Parczew partisans

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The Parczew partisans were fighters in irregular military troops who participated in the Jewish resistance movement against Nazi Germany and its collaborators during World War II . They were part of the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans on Polish territory. The name of this partisan troop, coined by Holocaust historians, goes back to the Parczew Forest, in which the partisans hid. This is not far from Lublin , halfway to the city of Sobibór , the site of the Sobibór extermination camp during the Holocaust in occupied Poland . The Jews who managed to escape from the Sobibór camp hid there along with a considerable number of Jewish families from the Lublin ghetto .

The area that included the Parczew and Włodawa districts near Lublin became one of the main battlefields of the Jewish partisan movement. The inaccessible forests of Parczew were an ideal place for this.

Partisan leader

The partisan leaders Frank Blaichman , Harold Werner and Shmuel Mieczysław Gruber deserve special mention . Werner and Gruber were deputies of Jechiel Grynszpan , who led the Jewish armed forces in the Parczew forest. Bleichman was one of the two train drivers from Grynszpan.

Main base

Cenotaph for the Poles who fell in the Parczew forest during the occupation by German and Soviet troops during World War II.

The Parczew Forest was also the main base of the non-Jewish Polish partisan movement. Such a high concentration of resistance, to which the Gwardia Ludowa (GL, "People's Guard"), Bataliony Chłopskie (BCh, "Peasant Battalions") and Armia Krajowa (AK, "Polish Home Army") belonged, was only due to the strong material support from the surrounding districts possible.

The partisan force fought together with the Gwardia Ludowa in several intense skirmishes against German armed forces with machine guns , explosives to blow up railway tracks and other goods thrown from the air by Soviet armed forces. They were provided with food from local farmers. The partisan troops participated in the capture of Parczew on April 16, 1944.

Zamosc uprising

After Operation Barbarossa , the code name for the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 , mass deportations of Polish residents from Zamojszczyzna (south of Chełm ) ( Aktion Zamość ) began by the German military and the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo), with the support of the Ukrainian auxiliary police battalions . The aim was to prepare for the resettlement ordered by Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler in accordance with the General Plan East . Some Polish villages were simply wiped out and their residents massacred . During the " Home to the Reich Ukrainian action " Nazi Ukrainians and German-Ukrainian were popular German resettled with ethnic Germans from the East there. They received new latifundia that had been built by Jewish prisoners as part of the Nisko plan for the initially planned creation of a "Jewish reserve" in Nisko (Poland). They were then murdered in the nearby Sobibór extermination camp. The Polish underground retaliated by starting the Zamość uprising, considered one of the greatest acts of the Polish resistance during World War II. Resettlement actions in the Zamość district were made impossible for the Germans by an ever-growing partisan movement. Partisans attacked the German units when these villages wanted to relocate, set fire to the settlements of German colonists and disrupted or prevented rail traffic. In the 17 months that the Zamość uprising lasted - from December 31, 1943 to the complete expulsion of the Germans - around 850 fights and skirmishes took place. According to Jewish sources, the Jewish partisans also executed Ukrainian villagers "who had ventured into the forest to capture the Jews who had fled the ghettos". This was seen as revenge for the “anti-Jewish activities” of the Ukrainian farmers.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Holocaust Encyclopedia: Partisan Groups in the Parczew Forests . United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Retrieved June 26, 2019: "(OTRS ticket no. 2007071910012533)."
  2. ↑ Agnieszka Smreczyńska-Gąbka, Historia Parczewa. Bitwa w Lasach Parczewskich, 6–7 grudnia 1942 roku (History of Parczew. Battle in the Parczew Forest, December 6-7 , 1942), Gmina Parczew, p. 6.
  3. ↑ Agnieszka Jaczyńska, action Zamosc , Institute of National Remembrance, No. 8/2012
  4. ↑ "Zamosc Ghetto" DeathCamps.org. Retrieved June 26, 2019.
  5. ^ The "evacuation" of Skierbieszów residents . Retrieved June 27, 2019.
  6. ^ Harold Werner, Fighting Back: A Memoir of Jewish Resistance in World War II, 1992, Columbia University Press, New York, ISBN 0-231-07883-8 .
  7. ^ Marek Jan Chodakiewicz: Intermarium: The Land Between the Black and Baltic Seas . Taylor & Francis, September 8, 2017, ISBN 978-1-351-51195-7 , p. 159.