Gródek

In all likelihood, the first Jews settled in Gródek Wileński (Grodek Wilejski) in the early 19th century. According to the census of 1897, there were 1,230 Jews in the village, making up seventy-seven percent of the total population. Most of these Jews were petty traders (along with a few large-scale lumber merchants), and the economy of the village was based on lumber, flax, hides, and grain (mainly rye). There were three tanneries in Gródek, as well as three ceramic workshops and a factory producing carbonated water and soft drinks. Religiously, the Jewish community of Gródek was divided between anti-Hassidic misnagdim and adherents of the Hasidic Chabad movement. World War I resulted in the depopulation of the town, ushering in a period of economic decline. In 1921 (the year of the first census in the Second Polish Republic), Gródek was home to only 990 Jews. Nevertheless, the community was split along political lines, and cells of various parties and movements emerged in the town during the 1920s. The most popular parties were the religious Agudat Israel, the various Zionist factions, and the socialist anti-Zionist Bund. In September 1939, World War II began, and Gródek was quickly occupied by the Soviets. On June 22, 1941, the Soviet-German War broke out, and German troops entered the town in early July. On July 11, the Germans assembled all the men of Gródek in the market square, and registered the Jews and the non-Jews separately. This done, they released the non-Jews from the square and imposed a high "ransom" on the Jews. Anti-Jewish decrees followed. In the following days, a Jewish council was set up in the town, and forced labor was imposed on its Jews. In March 1942, a ghetto was established in Gródek, and it housed both the local Jews and the Jews from the surrounding small villages. On July 11 (or June 3, according to other accounts), 1942, the Nazis came to Gródek to liquidate the ghetto. A German murder squad, reinforced by German and auxiliary policemen, surrounded the ghetto and assembled all the inmates, 1,100 people in total, in the town park. Here, the SD men carried out a selection. They separated 400 able-bodied Jews, loaded them onto trucks, and took them to the Krasne Ghetto as forced laborers. On the way there, some forty Jews jumped out of the trucks, and thirty-six of them managed to vanish into the forest. They eventually joined the Soviet partisans. The rest of the Jews of Gródek (about 700) were transported in trucks to the village of Semerniki, where they were burned alive in a barn. Gródek Wileński was liberated by the Red Army on July 3, 1944.