Lubartów Ghetto

The Lubartów Ghetto
Jewish cemetery in Lubartów   Lubartów location west of Majdanek during the Holocaust in Poland Lubartów Ghetto Location of Lubartów in Poland today
Location	Lubartów, German-occupied Poland
Persecution	Imprisonment, forced labor, starvation, transit to extermination camps
Organizations	Schutzstaffel (SS)
Death camp	Auschwitz
Victims	4,500 Polish Jews

Lubartów Ghetto was established by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II, and existed officially from 1941 until October 1942. The Polish Jews of the town of Lubartów were confined there initially. The ghetto inmates also included Jews deported from other cities in the vicinity including Lublin and Ciechanów and the rest of German occupied Europe for the total of 3,500 Jews in its initial stages including 2,000 Jews from Slovakia. In May 1942 additional transport from Slovakia with 2,421 Jews arrived.

The Lubartów Ghetto was one of hundreds of such ghettos established in the course of the Holocaust in occupied Poland. The maximum number of prisoners at any one time was 4,500 according to Virtual Shtetl. The ghetto was dissolved when all its prisoners – men, women, and children – were sent to the Belzec extermination camp among other secretive killing centres established by the SS, to be murdered under the guise of "resettlement".

Further information: Jewish ghettos in German-occupied Poland

Background

The first mention of the Jewish community in Lubartów comes from 1592. By 1676 there were 80 Jews in the town, operating 15 breweries. The Beth din rabbinical court was also established. In the 17th and 18th centuries the Jews received numerous privileges consecutively from Michał Korybut Wiśniowiecki (in 1678), Józef Lubomirski (in 1688) and Janusz Aleksander Sanguszko family (in 1780, and 1796). There were three synagogues and two Jewish cemeteries, one of which had not been used since the 19th century. In the interwar period the town's population was 53.6 percent Jewish according to the national census with 3,269 Jews living there in 1921. By the time of the invasion of Poland in 1939 that number has already gone down to 42 percent due to migration flows.

The German army entered the town on 19 September 1939, early on in the attack against Poland. On the morning of 12 October 1939, the German army ordered all of the Jews to go to the market square where they were surrounded by machine guns. This allowed for the German army to ransack and rob Jewish-owned homes and businesses. This lasted all day.

Deportation and execution

The deportation of Jews to the nearby towns of Firlej, Ostrów Lubelski, and Kamionka, started at the beginning of November 1939. All of the Jews were told to leave. There were, though, a few who stayed to work for the German Army. They were exiled from Lubartów until September 1940.

A Judenrat (German: for Jewish council) was set up in late 1939 for those Jews who remained. The first President, Jakub Modko Lichtenfel, did not stay at his post for long, and was soon replaced by Dawid Perec. The last Judenrat of Lubartów consisted of five members: Moshe Joel Edelman (President), Shlomo Ber Ciesler (Vice President), Izrael Ratensilber, Menashe Kosman, and Jechiel Weinberg.

The ghetto area around the two marketplaces of Lubartów were still in existence when the Jews returned from slave labour projects. A communal kitchen was organised for the now poverty-stricken Jews. Deportations were also conducted into the Lubartów Ghetto. An example of this is the transport of 1,000 Jews from Ciechanów. In addition, by May 1942, some 2,421 Slovakian Jews had been deported to Lubartów.

The first deportation to a death camp aboard Holocaust trains took place on 9 April 1942, the last day of Passover. On the first day, 800 Jews who did not have work cards were ordered to go to the railway station, from which they were taken to Belzec extermination camp. The last one of the train deportations to Belzec was on the 11 October 1942, with 3,000 Jews sent to their deaths. Some of these deprtees were sent to Majdanek, with the others going to the death camp in Treblinka. Jews that were found to be hiding were shot. In total, the number of Jews found after last deportation numbered 300. After a while, the Jews that were found were instead deported to the Piaski ghetto.

The members of the Judenrat, and their families, were deported to Łęczna. They were shot in November 1942, while Jews who worked for the German gendarmerie were shot on 29 January 1943. After the last deportations, the synagogues and cemeteries were destroyed. The gravestones were used in a pavement at a Wehrmacht base. At the end of the war only forty Jews had survived the mass murder, five of which had stayed in the town of Lubartów.

Sources

• Documents from State Archive in Lublin and Archive of the Majdanek State Museum.
• Hurben Levertow, edited by Baruch Tshubinski. Copyright by "Les Amis de Lubartow," Paris 1947
• J. Kielbon: Martyrologia ludności Lubartowa w latach okupacji hitlerowskiej (Martyrdom of the Inhabitants of *Lubartow in the Years of Nazi Occupation). Lubartow and Ziemia Lubartowska 1993
• Z. J. Hirsz: Lata wojny i okupacji 1939 -1944 ( Years of the War and Occupation 1939–1944). (in:) Lubartów – z dziejow miasta i regionu (Lubartów – from the History of the Town and Region). Ed by S. Tworek. Lublin 1977
• M. Derecki: Kromka chleba (Slice of Bread). "Gazeta w Lublinie” (23 April 1993)
• Robert Kuwalek, Paweł Sygowski (2000): Z dziejów społeczności żydowskiej w Lubartowie. (From the History of the Jewish Community in Lubartów). Lubartów i Ziemia Lubartowska magazine, Vol. 14.