Memorial to the Ghetto Heroes and Memorial to the Great Synagogue in Białystok

Pomnik Bohaterów Getta i Pomnik Wielkiej Synagogi w Białymstoku

On August 1, 1941, the German military administration established a ghetto in Białystok - a city which is today located in the north-east of Poland, on the border to Belarus - for approximately 50,000 Jews from the city and surrounding areas. Over time, the Jewish inmates of the ghetto were deported to various extermination and labour camps, until the ghetto was finally dismantled. Today, several monuments commemorate the Jewish victims from Białystok, most notably the Memorial to the Great Synagogue, erected in 1995 to commemorate the 2,000 Jews who were locked into the synagogue and burnt alive on the first day of German occupation.

History

Białystok had a population of 107,000 before the Second World War, with Jews constituting over half. Following the German invasion of Poland, Białystok was occupied on September 15, 1939. A few days later, the Soviet army invaded Poland from the east and occupied large parts of the country - in accordance with the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact - including Białystok. When the German Reich breached the treaty on June 22, 1941, by invading the Soviet Union, Białystok was yet again occupied by Wehrmacht units. In order to create »Lebensraum« for Germany, the »District of Białystok«, established in August 1941, was to be exploited economically, with the local population deployed in labour until it would be resettled or murdered. From the very beginning of the German occupation on June 27, 1941, SS mobile killings units, various police battalions, units of the Security Police and Wehrmacht murdered Jews in the region. Already on the first day, members of police battalion 309 locked about 2,000 Jews in the Great Synagogue and set fire to the building, killing everyone inside. At the beginning of August 1941, the German military administration established a ghetto for 50,000 Jews. Ephraim Barasz - the chair of the Judenrat, which was installed by the Germans - made the ghetto into an important textile production site in the hope of protecting the Jews who were deployed in labour.
In mid-July 1943, it was decided that the ghetto would be dissolved. This was partly due to the developments on the eastern front and partly because of an increase of Russian partisan activities in the region. All of the factories located in the ghetto were to be moved to Lublin. Soldiers, policemen and an SS auxiliary unit surrounded the ghetto on August 16, 1943. They were met with the resistance of about 200 members of the underground, who organised an uprising. The struggle was short-lived. After the revolt had been suppressed, the SS deported about 30,000 Jews to extermination and labour camps.

Białystok, undated, Colourised historical picture of the Great Synagogue, Tomasz Wisniewski

Białystok, undated, View of the burned out Great Synagogue, deathcamps.org

Victims

Between June and September 1941, in the first months of the German occupation, about 31,000 Jews were murdered in the district of Białystok - most of them died in mass shootings. In Białystok alone 4,000 Jews perished. From October 1942 on, the numerous ghettos of the »Bezirk Bialystok« were rapidly dismantled, only the Białystok ghetto remained in operation for longer. In February 1943, over 10,000 Jews were deported from Białystok to Auschwitz and Treblinka. About 1,000 Jews were shot in the ghetto.
When the ghetto was liquidated in August 1943, some 17,000 to 19,000 Jews were deported to the Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz death camps and murdered there, including 1,264 children who were deported to Auschwitz via Theresienstadt in Bohemia. 11,000 other Jews were forcibly taken to labour camps in Lublin. Most of them were shot there by policemen and members of the SS in the course of »Aktion Erntefest« (»Operation Harvest Festival«), a mass murder that took place on November 3/4, 1943. The final dissolution of the ghetto took place on September 16, 1943. Between 1,200 and 2,000 Jews were deported to Majdanek, where they too fell victim to »Aktion Erntefest«. Only about 300 to 400 Jews from Białystok lived to see the end of the war.

The Second World War began in September 1939 with the invasion of Poland and the occupation of the west of the country by German troops and the east of the country by the Red Army. Persecution and terror directly followed the invasion in both parts of the country. German units massacred members of the intelligentsia, Jewish and non-Jewish civilians as well as hospital patients. At the end of 1939 the German administration established ghettos where the Jewish population was forced to live in cramped and horrendous conditions. Following the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, eastern Poland also fell under German control. SS Einsatzgruppen started to systematically murder Jewish men, later also women and children. In autumn 1941, local German authorities in the former west of the country began to prepare for the mass murder of Jewish ghetto prisoners using poison gas. By 1945, some three million Polish Jews had been murdered in the extermination camps at Chelmno, Belzec, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek or Auschwitz, starved to death in the ghettos or shot dead. In 1943 the Jews living in the Warsaw ghetto staged an uprising, which was brutally crushed by the SS. Polish soldiers fought with the Allies on all fronts during the Second World War. Polish partisan groups, including the patriotic »Armia Krajowa« (Home Army), formed the largest resistance movement in occupied Europe. August 1, 1944 saw the start of the Warsaw Uprising, the most extensive civilian campaign against the Germans in occupied Europe. It failed also because the Red Army, already standing on the opposite side of the Vistula River, chose not to intervene. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people lost their lives in the uprising. A total of around three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death during the German occupation. Once the Red Army had arrived on (East) Polish soil in January 1944, the troops of the Armia Krajowa were stripped of their weapons by the Soviet secret service and the officers were either shot or deported. The millions of deaths during the occupation, the permanent Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, the incorporation of former eastern German territories and the ensuing population transfers all left a traumatic political and social legacy in Poland. Remembrance of the murder of European Jews in German extermination camps was initially marginalised in the Polish culture of memory. Although Auschwitz soon became an international symbol of the Holocaust, in Poland it was viewed for decades above all as a »site of Polish martyrdom«. However, the start of the 21st century brought about changes in this respect, due in part to the fierce debates over the Jedwabne massacre in eastern Poland. The massacre of around 340 Jews on July 10, 1941 was originally attributed to the »Gestapo and Hitler police« but had in fact been carried out by Polish »neighbours« without orders from the Germans. Debates in Poland and abroad on Polish perpetration resulted in the Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski (*1954) issuing an apology to the victims in 2001. There were increasing calls from experts, such as those from Poland’s Institute for National Remembrance, for the country to confront the most difficult chapters in its history, which also include the anti-Jewish pogroms in 1946-47 and state anti-semitism in communist Poland during the post-war period. The Polish invests extensively in memorial culture, including grand projects with international ambition. The Warsaw Rising Museum was opened already in 2004. The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in 2013 on the territory of the former Warsaw Ghetto, a new museum dedicated specifically to the Warsaw Ghetto will follow suit in 2024. Since 2017, there is a major Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Since the turn of the millennium, the sites of the former German extermination camps have also been converted into modern memorial sites. An ever-growing preoccupation with Poland’s Jewish and multicultural heritage can be observed in the field of culture as well.

Remembrance

The Memorial to the Ghetto Heroes (Polish: Pomnik Bohaterów Getta) was erected not long after the end of the war. It commemorates the participants of the uprising in the Białystok ghetto. In 1993, the memorial was restored on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the uprising.
1958, on the 15th anniversary of the uprising in the ghetto, a memorial plaque in Polish and Yiddish was placed on a house near the former site of the Great Synagogue, commemorating the murdered Jews of the city.
A major memorial was unveiled in 1995: Białystok Jews from all over the world as well as the city council donated the Memorial to the Great Synagogue (Polish: Pomnik Wielkiej Synagogi). It is dedicated also to the memory of the 2,000 Jews who were burnt alive inside the synagogue on June 27, 1941. The memorial symbolizes the destruction of the synagogue’s dome by the fire.
The memorials are part of the »Jewish Heritage Trail« (Polish: Szlak Dziedzictwa Żydowskiego w Białymstoku). In 2008, a group of students and doctoral candidates from the University of Białystok as well as volunteers developed a project on the Jewish history of Białystok from 1685 to 1945, marking all the relevant sites on a map of the city.

Białystok, 2007, Memorial to the Ghetto Heroes, Regionalny Oddział PTTK, Łukasz Wołyniec

Białystok, 2006, Memorial to the Great Synagogue, Podlaska Regionalna Organizacja Turystyczna

Open

The memorials are accessible at all times.

Contact

Białystok, 2023, Plaques in memory of the Great Synagogue and of the Jews murdered in the fire, Stiftung Denkmal

Białystok, 2023, Information sign with a picture of the former Great Synagogue and the memorial in the background, Stiftung Denkmal

Białystok, 2023, The memorial for the Great Synagogue is standing on a symbolic Star of David, Stiftung Denkmal

Białystok, 2023, Memorial plaque for the Jewish victims from the year 1958, Stiftung Denkmal

Białystok, 2007, Memorial to the Great Synagogue, Regionalny Oddział PTTK, Łukasz Wołyniec

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