“He Was an Interpreter in the German Gendarmerie”

March 1946. A small Ukrainian railway station. On the platform, a former inmate of a Nazi camp sees a man in whom he recognises “Solomon the interpreter,” who had tormented prisoners. He reports the traitor to a railway police officer.

This opening, entirely worthy of a Hollywood film, led to the opening of the Solomon Sherf case file, now held in the J-Doc digital archive.

On 24 March 1946, Solomon Borukhovich Sherf, a native of Chernivtsi Oblast, was arrested by the police at Zhmerynka station following a statement by Boris Moiseevich Kupershtein. Both men were former inmates of a concentration camp located in the settlement of Varvarovka, near Mykolaiv. A face-to-face confrontation confirmed that Sherf had indeed worked as a clerk in the camp administration.

In camp jargon, inmates like Sherf were known as Prominente, or “prominent prisoners” — from the German Prominente (“well-known,” “distinguished”). This category included clerks, interpreters, doctors, and other prisoners who occupied a special position in the camp hierarchy. Unlike kapos, they did not directly participate in using force to compel prisoners to work. At the same time, such prisoners had to take part in interrogations, select people for execution, or select them for deportation to death camps.

After the war, the attitude toward them was stricter than toward ordinary liberated inmates of Nazi camps. In the USSR, they were subjected to more intensive filtration checks. In doubtful cases, investigations were opened and cross-interrogations were conducted. If active collaboration with the Germans was confirmed, people like Sherf could be sentenced to imprisonment or even death.

During interrogations, Solomon Sherf did not deny that he had served as a clerk in the camp — something he had probably already reported during his filtration check in the spring of 1944. However, he categorically denied Kupershtein’s version that he had interpreted during interrogations, participated in escorting prisoners, and “beat them with nagaikas.”

In the end, the preliminary investigation into his case was closed for “insufficiency of the evidence gathered.”

You can read this case file, the original interrogation records, and other documents in the J-Doc digital archive.