in this town, beginning already in 1935, before World War II, by the local population and government, and ending with the total annihilation of the Jewish population by 1943. A book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn, tells the story of the town and the demise of its Jews, according to testimony, most of which was found at the Yad Vashem holocaust museum in Jerusalem. A survivor, Shlomo Adler, published a book "I am a Jew Again" about the town in Hebrew,^[2] and a German writer Anatol Regnier who married an Israeli singer the daughter of a Jewish Bolechov survivor, wrote another version of the town story "Damals in Bolechów: Eine jüdische Odyssee".^[3]

A documentary movie "Neighbors and Murderers" was made, about the books and their authors, following the survivors' stories, and those of some of the Ukrainian neighbors who witnessed what happened, also confronting some of the Ukrainian perpetrators' family. The movie ends with the sister in law of one of the murderers from the Ukrainian police, herself a victim of the communist regime sent to Siberia for many years, asking forgiveness, and the survivor asking if he is allowed to forgive.^[4]