Siedlce Ghetto

Public announcement by the Nazi occupation authority commanding the resettlement of all Roma people from the county of Siedlce into the Jewish ghetto, with the letter "Z" for Zigeuner (Gypsy in German) on their armbands.

Conditions in the ghetto were appalling, with grossly insufficient quantities of food. At one point, 15 people lived in single rooms without sanitation. Jews were not allowed to own fur products. People trying to cross the fence illegally were shot in the back by the dozen.[2] A typhus epidemic broke out in the winter of 1941–42. There were five labour camps set up by the Germans in the vicinity of the ghetto.[2]

1. Camp I – Army Food Storehouse No. 6 (Armeeverpflegungslager, A.V.L.)[lower-alpha 3] at the Polish Army base, with the active labour force of 100 prisoners (1940–42). The total number of Jews who passed through the camp was around 5,000.[2]
2. Camp II – The Reckmann Construction (close to the fire station). Active labour force: 500 prisoners (1941–43). The total number of 15,000 Jews passed through the facility; decimated by epidemic of typhus and scarlet fever. Remaining prisoners were shot on site during camp liquidation.[2]
3. Camp III – Building Inspectorate No. 8 "Kiesgrube" (at the Łuków road). Active labour force: 300 prisoners (1941–43), housed in two barracks; with 250 grams of bread and 1 litre of soup per day. One prisoner is known to have survived.[2]
4. Camp IV – Wolfer and Göbel Road Construction (10 barracks, next to Brzeska Street). Active labour force: 2,000 prisoners (1941–42). Counting in the ill persons, released for threat of an epidemic, as well as Jewish men brought in from other settlements – not from the ghetto – some 20,000 Jews passed through the camp.[2]
5. Camp V – "Bauzug", at the railway station. Active labour force: 100 prisoners repairing railway tracks (1942–43).[2]

In early 1942 the Final Solution to the Jewish Question was set in motion by Nazi Germany during the Wannsee Conference; and the fate of ghettoised Jews across occupied Poland was sealed.[8] The Treblinka extermination camp – built north of Siedlce exclusively for the implementation of Operation Reinhard – began gassing Jews in July 1942.[9] The next month, on 22 August 1942 the Siedlce Ghetto liquidation action began in earnest, under SS-Obersturmführer Schultz.[5] The Judenrat has been informed about mass "transfer to the east" personally by Gruppenführer Ludwig Fischer, the governor of Distrikt Warschau.[2] People unable to move and attempting to hide were shot in their homes by the roaming squads of Trawniki men aided by the Orpo battalion who arrived in Siedlce from Łosice for that express purpose.[10]

Deportation of 10,000 Polish Jews to Treblinka during the liquidation of the ghetto in Siedlce, beginning 23 August 1942 [3]

Around 10,000 Jews were herded into the square on 22 August, including all captives brought on foot by Orpo from the transit ghettos in three nearby settlements;[lower-alpha 4][10] 500 men were selected to go back to their work camps.[6] The rest were made to sit on the ground overnight, tormented and shot at. The next day they were assembled into columns and marched to the train station in utter terror; the connecting streets were full of dead bodies. The Jews were crammed into awaiting freight cars (pictured) and sent to Treblinka, 62 kilometres (39 mi) distance.[lower-alpha 5][6]

While the Jews from out of town were gathered at the square on the first day of roundups, local Jews were forced into the cemetery on Szkolna Street.[5] The squad of Ukrainian Trawnikis has been sent by the Gestapo around noon time to conduct a shooting action there in order to inflict terror.[lower-alpha 6][2] In the evening of 24 August 1942 – a day after the first Holocaust transport – some 5,000 to 6,000 people from the cemetery have been sent away to their deaths.[5] Meanwhile, the overall number of Jews shot at the cemetery and thrown into mass graves was 3,000 estimated by the Polish historians.[12] On the day of the "aktion", the Jewish hospital was liquidated, with everyone killed on site either in their beds or out in the courtyard.[5]

By 27 August 1942, the ghetto was no more.[5] The town's remaining Jewish slave workers were returned to the "little ghetto" and on 25 November 1942 marched to the Gęsi Borek colony under the pretext of reemerging threat of epidemic typhus; several thousand of them were massacred three days later, on 28 November. Their bodies were nefariously not buried, but sent to Treblinka in a freight train consisting of 40 wagons of corpses, which outraged the SS at the killing factory. The incident was described by Sonderkommando prisoner Samuel Willenberg who successfully escaped during the perilous Treblinka revolt,[13] and who took part in the unloading of the freight cars. He described it in the following way in his book Revolt in Treblinka: "Even as we emptied twenty cattle cars, another twenty pulled up at the platform. These, too, were full of bodies. Again there were the brutal beatings of the Ukrainians and the SS men, and the hell began anew. We were bruised from head to toe. Again we emptied the cars of corpses, only corpses. In several hours, we hauled 6,000–7,000 of them to the Lazarett. We learned that the transport had come from Siedlce, a town about 60 kilometers from Treblinka." The last two box cars were filled with the victims' clothing containing nothing of any value.[14]

The Siedlce Jewish community was not restored after Nazi defeat, and the town's later history lacked the hitherto conspicuous Jewish component. Survivors of the town's population established an association in Israel which in 1956 published a comprehensive memorial book on the community's history.[15] One of the survivors, Yisrael Kravitz, published his memoires in 1971 as the Five Years of Living Hell under Nazi Rule in the City of Siedlce.[16]