Transport from Jozefow, Bilgoraj, Lublin, Poland to Belzec, Extermination Camp, Poland on 04/11/1942

Józefów is a village in Biłgoraj County in southeastern Poland, approximately 30 kilometers from Biłgoraj and 110 kilometers from Lublin. It belonged to the Lublin Voivodeship before World War II. The village, part of a vast rural area, had poor infrastructure: no electricity, no hospital, and no railway station. It had approximately 2,000 Jewish inhabitants, or 60% out of the 3,330 citizens on the eve of the war. The Wehrmacht occupied Józefów on September 17, 1939, after heavily bombarding and destroying its center. On October 26, 1939, Józefów became part of the Kreishauptmannschaft Bilgoraj (county) in the Lublin district of the newly created Generalgouvernement (General Government).

The Germans didn’t establish a ghetto in Józefów, but formed a Judenrat (Jewish Council) which was headed by Baruch Goldsztajn and the local pre-war rabbi, Szymon Parzenczewski. Most of the Jews were concentrated in a narrow street called Ogrodowa (Garden Street).^[1] The living conditions drastically changed on March 18, 1941, when about 1,100 Jews were resettled in Józefów from Konin in the Warthegau. These Jews, among them many elderly and sick, arrived with barely any possessions and were forced into the already overcrowded houses of the local Jewish inhabitants. Due to the deteriorated sanitary conditions, a typhus epidemic subsequently broke out. In mid-1941, the Judenrat recorded 2,147 Jews in Józefów.

The first deportation from Józefów to Belzec Extermination Camp, on May 1, 1942, targeted twenty to thirty-five Jews from Józefów who were accused of being communists.^[2] The second deportation occurred on May 11^[3] In the third deportation, on July 13, 1942, 300 to 400 able-bodied Jewish men were sent to Lublin for forced labor.^[4] An additional aktion consisted of the massacre of the entire Jewish population of Józefów at the nearby Winiarczykowa Góra Hill that same day. ^[5] The slaughter was organized and perpetrated by the Hamburg Reserve Police Battalion 101, also known as the 3rd Battalion of Police Regiment 25....