Transport from Hajowniki, Zamosc, Lublin, Poland to Hajowniki, manor park, Murder Site, Poland on 14/05/1942

Hajowniki is a village in the gmina (municipality) of Skierbieszów, Zamość County, some 22 kilometers northeast of Zamość. According to the 1921 national census, Hajowniki had a population of 299, including eleven Jews.^[1] The area was occupied by the Germans on September 13, 1939, and, after the withdrawal of the Red Army, the Germans reoccupied it on October 20.^[2] During World War II, it belonged to the Lublin District of the occupied part of Poland, not formally annexed to the Reich, called the Generalgouvernement (General Government). By 1940, ten Jews lived in the village.^[3]

The German authorities planned to deport local populations of the villages in the Zamość area and replace them with Volksdeutsche or German settlers. Preparations for such "resettlement" began in 1940 and continued until 1943, with the first deportations of Poles taking place in November 1941.^[4] At the same time, Nazi plans for annihilation of Jews in the Lublin District were also made. At the beginning of May 1942, Lublin’s Population and Welfare Department (Bevölkerungswesen und Fürsorge Abteilung), a unit of the Kraków-based civil administration of the General Government headed by Richard Türk, instructed the county governors to prepare for the deportation of all the Jews in the district.^[5] Those living in the county’s villages were moved to larger towns in order to concentrate the communities for further mass deportations, usually to the Bełżec (Belzec) death camp, which became operational in March 1942.^[6] In some cases, however, entire communities were transported to a site near the village and murdered there. This was the fate of the Jewish inhabitants of Hajowniki.^[7]

Józef Śmiech, pseudonym “Ciąg,” a Polish partisan in Związek Walki Zbrojnej (ZWZ, later known as Armia Krajowa, AK, the Polish underground military forces) active in the area of Hajowniki, wrote after the war that:...