Transport from Sosnowica, Wlodawa, Lublin, Poland to Sobibor, Extermination Camp, Poland on 10/1942

According to the Polish census of 1921, the townlet of Sosnowica in eastern Poland was home to 275 Jews, out of a total population of 616.^[1] In October 1939, following the outbreak of World War II, the village was occupied by German troops and assigned administratively to the Chełm County within the Lublin District of the General Government (the area of German-occupied Poland that was not officially annexed to the Reich). With the onset of German rule, the Jewish community of Sosnowica quickly became a target for violence and brutality. According to the account of Menachem Yungstajn, a local resident, the very first day of the German occupation saw the murder of thirty people by the occupiers. This initial act of violence set a pattern, with spontaneous killings continuing throughout the occupation period.^[2]

According to Stanisław Jadczak's monograph on the community (gmina) of Sosnowica, in January 1941 the Nazis confined the Jews of the town itself and of the surrounding villages to a ghetto. It covered a small area extending northward from the school building, toward the road leading to Sosnowica Lasek, and its boundaries were marked with warning signs, rather than physical fences.^[3]

The largest of the incoming deportations, or so-called "resettlement actions," took place in March 1941, in the context of the establishment of the Lublin Ghetto and the imposition of restrictions on the Jewish presence in that city.^[4] The protocols of the Jewish Council meetings in Lublin refer to a mass deportation from the city to other towns and villages, which was carried out by the Germans on March 10-13, 1941. The protocol from March 21, 1941 speaks of some 3,200 Jews resettled to Sosnowica, in addition to 412 local Jews residing in the town at that time.^[5] The housing capacity of the tiny ghetto was stretched to the limit, and some of the deportees, such as Yocheved Schwarzman, would seize any opportunity to relocate elsewhere, or return to Lublin under a non-Jewish identity or some other pretext.^[6]  On March 15, 1942, 783 deportees arrived in Sosnowica from Mielec.^[7] Irena Iber Geminder was among them. According to her testimony, two hundred of the deportees were separated from the rest and taken to Sosnowica, while the others were sent to Włodawa.^[8] It is difficult to estimate the exact number of Jewish men, women, and children who were gathered in Sosnowica at the start of the Operation Reinhardt deportations in April 1942, but it probably ran into the hundreds, and possibly even thousands....