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| Ghettos |
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| Ghetto Map |
The city of Bialystok is situated in North-Eastern Poland, 188 km from
Warsaw
and 54 km from the border with Belarus. In common with the region named after it, the city had fallen
under the control of many different countries in the course of its history. Bialystok
became part of Prussia in
1795 before being annexed to Russia in
1807. In
1921, following
the cessation of hostilities between Poland and the Soviet Union, the city was incorporated
into the state of Poland. The
1931 census revealed a total population
in excess of 91,000, of whom nearly 40,000, or 43% were Jewish. On the outbreak of war on
1 September 1939, the Jewish population of Bialystok had risen to
approximately 50,000.
By
15 September 1939 the Germans had captured the city. Following the
invasion of Eastern Poland by the Soviet Union on
17 September, Bialystok became
part of the area to be occupied
by the Soviet Union under the terms of the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. On
22 September,
Germany handed the city over to the Soviets, who occupied it for the next twenty-one months. Following
the outbreak of war between Germany and the Soviet Union on
22 June 1941, the
Germans re-occupied Bialystok on
27 June. By this time, because of an influx
of refugees from German-occupied Poland,
the Jewish population of the city and surrounding district had swollen to about 60,000.
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| Burned Synagogue * |
On the morning of the German entry into the city, a day which was to become known as "Red Friday" by
the Jewish community, Order Police Battalion 309 gathered in the Jewish quarter around the Great
Synagogue. Armed with automatic pistols and hand grenades, the Germans began killing Jews in the
streets and houses in the area. At least 700 Jews had been locked into the synagogue, which had
then been set on fire. The Nazis forced further victims to push one another into the blazing building.
Those resisting were shot. On that first day, 2,000 - 2,200 Jews were killed. Within the first two
weeks of the German occupation, the
Einsatzkommando 9 had murdered a further 4,000 Jews in an open
field near
Pietraszek. In the early days of German occupation the city
had received visits from
Heinrich Himmler, on
8 July, as well
as from
Adolf Eichmann, acting on the instructions of
Gestapo
chief
Heinrich Müller. These tours of inspection, which included other
recently conquered cities and towns, were intended to assess the impact of the first wave of
Einsatzkommando
activities.
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| Judenrat Building |
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| Ghetto Fence * |
Two days after the occupation, the military commander summoned Bialystoks’s chief rabbi, Dr
Gedaliah Rosenmann, and the chairman of the Jewish Community Council,
Efraim Barasz, ordering them to form a
Judenrat. Initially formed with 12 members, all public figures, a month later a new
Judenrat, twice
the size of its predecessor was formed, with
Barasz as its head.
On
1 August 1941 a ghetto was established in two small areas divided by the
Biala River. The ghetto was surrounded by a wooden fence and barbed wire. As in other ghettos, the space allotted
was totally insufficient for the number of inhabitants; two or three families were squeezed into a single tiny room.
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| Deportation 1941 * |
Until
15 August 1941, Bialystok was under military rule; from that date
it became a quasi-incorporated
territory of the
Reich attached to East Prussia, under the civilian administration of
Erich Koch in his capacity of
Oberpräsident of East Prussia.
A decree ordering all Jews to be registered, to wear yellow badges on their chest and back, together with
a host of other discriminatory measures was introduced. All Jewish property outside the designated ghetto
area was to be confiscated. Food supplies were to be restricted to that which was "surplus" to local requirements.
And all able-bodied Jews between the ages of 15 - 65 were to be subject to forced labour.
Between 18 and 21 September 1941, 4,500 sick, unskilled and unemployed Jews
were transferred to the ghetto at
Pruzhany, 100 km south of Bialystok.
Most of them were killed when that ghetto was liquidated in
late January 1943.
The Bialystok ghetto rapidly became a centre of industry. There were private factories in the ghetto,
owned by a German industrialist,
Oskar Steffen. Most Jews were employed
in one of some 10 factories or in other workshops within the ghetto. A lesser number were employed in
various German enterprises outside the ghetto. Supplies of food by the German administration were, at best,
irregular. As in other ghettos, the smuggling of food was the only way to avoid starvation on a massive scale.
In small, secret workshops, goods were produced and exchanged for food with those living outside of
the ghetto. In order to increase the availability of food, the
Judenrat converted the sites of
destroyed buildings within the ghetto into fruit and vegetable gardens. The
Judenrat itself became
a major employer; more than 2,000 people worked in various departments: hospitals, pharmacies,
schools, a law court and other institutions. A
Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst (Jewish police force) of
200 men was also organised.
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| Ghetto Fighters * |
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| Tenenbaum * |
Throughout
1942, the various factions of the Jewish youth movements had inched
their way towards creating a unified front with a view to waging an armed struggle against the Germans. Agreement
was finally reached in
August 1942 and the first united underground, named
"Bloc No.1" or "Front A", consisting of Communists, the Socialist "Bundists" and the Zionist "Ha-Shomer ha-Tsa’ir"
was formed under the command of
Edek Borak.
In
November 1942 Mordechai Tenenbaum (Josef Tamaroff)
arrived in Bialystok from the
Warsaw Ghetto to bolster the resistance and "Bloc No.2" came
into being, uniting all the remaining movements. On
Tenenbaum’s initiative and
supported by
Barasz, a secret archive was established. Hidden outside of the ghetto,
the documents it contained constitute an invaluable record of the ghetto’s existence.
Barasz also made substantial sums of money available to
Tenenbaum for the procurement of arms from the Polish underground
Armia Krajowa (Home Army), but without success.
In common with certain leaders of other ghettos,
Barasz believed in
the principle of "salvation through work". On
21 June 1942, he explained
to a mass meeting of Bialystok Jews: "We have transformed all our inhabitants into useful elements. Our security is
in direct proportion to our labour productivity... Steps have to be taken so that the existence of the ghetto will
achieve justification, so that we may be tolerated."
On
11 October 1942, by which time knowledge of
Aktion Reinhard was sensed, if scarcely believed,
Barasz addressed fellow Council members and the heads of ghetto workshops,
saying: "It is imperative that we find means to postpone the danger, or at least reduce its scope."
Such illusions did not survive long. At that time, when there were still over 41,000 Jews
in the Bialystok ghetto, the
Reich Security Main Office (
RSHA) had issued an order for the
liquidation of all ghettos in the Bialystok General District and the deportation of all Jews.
But following the intervention of German military and civilian authorities, who were anxious
not to lose their valuable Jewish workers, the liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto was postponed.
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| Railway Station |
The reprieve was short.
Between 5 and 12 February 1943, an
Aktion
was conducted in the ghetto, in the course of which, 2,000 Jews were shot and a further 10,000 deported to
Treblinka in 5 transports. On
19 February,
at a conference held in Bialystok about the continuation of
the deportations, it was announced that for economic reasons the Bialystok ghetto, with its
remaining 30,000 inhabitants, would be left intact until the end of the war. But this was not
to be. Despite the continuing protests of the military and civilian employers of Jewish labour,
in the
summer of 1943,
Himmler
ordered the immediate liquidation of the ghetto. Since he no longer considered the local German authorities reliable,
he entrusted the mission to the
Aktion Reinhard staff and placed
Odilo Globocnik in overall charge.
German police, SS units and Ukrainian auxiliaries surrounded the ghetto on the night of
15 - 16 August 1943.
Barasz was
summoned by the
Gestapo and informed that the ghetto inhabitants were going to be moved to
Lublin. The ghetto awoke to find the
Judenrat’s
announcement of the deportation posted on the walls. As tens of thousands of Jews made their way to the assembly
point on
Jurowiecka Street, the underground rose in revolt. This was not the
first act of resistance in Bialystok. At the time of the deportations in
February 1943,
"Bloc No.1" had been activated and suffered many casualties in a vain attempt at armed resistance.
Borak was among those captured and transported to
Treblinka for extermination. But now "Bloc No.1" and "Bloc No.2",
united since
July 1943, began a desperate armed struggle.
At 10 a.m. the various cells of the underground took up their positions and were issued with arms.
The plan was to break out of the ghetto at the
Smolna Street fence and escape
to the forest. For the ensuing five days the poorly armed and heavily outnumbered members of the resistance fought
against overwhelming German firepower, including armoured cars and tanks. Unable to break out of
the ghetto, the fighters retreated into a bunker at
Chmielna Street, which the
Germans discovered on
19 August. All but one of the 72 fighters in the bunker was shot.
The next day as the last resistance positions fell,
Tenenbaum and
Daniel Moskowicz who had jointly led the uprising, died,
probably by their own hand. Much has rightly been written about the heroic and doomed
Warsaw Ghetto uprising, yet scant attention has been paid to
the equally heroic and doomed Jewish resistance in Bialystok.
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| Deportation Aug 1943 to Majdanek |
The deportations began on
18 August and continued for 3 days. 7,600 Jews
were transported to
Treblinka; thousands more were sent to
Majdanek, where a selection took place. Those found fit
were taken to
Poniatowa,
Blizyn or
Auschwitz. More than 1,200 children between 6 and 15 were
deported to
Terezin (Theresienstadt) on
23 August.
Many died there.
The sick were taken to the Small Fortress section of the ghetto and beaten to death. A few weeks later, the
surviving children were deported again, this time to
Auschwitz-Birkenau,
where all of them were gassed on
7 October,
together with the 53 adults who had volunteered to accompany them. In Bialystok itself a "Small Ghetto"
was left, containing 2,000 Jews. After three weeks, it too was liquidated and its occupants sent to
Majdanek. Amongst them were
Barasz and
Rosenmann, who, together with the remnants of
the Bialystok Jews, were murdered there on
3 November 1943 in the so-called
Aktion Erntefest.
During the course of its liquidation, the Germans had selected 43 people from the ghetto on
16 August, including
Zalman Edelman and
Shimon Amiel. They were to become members of the
Sonderkommando 1005, responsible for the exhumation and cremation of the bodies
of the slaughtered. Chained together to prevent escape, they were taken from place to place in the
Bialystok district to perform their gruesome task. Three pits in
Augustow contained 2,100 bodies. Other burial pits were
opened in the vicinity of
Grodno, near
Staraya
Krepost, at
Novoshilovki, Kidl, and at
Golnino near
Lomza. By the
time they managed their escape from the command on
15 May 1944,
Edelman and
Amiel were 2 of only 9
survivors of the original group.
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| Ghetto Ruins #1 |
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| Ghetto Ruins #2 |
Small numbers of armed men had managed to escape from the ghetto in
December 1942.
By the time of the uprising in the
summer of 1943, 150 fighters from the
Bialystok ghetto had joined the partisans. They harassed the Germans in the region until the liberation of Bialystok
by the Red Army on
27 July 1944. By the war’s end between 300 - 400 Bialystok Jews had
survived, either with the partisans, in German camps or in hiding on the "Aryan" side of the city. The city’s post-war
Jewish inhabitants peaked at little more than 1,000, before gradually dwindling away. Today, in a population of 350,000,
only a handful are Jewish.
In
October 1949,
Fritz Gustav Friedl,
commander of the
Gestapo in Bialystok, stood trial in the city for war crimes committed there and
in the nearby town of
Zabludow.
A number of trials of individual’s accused of crimes in Bialystok were held in West Germany. In the main,
these were of members of
Einsatzgruppen or Police Battalions. Those found guilty generally received modest
sentences. Many were acquitted.
Photos:
GFH
*
Sources:
1) Gutman, Israel ed.
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Macmillan Publishing Company, New York, 1990
2) Hilberg, Raul.
The Destruction of the European Jews. Yale University Press, New Haven 2003
3) Gilbert, Martin.
The Holocaust. Collins, London 1986
4) Ehrenburg, Ilya and Grossman, Vasily ed.
The Black Book. Yad Vashem, New York, 1981
5) Arad, Yitzhak.
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka - The Operation Reinhard Death Camps. Indiana University Press,
Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1987
6) Gilbert, Martin.
Atlas of the Holocaust. William Morrow and Company Inc, New York, 1993
7) Browning, Christopher R.,
Ordinary Men – Reserve Police Battalion 101 and The Final Solution in Poland.
Harper Collins, New York, 1992
© ARC 2005
