Transport from Jozefow, Bilgoraj, Lublin, Poland to Babia Dolina, quarry, Murder Site, Poland on 11/05/1942

Józefów is a village in Bilgoraj County in southeastern Poland, approximately 30 kilometers from the town of Bilgoraj and 110 kilometers south of Lublin. (Before World War II it belonged to the Lublin Voivodeship – the area administered by a voivode, or governor.) Located in a vast rural area, the village suffered from a poor infrastructure, lacking electricity, a hospital, and a train station. Its approximately 2,000 Jews constituted 60 percent of the 3,330 inhabitants on the eve of the war. The Wehrmacht occupied Józefów on September 17, 1939, after destroying its center in a heavy bombardment. On October 26, 1939, Józefów became part of Kreishauptmannschaft Bilgoraj (county), District of Lublin, in the newly created Generalgouvernement (General Government).

The Germans did not establish a ghetto in the village but did create a Judenrat (Jewish Council), which was headed by Baruch Goldsztajn and the local prewar rabbi, Szymon Parzenczewski. Most of the Jews were concentrated in a narrow street called Ogrodowa (Garden Street).^[1] The already poor living conditions in Józefów worsened drastically when, on March 18, 1941, about 1,100 Jews were resettled there from the city of Konin in the Warthegau (administrative unit established by the Germans in the Polish territory that was incorporated into the Reich). The arrivals, many of them elderly and sick, came with barely any possessions and were forced to move into the overcrowded houses of the local Jewish inhabitants. The deteriorating sanitary conditions subsequently caused a typhus epidemic. In mid-1941, the Judenrat counted 2,147 Jews in the village.^[2]

The first deportation of Jews from Józefów, on May 1, 1942, targeted between twenty and thirty-five individuals, apparently all men, who were accused of being communists.^[3]  Their arrest was part of an anti-communist and antisemitic operation throughout the General Government.^[4]...