Szczuczyn

The first Jews appeared in Szczuczyn Litewski in the 1760s. According to the first all-Russian census of 1897 there were 1,356 Jews in the town, where they constituted 77.8 percent of the total population. In the interwar period, when Szczuczyn was part of Poland, the town suffered an economic decline, with some improvement only between 1934 and 1939. A yeshiva functioned in the town in the 1930s. In the 1920s and 1930s two schools, a Hebrew-language school of the Tarbut network and a Tsisho school with instruction in Yiddish, were attended by dozens of Jewish schoolchildren. Two leftist Zionist movements, Hashomer Hatzair and Dror, combined to establish a training group to prepare young Jews to live in the Land of Israel. In September 1939, with the beginning of World War II, the area was occupied by the Soviets. Soon thereafter, the influx of refugees from the German zone of occupation into Szczuczyn, which was relatively close to the demarcation line between the two occupied zones, increased the town's Jewish population to 3,000. The Wehrmacht entered Szczuczyn Litewski on June 26, 1941, i.e. on the fifth day of Operation Barbarossa. The first days of the German occupation saw the killing of individual Jews. For example, on the very first day, a Jewish youth who had been denounced as a Communist was hung. The initial sporadic killings were followed by the usual German anti-Jewish measures, like the obligatory wearing of a yellow Star of David, the prohibition of contacts with non-Jews, and forced labor. In July a Jewish council was established. In the middle or at the end of August (according to other sources, in September-October) 1941, a ghetto was set up in Szczuczyn. At the end of September 1941, ca. 50 Jews were transferred to the town of Ejszyszki (now Eišiškes in Lithuania), where they were killed. Individual and small group killings, which were carried out without the slightest pretense of military rationale or connection to any organized action, continued until the spring of 1942. At that time the occupiers transferred the last 600 Jews of the nearby shtetls of Bielica, Raduń, Różanka, Żołudek, Wasiliszki, Orla, and Dziembrowo to the ghetto of Szczuczyn, whose population reached 3,000. On May 9, 1942, the liquidation of the ghetto began. On that day the Germans selected 500-600 work-capable Jews, while the rest of the Jews were shot to death in the area of the former military airfield. The ghetto was reduced in size, but not yet liquidated. Sporadically, the Germans took some workers from there and sent them to the local labor camps of the Todt Organization. On September 17, 1943 the last Jews of the Szczuczyn ghetto were deported to the Majdanek death camp. Szczuczyn Litewski was liberated by the Red Army in July 1944.