Some 200 died in a typhus epidemic; the others were taken out of the camp in two batches, guarded by soldiers of the Romanian Gendarmerie, and shot to death.
In practice, Vapniarka was a concentration camp for Jewish prisoners, since no other political suspects were held there—the only other inmates were several Ukrainian convicts.
The inmates established a camp committee to help them survive despite starvation, disease, hard labor, and physical and mental torture.
The father of Costin Murgescu, Ion, had "strong pro-Nazi sympathies"[2] and by September 1942 he was the camp commandant in Vapniarka.
By keeping the camp meticulously clean, the prisoners were able to overcome the typhus epidemic,[3] but they suffered from the poor quality of the food, which included Lathyrus sativus, a species of pea that was normally used to feed livestock, and barley bread that had a 20% straw content.
It was only at the end of January that the prisoners were no longer fed with the animal fodder that had caused the disease, but 117 Jews were paralyzed for life.