Starzeń is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Horodło in Hrubieszów County, Lublin Voivodeship, eastern Poland. It is located about 7 kilometers south of the town of Horodło, and about 34 kilometers east of the town of Uchanie.[1] In 1921, it had a population of eighty, all of them Poles. Under the German occupation, Starzeń became part of the General Government. Jews arrived in the village only in late April 1942. [2] Numbering about a hundred, they were slave laborers brought from the surrounding villages and towns to a plantation belonging to an estate in Starzeń.[3]
Among the Jews taken to Starzeń, there was a small group of mostly young men and women who had been deported to Miączyn on June 8, 1942, together with some 2,000 Jews from Uchanie and the surrounding area. At the Miączyn railway station, most of the deportees were herded into railcars and sent to the Sobibor extermination camp, and only the small group of youngsters was left behind at the station. [4] The next morning, the Germans performed another selection. Those able-bodied and fit to work were taken back to Uchanie, where they remained for eight days. On June 17, the Polish owners of nearby farms came to Uchanie to select Jews to work for them.[5]
After four-five months of work, in October 1942,[6] an order was given by the Germans, requiring all the Jewish workers at the Starzeń estate to report within a day to the German police headquarters in Hrubieszów.[7]...