Bialystok Ghetto

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Map of present-day Poland

The Bialystok ghetto was located in the Polish city ​​of the same name, Białystok, in the Podlaskie Voivodeship . After the city was occupied by the German Wehrmacht in 1939, the Germans established the ghetto in 1941 as a concentration camp , which was dissolved in 1943 after the German occupying forces had murdered or deported all prisoners. Its official name was the cover term Jewish residential district.

Location and city history

Białystok is located around 180 km northeast of the Polish capital Warsaw, close to the Belarusian border. Like the entire region, the city looks back on an eventful past: it became Prussian in 1795, Russian in 1807 , Polish in 1921 - after the First World War , and at the beginning of the Second World War it became part of the Soviet Union due to the agreements in the German-Soviet non-aggression pact occupied and attached to the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic ; Occupied by the German Wehrmacht in 1941 and incorporated into the Bialystok district.

Białystok was the Eastern European city with the highest proportion of Jewish citizens (estimated at over 60 percent). A census carried out in 1931 showed a population of around 91,000 people, of which 43 percent, or almost 40,000 people, were of Jewish descent. When war broke out on September 1, 1939, the Jewish population had grown to around 50,000.

On September 15, 1939, the German Wehrmacht captured the city, but after the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland in 1939 it became part of the Soviet zone of occupation for the following 21 months in accordance with the agreements in the secret additional protocol of the German-Soviet non-aggression pact. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union , it was occupied by the German military. In the meantime, the Jewish population had grown to more than 60,000 due to the influx of refugees.

The day of the German occupation - June 27, 1941 - became known in the Jewish community as “Red Friday”. The German Police Battalion 309 under Lieutenant Colonel Ernst Weis gathered at the Great Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter and drove residents into the synagogue to then set them on fire. At least 700 people were burned alive; a total of 4,000 Jewish residents were killed in the first two weeks of the German occupation as a result of assaults or mass shootings , partly on the direct orders of SS leader Himmler , who visited the city on July 8, 1941.

Establishment of the ghetto

Shortly after the military occupation, Rabbi Gedaliah Rosenmann and the chairman of the Jewish community, Efraim Barasz, were ordered to form a Jewish council of twelve people. On August 1, 1941, the ghetto was built in two narrow areas on both sides of the Biała River and sealed off with wooden and barbed wire fences. Jewish property outside the ghetto was expropriated, and all Jews between the ages of 15 and 65 were obliged to do forced labor .

As in other ghettos, the room was far too small for the crowd; two to three families usually had to share a single room. The catering allocation was irregular and insufficient. The population was dependent on food smuggling for supplies. She also tried to plant fruit and vegetable gardens in a confined space within the ghetto.

In September 1941 4,500 sick, uneducated or unable to work Jews were deported to Pruzhany , a place 100 km southeast of Bialystok. Hardly anyone survived until this ghetto was dissolved in January 1943.

The so-called Ghetto Białystok quickly developed into an “industrial center”. Within its borders were about ten factories belonging to the German industrialist Oskar Steffen . Most of the residents were obliged to work there or in other workshops within the ghetto. Only a small number worked in other workplaces outside the ghetto.

The Judenrat also became an important employer. Around 2,000 people worked in schools, hospital wards, pharmacies, courts and other institutions. A Jewish security service was set up consisting of 200 men and women.

Acts of resistance

In the course of 1942, after previous individual actions, a first united resistance movement called "Block No. 1" or "Front A" was formed, which was made up of communists, socialists, " Bundists " and Zionists and later called "Block No. 2" was designated. She set up a secret archive that was set up in a hiding place outside the ghetto and began collecting a great deal of data and information about ghetto life. Efforts to cooperate with the Polish underground army and to be armed by them were unsuccessful. A small group of resistance fighters managed to escape the ghetto in December 1942 and join the Polish partisans.

Aktion Reinhardt, armed uprising against it

Between February 5 and 12, 1943, in the course of Aktion Reinhardt, 2,000 people were shot in the ghetto, which now had around 40,000 inhabitants, and 10,000 were taken to the Treblinka extermination camp . In the summer of 1943, despite the local protests and demands to maintain the camp from an economic point of view, Himmler ordered the immediate liquidation of the ghetto. On the night of August 15-16, 1943, SS units, German police and Ukrainian auxiliaries surrounded the ghetto; residents were informed that they would be deported to Lublin .

The underground movement then started a partially armed uprising that lasted until August 19th. Since the resisters were unable to escape from the ghetto, they withdrew to bunkers and hiding places, where most of them were gradually discovered and shot.

Deportations

The deportations could begin on August 18 and lasted three days. 7,600 Jews were transported to Treblinka , thousands more - the exact number is unknown - to Majdanek . A selection took place there; Those able to work were taken to Poniatowa , Bliżyn or Auschwitz .

More than 1,200 children between the ages of 6 and 15, 400 of whom had survived in the concentration camp, were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp on August 23 , where many died. The children who survived there were deported a few weeks later to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where they were murdered in the gas chambers on October 5, 1943, together with the 53 carers who voluntarily accompanied them. In reports about their fate, the headline is therefore from the Bialystok children .

The "little ghetto"

In Białystok itself a "small ghetto" with 2,000 remaining Jews was initially maintained, which was also dissolved after three weeks and whose inhabitants were sent to the Majdanek concentration camp , where they were murdered as part of the harvest festival .

At the end of the Second World War, 300 to 400 Jews from Białystok had survived either as partisans or in the labor camps.

When in 1998 four students decided in a history competition to reconstruct the history of the ghetto and the Białystok Jews in Białystok from July 1941 to August 1943, they identified only two resident Jews in the city, which today has around 300,000 inhabitants.

Secret archive

In Bialystok, Mordechai Tenenbaum initiated a secret archive based on the model from the Warsaw ghetto . These documents are now in Israel and Poland.

literature

  • Freia Anders, Hauke-Hendrik Kutscher, Katrin Stoll (HrSGV.): Bialystok in Bielefeld. National Socialist crimes before the Bielefeld Regional Court 1958 to 1967. 2003, ISBN 3-89534-458-3 .
  • Freia Anders, Katrin Stoll, Karsten Wilke (eds.): The Białystok Jewish Council - documents from the archives of the Białystok Ghetto 1941–1943. Schoeningh Verlag, Paderborn 2010, ISBN 978-3-506-76850-6 .
  • Yitzhak Arad : Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka - The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987.
  • Thomas Fatzinek: The Last Way , bahoe books, Vienna, 2019, ISBN 978-3-903290-02-0 .
  • Chaika Grossmann : The underground army. The Jewish resistance in Białystok. An autobiographical report . From the American. and with a foreword by Ingrid Strobl . Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verl. 1993 ISBN 3-596-11598-1 .
  • Sarah Bender, Teresa Prekerowa: Białystok , in: Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1990, Vol. 1, pp. 210-214.
  • Michael Okroy, Ulrike Schrader (ed.): January 30, 1933 - a date and its consequences. 2004, ISBN 3-9807118-6-2 .
  • Alexander B. Rossino: Polish "Neighbors" and German Invaders: Contextualizing Anti-Jewish Violence in the Bialystok District during the Opening Weeks of Operation Barbarossa, in: Studies in Polish Jewry, Volume 16 (2003).
  • Jacob Shepetinski, Michael Anderau: The Jacob's ladder. Memories of a Shoah and Gulag Survivor. 2005, ISBN 3-907576-78-0 .
  • Katrin Stoll: The production of truth. Criminal proceedings against former members of the Bialystok District Security Police . Dissertation at the University of Bielefeld 2011, Series Legal History / Department 1, Volume 22, De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston, 2012
  • Białystok , in: Guy Miron (Ed.): The Yad Vashem encyclopedia of the ghettos during the Holocaust . Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009 ISBN 978-965-308-345-5 , pp. 47-52.
  • Bialystok , in: Encyclopaedia Judaica , 1972, col. 805-811

Movie

  • Ingrid Strobl : I feel like doing . Documentary film, 1992, produced on behalf of WDR.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to ghetto-theresienstadt.de
  2. ↑ Claude Lanzmann , speaks around 1985, later shown in the interview film with Benjamin Murmelstein as a contemporary witness in what was then Terezín : The Last of the Unjust (2015)
  3. ↑ online

Coordinates: 53 ° 8 ′ 19 ″  N , 23 ° 9 ′ 41 ″  E