Wolkowysk

Jews settled in Wołkowysk at the end of the 16th century. The Jewish community there had its ups and downs in the following centuries. On the eve of World War I, when Wołkowysk still belonged to the Russian Empire, there were 7,975 Jews in the town (who amounted to 55% of the total population); their number declined to ca. 5,000 after the war, when the town became part of independent Poland. The Jewish population then revived, reaching 7,347 in 1931, the year of the Polish census. The spectrum of Jewish occupations in Wołkowysk was broad; it included commerce, entrepreneurship, and physical labor -- from iron working to weaving. Jews also worked operating brick kilns and in beer breweries. Secular education in Wołkowysk was represented by a Tsisho school, where the teaching was conducted in Yiddish, a Tarbut Hebrew-language school and, from 1931, by a Yavneh religious Hebrew-language school. In 1926 a Herzlia Hebrew gymnasium was added to the local Jewish educational possibilities. Among the students of the Herzlia school was the future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Two Yiddish newspapers were published in Wołkowysk in the 1920s and 1930s. In September 1939, following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Soviets occupied Wołkowysk; the area was then included in the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic. Thousands of refugees from the western, German-occupied, Polish territories inflated the town's Jewish population. Some of the refugees, those who had refused to accept Soviet citizenship in April 1940, were deported to the Gulag (this punishment in effect saved the lives of many of them). On June 22, 1941, the day of the launching of the German attack on the Soviet Union, Wołkowysk was bombed from the air; four days of incessant German air raids followed. Dozens of Jews were killed during that period. The German army entered Wołkowysk on June 28. On the fourth day of their occupation, the Germans shot ca. 200 Jews in the town's vicinity. There were other killings of Jews in July 1941, including, on July 13, the shooting to death of 11 Jewish physicians from Wołkowysk. On August 1, 1941, Wołkowysk and the surrounding area were included into the Generalbezirk (General District) of Bialystok, a territorial unit administered by the Germans as part of Eastern Prussia. Thereafter, the Nazi's "Final Solution of the Jewish question" was carried out in the Wołkowysk area in the same way as in Central Europe, i.e. via deportations of Jews to Auschwitz and Treblinka rather than by local mass shootings. In August-September 1941 a ghetto was set up in Wołkowysk: the Jews of the nearby shtetls and villages – Mścibów, Swisłocz, Ros, Porozów, Łysków, Izabelin, Piaski, Wołpa, Zelwa, Mosty, Jałówka, Różana, and probably, of some other places as well, were taken to it. Characteristically, German documents of 1942 refer to that ghetto as a "transit camp" (Sammellager), intended to hold victims for future deportation to death camps. The prisoners of the ghetto were housed in huge bunkers, that had been dug by Soviet POWs, with each bunker containing 500 prisoners. There was a high rate of mortality in this ghetto, mainly from typhoid fever and starvation. The dead bodies were buried in the Porokhovnia Forest, which is now within the urban area of Wołkowysk. On October 31, 1942, the Jews of Wołkowysk were ordered to hand over all "excess clothing and shoes." On the following day the German authorities announced the resettlement of the Jewish population of Wołkowysk to the ghetto (camp). According to some estimates, the ghetto population was as large as 20,000. At the end of November 1942 the ghetto inmates were informed that some of them would soon be sent to work in Germany. At about this time deportations to the death camps of Treblinka and Auschwitz began. The first to be deported were the Jews of Różana who were held in the Wołkowysk ghetto; Jews from Zelva, Mosty, Piaski, Jałówka, Łysków, and Mścibów followed. The main deportation took place between December 6 and 8, 1942, when the Jews of Swisłocz and Wołkowysk were deported. Fewer than 2,000 Jews remained in the ghetto of Wołkowysk – 1,700 men, 100 women and – clandestinely – some children. Sixty "privileged" Jews (including the only dentist of the town), who had been living in the town until then were also put into the ghetto. Typhus and dysentery epidemics broke out in the ghetto. By mid-January 1943 only 800 people were alive in the ghetto, 30 percent of them ill with typhus and other diseases. On January 26, 1943, the last 600 Jews in the Wołkowysk area were deported to Auschwitz. 80 ghetto inmates who were too feeble to be transported were left to die in a tightly closed bunker within the camp. Wołkowysk was liberated by the Red Army on July 14, 1944.