Wąsosz pogrom
During the Second World War , at least 70 Jews were murdered by Polish anti-Semites in the pogrom in Wąsosz on July 5, 1941.
On Saturday, July 5th, 1941, a group of around a dozen Germans came to the village of Wąsosz in northeastern Poland and advocated killing the Jews living there. They promised the residents that this would have no consequences. The locals began murdering the following night, indiscriminately killing Jews with clubs and knives. Witnesses testified that the bodies lay in pools of blood with their heads smashed in the streets. The perpetrators then robbed the Jews' possessions. It is estimated that between 150 and 250 people were killed, almost the entire Jewish community of Wąsosz. According to a report of July 14, 1941 by the German Security Department 221 / B, however, it says: "After the Russian withdrawal, the Polish population of Wąsosz drove Jews into a barn and killed them all before the German troops marched into the city."
At the place where the murdered were buried, there is a memorial in their memory in the form of a mazewa (tombstone) into which a menorah and the Star of David are incorporated. The inscription on the memorial reads: Here lies the ashes of 250 Jews who were brutally murdered in 1941. Honor their memory.
In 2015, an exhumation of the Jewish victims was planned to determine the exact number of victims and the causes of death. However, the exhumation was not carried out because of the protests of rabbis who insisted on the peace of the dead. As a result, the investigations were discontinued in 2016.
In 1951 Marian Rydzewski was brought before a communist court for participating in the pogrom and acquitted. The crimes committed in Wąsosz were investigated by the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej ( Polish Institute for National Memory , IPN) under the direction of Prosecutor Radosław Ignatiew, who had previously investigated the atrocities during the Jedwabne massacre . During his vacation in 2015 Ignatiev was replaced without explanation and replaced by Malgorzata Redos-Ciszewska. The exhumation was not carried out and the investigation was discontinued in 2016. The IPN identified no other perpetrators other than the two Polish men who had been convicted of their actions shortly after World War II.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Elazar Barkan, Elizabeth A. Cole, Kai Struve: Shared History, Divided Memory: Jews and Others in Soviet-occupied Poland, 1939–1941 . Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-86583-240-5 , p. 350.
- ^ Sara Bender: Not Only in Jedwabne: Accounts of the Annihilation of the Jewish Shtetlach in North-eastern Poland in the Summer of 1941 . In: Holocaust Studies . 19, No. 1, 2013, pp. 1-38. doi : 10.1080 / 17504902.2013.11087369 .
- ^ A b Polish Institute Stops Investigation Into WWII Murder of 70 Jews , JPost (JTA), March 14, 2016. Retrieved February 29, 2020
- ^ Sara Grosvald: Antisemitism: An Annotated Bibliography, 2004, Volume 20 . Walter de Gruyter, February 14, 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-094710-6 , p. 180.