Memorial to the murdered Jews of Będzin

Pomnik dla ofiar getta w Będzinie

In Będzin several memorials stand in memory of the approximately murdered 25,000 Jews from the city and its surroundings.

History

Będzin is an industrial city in Upper Silesia about 10 km away from Katowice. Prior to the First World War the city was part of the Russian Empire and in close proximity to the borders with the German and the Austro-Hungarian Empires.
The history of the Będzin Jews dates back to the Middle Ages. In the mid 19th century 2,240 Jews live in the city, more than a third of the total population. At that time the town thrived mainly thanks to mining and the steel industry. The Jewish community benefited from this boom and in 1894 a new synagogue built from stone was consecrated. After the First World War, Będzin became a part of Poland. At the outbreak of the Second World War more than 40 percent of the approximately 50,000 inhabitants were Jewish.
The German Wehrmacht occupied the city as early as September 4, 1939. Already in the first days of German rule numerous Jews were murdered, for instance under the pretext of pursuing speculation. On September 8 the Germans burned the synagogue and parts of the Jewish quarter without any prior warning. Hundreds died in the fire. In early 1940 a ghetto was established. In the followings months Jews were again and again taken away to conduct forced labour in other parts of Upper Silesia. From May 1942 onwards the German authorities started to deport Jews from Upper Silesia to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp which was only 30 km away from Będzin. Until summer 1943 most of the Jews from the ghetto had been deported, only men fit for work remained. At this stage, an underground resistance movement developed. When the Germans started to liquidate the ghetto on July 31, 1943 some fighters put up resistance until August 8. The last inhabitants of the ghetto, about 1,000 Jews, were deported to Auschwitz in January 1944.

Będzin, about 1900, View of the synagogue beneath the castle, public domain

Victims

Approximately 30,000 Jews from Będzin and surroundings were forced to live in the Będzin ghetto. More than 25,000 of them were murdered, most of them in the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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 Red Army reached the city in January 1945. Upper Silesia and therefore also Będzin became a part of Poland. Some of the Jewish survivors returned to their home but most of them emigrated soon afterwards. After the anti-Semitic campaign of the communist government in 1968 hardly any Jews stayed in Będzin.
For a long time very little was reminiscent of the city's former Jewish life or the victims of the ghetto except for the abandoned Jewish cemetery. In 1987 a memorial plaque was erected at the site of a mass shooting of Polish and Jewish hostages in the early days of the German occupation. Only after the breakdown of the communist system a memorial was erected which made reference explicitly to Jewish victims: At the site of the synagogue which was burned in 1939 a square-shaped memorial stone with a menorah and an inscription in Polish and Hebrew was erected on initiative of descendants of Będzin Jews. In 2005 a memorial to the victims of the ghetto was inaugurated. At the place which today is called the Square of the Heroes of the Ghetto members of the Jewish underground movement put up resistance during the liquidation of the ghetto. Behind the stele is a fragment of a wagon remembering the deportation. The inscription of the memorial plaque in Hebrew, English and Polish reads: »In memory of the more that 30,000 Jews who have settled here for ages and generations and have been taken away and murdered by the Nazis 1939-1945. Authorities and inhabitants of Będzin, August 2005.«
Between summer 1943 and September 1944 there was a satellite camp of the Auschwitz concentration camp in the Będzin district of Łagisza with approximately 1,000 detainees. They are remembered with a memorial stone in front of the local power station.

Będzin, 2012, Inscription on the memorial to the victims of the ghetto, Helena Grunfeld

Będzin, 2013, Memorial at the site of the former synagogue burned down in 1939, Steve Glickman

Open

The memorials are accessible at all times.

Contact

Plac Bohaterów Getta / ul. Józefa Podsiadły
41-200 Będzin

Będzin, 2012, Rear of the memorial to the victims of the ghetto, Helena Grunfeld

Będzin, 1942, Street scene in the ghetto, public domain

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