שילוח מ - Izbica, Krasnystaw, Lublin, פולין ל - Belzec, מחנה השמדה, פולין ב- 11/1942

Under German occupation, the town of Izbica nad Wieprzem (Izbica on the river Wieprz), once a center of Jewish religious life, was assigned to the Krasnystaw County and designated as one of the main transit ghettos of the Lublin District of the General Government. The decision to turn Izbica into a Hauptunterbringungs- und Umschlagpunkt (the official German-language term for such ghettos) was taken at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on January 20, 1942, and at the subsequent meeting of Gestapo officials at the IVB4 office of Adolf Eichmann at the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA, Reich Security Main Office) in Berlin on March 6 that year. Thus, the town was supposed to temporarily absorb the masses of Jews from Germany, Austria, Slovakia, and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia arriving in the General Government on their way to their deaths. Following this decision, SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle, chief of "Einsatzstab Reinhard" of the SS-und Polizeiführer (SSPF, SS- and police chief) in Lublin, Odilo Globocnik, and his expert on "Jewish affairs," promised the Krasnystaw County Commissioner, Adolf Schmidt, that his county would be the first to become "Jew-free."^[1]

Situated on the Lublin-Bełżec railway line, Izbica became a hub of the "Aktion Reinhard" deportations. The town is surrounded by mountains and the Wieprz River, and these served as the natural borders of the ghetto. In total, some 26,000 Jews passed through Izbica on their way to the Belzec and Sobibor extermination camps, and the Lublin-Majdanek camp.^[2] The German authorities ordered the establishment of a Judenrat (Jewish Council) and a Jewish police force in the town in early 1940.^[3] The deportations from Izbica were authorized by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and directed by Globocnik, together with Höfle, in collaboration with the Bevölkerung und Fürsorge (BuF, Population and Welfare) Lublin.^[4]  On March 30, 1942, SS-Obersturmführer Helmut Pohl, Höfle's deputy, informed Richard Türk, the BuF Lublin chief, that, by that point, 2,200 Jews had been deported from Izbica, while some 4000 Jews from the Reich had arrived there.^[5]

In July 1942, Heinrich Himmler ordered the completion of the "Final Solution" and the liquidation of the Jews in the General Government by the end of 1942.^[6] Yekutiel Tzvilikh (also spelled Jekutiel Cwilich), who had arrived in Izbica from Zamość on October 14, 1942, described the townlet as "a station, where people are waiting for the train."^[7] On October 18, a several-day-long deportation action of the Jews of Izbica began.^[8] Afterward, Kurt Engels, Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD (KdS, Commander of the Security Police and SD), declared Izbica "Jew-free," and any Jew out in the streets was to be shot on the spot. On October 28, a decree designated Izbica as a "Judenstadt" (Jewish city),^[9] which prompted many of the surviving Jews, who had escaped to the nearby fields or gone into hiding during the deportation wave, to return to the town.^[10]...