Tykocin massacre
The Tykocin massacre occurred on April 25-26. August 1941, during World War II , when the local Jewish population of Tykocin, Poland was murdered by a German task force .
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The city of Tykocin was conquered by the Nazis during the Soviet and German invasion of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact . At the end of September 1939, the area was handed over to the Soviet Union by the National Socialists in accordance with the German-Soviet border treaty. In June 1941, the city was captured by the Germans during Operation Barbarossa , the attack by the Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union .
Members of the National Democracy ( Narodowa Demokracja in Polish , also called Endecja after the initials ), a Polish nationalist , conservative and anti-Semitic movement, had already attacked the Jewish population in advance and looted their belongings. The members of the Polish "National Democracy" acted as willing helpers in the subsequent actions of the National Socialists. Although no ghetto was established in Tykocin, the Jews of Tykocin were almost starved to death. The Polish police forbade all contact between Jews and Poles, making it impossible to buy food. This situation became even more serious in July 1941 when refugees arrived from nearby Jedwabne and Wizna . These told of the murder of hundreds of Jews in these cities by Germans and Poles.
Five German police officers appeared in Tykocin on August 16, 1941, pretending to have come to protect the Jews from their Polish attackers. They even ordered the Poles to return the property stolen from the Jews in order to gain their trust.
On the morning of August 24th, the Germans announced that Jews should report to the town square the next day. At that time there were about 1400 Jews in Tykocin. On August 25, with the help of the Polish police, the Germans rounded up the Jews on the square. To calm the crowd, the Germans told the Jews that they would be taken to the Białystok Ghetto . The men were carted to a nearby village and from there by truck to pits in the Łopuchowo forest that had previously been dug by local farmers. The pits were about five meters deep. Some of the people were shot and some were thrown into the pits alive. The old, frail and other people who did not show up on August 25, a total of around 700, were driven to the pit on August 26 and shot. The Polish farmers were forced to fill the pits again. They were told that it would be a grave of fallen soldiers because the operation should be kept secret. In a West German investigation, a Jewish witness identified SS-Obersturmführer Hermann Schaper , who was in command of the SS task force.
As a result, the Jewish cemetery in Tykocin was completely destroyed.
About 150 Jews escaped Tykocin before the community was destroyed, but most of them were captured by Polish peasants and turned over to the Germans, who murdered them. The fate of the refugees who made it to Białystok was the same as that of the Białystok Jews when the ghetto there was liquidated. Only seventeen of Tykocin's Jews survived the Shoah .
There are now four monuments at the site of the massacre in the forest. The first, a Polish memorial from the communist era, does not contain any reference to Jews. The second and third were built by American Jews. The fourth is in the shape of a Star of David and is labeled in Hebrew.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Beyrau, Dietrich (1993). "Anti-Semitism and Jews in Poland, 1918-1939". Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism 1870–1933 / 39 - Austria, Hungary, Poland, Russia. de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-088329-9 . P. 1087.
- ↑ Tykocin . Retrieved February 27, 2020.
- ↑ Łopuchowo - the place of execution and burial of Holocaust's victims , Virtual Shtetl
- ↑ Menachem Turek, Życie i zagłada Żydów w Tykocinie podczas niemieckiej okupacji . Retrieved February 27, 2020.
- ↑ Alexander B. Rossino, “Contextualizing Anti-Jewish Violence in the Białystok District during the Opening Weeks of Operation Barbarossa,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, Volume 16 (2003), pp. 431–452.