The Akhmechetka concentration camp (also spelled Akmechetka and known in Romanian sources as Acmecetca) was a Romanian-administered concentration camp at in the Golta County of the Transnistria Governorate during World War II. It was established in the spring of 1942 by Golta prefect Modest Isopescu on an abandoned pig farm in the Domanovka district.
The camp was used primarily to isolate Jews considered unable to work, including elderly and sick people, women and children, as well as Jews sent there as punishment. Approximately 4,000 Jews were initially confined at Akhmechetka. Prisoners were crowded into four former pigsties and a warehouse surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Ukrainian police subordinate to Romanian gendarmes.
Conditions were deliberately lethal. Prisoners received little food and no adequate medical care, and large numbers died from starvation, exposure, typhus, dysentery and other diseases. The International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania described the purpose of the camp as extermination through isolation. By May 1942, only several hundred of the approximately 4,000 initial prisoners remained alive, although additional prisoners continued to be sent there.
Romanian authorities sometimes officially described Akhmechetka as a "ghetto", but historian Dennis Deletant has argued that "concentration camp" more accurately describes the site and its conditions. Historian Jean Ancel identified Akhmechetka, together with Bogdanovka and Domanovka, as among the principal sites in Golta County where Romanian gendarmes and their auxiliaries killed Jews during the Holocaust.
References