Anti-Tank Ditches near the Augustów Canal Related Communities
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Murder story of Sopockinie Jews in the Anti-Tank Trenches at the Augustów Canal
Murder Site
Anti-Tank Ditches near the Augustów Canal
Poland
After occupying Sopoćkinie in June 1941, the Germans ordered the newly formed Polish auxiliary police to denounce the Jews who had collaborated with the Soviets. Upon receiving a list of the “collaborators” (one of whom may have been the town rabbi), the Germans carried out a roundup of these Jews, and they shot the arrestees north of the town, near the Augustów Canal. During the resettlement of the Jews of Sopoćkinie into another ghetto in November 1942, the Germans shot the “useless” (i.e., elderly and infirm) inmates at the same site. The exact number of victims of the two massacres is unclear.
Related Resources
Written Accounts
Yona Erdman, Haya Pinczuk, “The Nazi Occupation and the Holocaust of the Community: As It Was Related by Sarah Hofman, A. Shadmon, Borowski Hanan, and Yaakov Ben-Yehuda” [in Hebrew], an excerpt:
Several days after [June 22, 1941], the Germans ordered all the Jews who had left the town to return to their residences. Anyone found out in the open would be shot. The Jews came back, and the Germans assembled them, seated them down on the grass, singled out those identified by the Poles as Russian collaborators – and shot them. This was the Poles' revenge on the Jews who had denounced them to the Russians during the Russian occupation.…
The rabbi and the elderly residents of the town were rounded up on another day, driven out of the town under the pretext of being unfit for work, taken into the forest, and shot.
Parnas Hager, ed., Sopotzkin: The Story of the Town's Adoption, Kiryat-Yam, 1973, pp. 74-75 (Hebrew) .
Anti-Tank Ditches near the Augustów Canal
Murder Site
Poland
53.833;23.650