Czartorysk

Jews lived in Czartorysk from the mid-16th century. In 1897 the town's 822 Jews comprised approximately 30 percent of the total population. In 1916, during World War I, due to the proximity of Czartorysk to the frontlines many Jews were expelled from the town by the Russian authorities and their houses were badly damaged. After the war, as a part of the Volhyn Region, Czartorysk was incorporated into the Polish state. In 1921 220 Jews lived in the town, where they amounted to one fourth of the earlier Jewish population. During the interwar period Zionist youth organizations (mainly Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair and Beitar) were active in Czartorysk. Jewish children studied at the Polish state school. In September 1939, following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the German and Soviet invasions of Poland, Czartorysk became part of the Soviet Ukraine. Soviet rule brought independent Jewish public life to an end: Jewish organizations were forced to disband. Several hundred Jews, including some refugees from Nazi-occupied Poland, lived in the town prior to the outbreak of war with the Soviet Union. The Germans captured Czartorysk on June 28, 1941. According to one testimony, shortly afterwards several Jewish men were caught and shot to death by the Germans. In July the Germans confiscated the livestock owned by Jews. The Jews were incarcerated in the open ghetto that had been set up in the town. Jewish men were made to perform different kinds of forced labor, such as working at the railway station outside the town and cutting down trees in the nearby forest. At the end of July (or, according to another source, at the end of August), 1942 all the Jewish residents of Czartorysk – mostly women, children, and elderly people, were shot to death by a German unit near the town's Christian cemetery. Czartorysk was liberated by the Red Army on February 3, 1944.