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| Ghettos |
Biala Podlaska is a town situated 162 km east of
Warsaw, 120 km north of
Lublin, and 61 km east of
Siedlce.
In
1931, of the population of 10,697, 6,923 (64.7%) were Jewish. The Jewish community
in the town had grown rapidly in the second half of the 19th Century, members owning a nail
factory, a tannery, a shoe factory, saw-mills, brick-making furnaces, flour mills, a soap factory,
a brewery and various other small factories. However, in common with other towns and
shtetls in
Poland, there were also many who lived in poverty.
The Jews of Biala Podlaska were typical of the small communities of that time; all were religious
to a greater or lesser degree, although some were influenced by the
Haskalah (Enlightenment),
and Zionist movements.
The Germans captured Biala Podlaska on
13 September 1939,
but withdrew on
26 September to allow the Soviets to occupy the town.
On
10 October 1939, in accordance with the terms of the
Molotov – Ribbentrop pact, the Soviets departed and the town
was reoccupied by the Germans.
600 Jews left the town at the time of the Soviet departure to reside in that part of eastern Poland
then under Soviet control. A
Judenrat was formed in
November 1939,
with
Icchak Pirzyc as its head. Insofar as it was possible,
the
Judenrat attempted to act as the successor to the
Kehillah, the pre-war
Jewish Community Council, providing a public kitchen for the poor, supervising the Jewish hospital
and providing for other communal needs.
On
1 December 1939, the Germans published a decree requiring all Jews
aged 6 and older to wear an armband on their right arm bearing a yellow Star of David (the colour
was later changed to blue). Jews were ordered to move to a separate zone on
Grabanow,
Janowa, Prosta and Przechodnia Streets. At the same time, a Jewish Police (
Ordnungsdienst)
was established.
At the end of
1939, 2,000-3,000 Jews, deported from
Suwalki and
Serock, arrived in the town,
increasing the misery in the already overcrowded Jewish quarter. Although there was not a closed ghetto in
Biala Podlaska, because of the numbers crammed into the residential area and the appalling sanitary conditions,
there was a typhus epidemic in early
1940, causing many fatalities.
At about this time, less than 200 survivors of a death march of Jewish POWs, initially numbering
some 880 men, arrived in Biala Podlaska, to be interned in a prisoner-of-war camp there.
In
July 1940, a number of Jewish men were sent from Biala Podlaska
to the forced labour camps at
Belzec. In the autumn of
1940,
the
Judenrat's employment office began to conscript workers for the factories built by
the Germans in Biala Podlaska and its environs. Work camps were built by the Germans nearby
the factories. Hundreds of Jewish tradesmen were incarcerated in seven of the
Judenrat's
labour camps situated at the airfield, the train station, the
Wineta camp in the
Wola
district, and elsewhere. Hundreds of other Jews worked in heavy manual labour paving roads, draining
ditches, and constructing sewage facilities, saw mills, and barracks. Many women worked at
Duke
Potocki's farm
“Halas”.
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| Announcement * |
On
15 May 1941, the Jewish POW camp was closed down, and the surviving
prisoners were transported by sealed train to
Konskowola, further west. During
1940 and
1941, several hundred Jews from
Krakow and
Mlawa were deported to Biala
Podlaska. As a result of the many "resettlements" to the town, the Jewish population of the town had grown to
approximately 8,400 in
March 1942. On
6 June 1941
an announcement forbade "Arians" to do business with Jews.
At the end of
June 1941 a number of Jews were sent to the concentration camp at
Auschwitz as punishment for giving bread to Soviet prisoners of war
marching through the town. They were among the first Jewish victims to perish in
Auschwitz.
On
6 June 1942, a rumour spread throughout the ghetto that the Jews
were to be forced to leave Biala Podlaska and evacuated to the west. Only workers at the forced labour
camps or those employed at German factories as well as those possessing a labour permit would
be exempt from the deportation. On
10 June at 5 a.m. 3,000 Jews, among them the
elderly, women, and children were assembled in the synagogue courtyard. Many of the Jews did not report as ordered
and fled to the forests. German police led the assembled Jews to the railroad station. The next day,
11 June 1942, the deportees were herded into freight cars and were deported
to the death camp at
Sobibor. When the deportees disembarked from the train, believing they
had been sent to a labour camp, a letter was handed to the SS from the municipality of Biala Podlaska
requesting decent treatment for the arriving Jews. For this act of “insolence” and “impudence”, 200 of
the Jews were selected for “special treatment”; all others were immediately gassed. The “special treatment”
consisted of removing luggage from Camp II and loading it onto a train, whilst running a gauntlet of
guards who whipped and clubbed the prisoners as they ran. The Jews who had been the subject
of this “special treatment” were then also gassed.
One week later,
Emanuel Ringelblum spoke in
Warsaw
to the head of the Jewish Social Relief Organization in Biala Podlaska, who asked angrily:
“
How much longer will we go 'as sheep to the slaughter’? Why do we keep quiet? Why is
there no call to escape to the forests? No call to resist?”
Ringelblum confided to his diary:
“
This question torments all of us, but there is no answer to it because everyone knows
that resistance, particularly if even one single German is killed, may lead to the slaughter of a whole community,
or even of many communities.
The first who are sent to slaughter are the old, the sick, the children, those who are not able to resist.
The strong ones, the workers, are left meanwhile to be, because they are needed for the time being.
The evacuations are carried out in such a way that it is not always and not to everyone clear that a
massacre is taking place. So strong is the instinct for life of the workers, of the fortunate owners of
work permits, that it overcomes the will to fight, the urge to defend the whole community, with no thought
of consequences. And we are left to be led as sheep to a slaughterhouse. This is partly due to the
complete spiritual breakdown and disintegration, caused by unheard-of terror which has been inflicted
upon the Jews for three years and which comes to a climax in times of such evacuations.
The effect of all this taken together is that when a moment for some resistance arrives, we are
completely powerless and the enemy does to us whatever he pleases... Not to act, not to lift a hand
against Germans, has since then become the quiet, passive heroism of the common Jew…”
Following the first deportation, the Germans reduced the area of the ghetto. On the night of
4 August 1942, gendarmes, German police and Poles cordoned off the
ghetto area, took men out of their homes and gathered them in the market square, where the men’s
labour permits were examined. Afterwards the men were freed, but on that same night 19 Jews
were executed. On
12 August, German gendarmes and Ukrainian
auxiliaries began arresting Jewish men and collected them in a square in the
Wola
neighbourhood. The
Judenrat complained to the German authorities and the workers were released. However after
a few days the arrests were renewed. About 400 Jews, including members of the
Judenrat were deported to
KL Majdanek. 50 Jews remained there. The other 350 men were
transferred to work on the railroad at
Golab, between
Lublin and
Pulawy.
In
September 1942, 3,000 deportees from the towns of
Janow and
Konstantynow
were transported to Biala Podlaska. The overcrowding in the ghetto became desperate.
Glätt, an SD man, took any valuables the Jews
still retained and imposed a “fine” of 45,000 zlotys. The Jews sensed that the Germans intended to
soon liquidate them. Many attempted to escape to the forests, to dig bunkers, and prepared hiding
places for themselves or hid themselves in basements.
The second deportation of the Jews of Biala Podlaska began on
26 September 1942 and ended
on
1 October 1942.
Gestapo men, the Gendarmerie, the German and Polish police
and soldiers from the nearby airport all participated in this
Aktion. The night before the
Aktion the
Germans encircled the ghetto. The following morning the Jews were driven from their homes and concentrated in the
New Market Square (
Rynek). Jews who resisted deportation were shot on the spot. On the same day, 15 patients
and two nurses at the Jewish Hospital were shot by the
Gestapo. A number of Jews were removed from the assembly
and were sent as slave labourers to the airport at
Malaszewicze, near
Terespol. Most of the people who were left in the market square were driven to
Miedzyrzec Podlaski in the wagons of peasants from the surrounding area. On the
way many were murdered in the
Woronica Forest.
On
6 October 1942, the Germans deported about 1,200 workers from the labour camps in the
vicinity of Biala Podlaska to
Miedzyrzec Podlaski. Only a few managed to escape to
the forests. Upon their arrival at the
Miedzyrzec train station, the Germans joined
most of those who had been deported a few days earlier to the group of workers and brought all of them to the local
ghetto, from where they were subsequently deported to the
Treblinka death camp.
The fate of the remaining deportees from Biala Podlaska was shared with the rest of the Jews of
Miedzyrzec. In
July 1943, after several further
Aktionen at the
end of 1942 and in
May 1943, the
Miedzyrzec Podlaski Ghetto was liquidated and its inhabitants
were deported to
Treblinka, where they were murdered. The Germans left a group
of 300 Jewish workers in Biala Podlaska to clear the ghetto and to destroy the synagogue and the small prayer houses.
In
May 1944, the surviving workers were transferred to
KL Majdanek.
Biala Podlaska was liberated by the Red Army on
26 July 1944. Of the more than 6,000
Jewish residents of the town in
1939, only 300 remained alive at the war’s end.
Photos:
GFH
*
Sources:
Gilbert, Martin.
The Holocaust – The Jewish Tragedy, William Collins Sons & Co. Limited, London, 1986.
Arad, Yitzhak.
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka - The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press,
Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987.
www.jewishgen.org
http:motlc.learningcenter.wiesenthal.org/
© ARC 2006
