Rejowiec Ghetto

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The transit camp Ghetto Rejowiec was established at the beginning of the Second World War in the occupied Polish municipality of Rejowiec in the Chełm district in the Lublin Voivodeship . In addition to Polish Jews, large numbers of Czech Jews from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and Slovak Jews from the Slovak state were kept here. In 1943 the ghetto was closed and the inmates still present were transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp .

history

After the synagogue and the prayer house in Rejowiec were destroyed in February 1941, the Germans relocated the mostly poor Orthodox , Hasidic Jews from the center to the outskirts, where a transit ghetto (also known as a transit ghetto) was built for deported Jews who were in the extermination camps of the Holocaust , in particular to Sobibor , were transported on. In the same year about 1,300 Jews deported from Lublin and Krakow were added. The ghetto was hopelessly overcrowded, with very poor sanitary conditions, little food and disease spreading. In the winter of 1941/1942 there were many deaths for these reasons. At the end of 1941 there were 2,380 people in the ghetto.

On April 7, 1942, around 2,000 Jews were picked up from the ghetto and transported to the Sobibor extermination camp 70 km away ; those who tried to hide were shot. In their place came a good 5,000 Czech and Slovak Jews. In October 1942, a few dozen Jews were massacred in their homes. With the arrival of 24,000 Jews from Slovakia, the transports to Sobibor had to be continued. Gas chambers were also built in the camp; there other newly arriving prisoners were murdered immediately, most recently up to 1,300 prisoners a day.

Between April 7 and July 2, 1943, all but 16 people were deported to Majdanek, mostly Czech and Slovak Jews. The 16 Jews who remained in Rejowiec were murdered in July 1944 shortly before the liberation.

literature

  • Rejowiec , in: Guy Miron (Ed.): The Yad Vashem encyclopedia of the ghettos during the Holocaust . Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009, ISBN 978-965-308-345-5 , p. 651.

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