Memorial to the murdered Jews of Tarnów

Pamięci tarnowskich Żydów

The city of Tarnów had the highest Jewish share of population in the historic region of Galicia. During the German occupation almost all Jewish inhabitants of Tarnów were murdered. In the city there is little remaining evidence of the once vibrant Jewish life.

History

On the eve of the Second World War the city of Tarnów, approximately 65 km east of Cracow, had a pronounced Jewish character, due to their share of more than 50% of the population. Jews lived there since the middle of the 15th century. When Tarnów was part of the Habsburg Empire the city became a centre of trade with Jews playing an important role. At the end of the 19th century the Zionist movement gained strength, so much that in the period between the two world wars up to 150 Jews from Tarnów emigrated to Palestine every year. In 1908 the New Synagogue was completed, the largest house of prayer for the Jews of Tarnów.
The German Wehrmacht occupied Tarnów on September 7, 1939. Many of the Tarnów Jews had fled before, however, many Jewish refugees entered the city as well. As early as by November 1939 all 40 synagogues and houses of prayer were destroyed, Jews were drafted for forced labour. In May 1940 the occupation authorities deported several members of the Jewish elite to the Auschwitz concentration camp. In March 1941 they established a ghetto where 40,000 Jews from Tarnów and its surroundings were concentrated in. On June 11, 1942 the mass murder of the Tarnów Jews started. The SS deported more than 3,500 of them to the Bełżec extermination camp and shot hundreds on the Jewish cemetery. A few days later a second »Aktion« followed when further 10,000 Jews were deported to Bełżec. The approximately 20,000 survivors were cordoned off in the ghetto. Until its final liquidation on September 2, 1943 the deportations to the extermination camps continued. On that day the SS deported about 7,000 Jews to Auschwitz and 3,000 to the Płaszów concentration camp. At the same time about 10,000 Jews were shot on the Jewish cemetery. Shortly afterwards, after the deportation of the last Jewish forced labourers to Płaszów, Tarnów was declared »judenrein« (free of Jews).

Tarnów, 1942, Jews prior to their deportation, Yad Vashem

Tarnów, 2009, The Bimah – the only remaining fragment from the Old Synagogue, magro_kr

Victims

Before 1939 Tarnów had a Jewish population estimated at 25,000. During the war, thousands of Jews came as refugees into the the city while others were brought there by force. The majority of Jews were either shot on site or murdered by poison gas in the extermination camps of Bełżec and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Only the few who were assigned to forced labour had a chance to survive. Exact numbers are not known.

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

Approximately 700 Jews returned to Tarnów after the war, first and foremost to look for surviving relatives. Most of them did not stay long, particularly since the Polish government supported emigrants to Palestine financially. By the middle of the 1970s only 35 Jews lived in Tarnów, the last of them died in 1993.
In the city there is little remaining evidence that Tarnów once was a centre of Jewish life. The site of the ghetto which is remembered in a few plaques is built-over by houses built during the socialist period. During German occupation all the city's synagogues were destroyed, only the bimah (the place where the Torah is being read from during services) of the Old Synagogue survived. It was restored in the 1980s and covered with a roof. Also the building of the mikvah, the bath used for the purpose of ritual immersion, still exists and serves as a trade centre. In this building more than 750 men were gathered in 1940 before being deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp, among them some Jewish intellectuals. This was the first deportation to Auschwitz ever and is remembered by a memorial erected in 1975 opposite the mikvah.
The Jewish cemetery of Tarnów, one of the biggest and oldest in Poland has been largely preserved. In memory to the thousands of Jews murdered on this cemetery survivors erected a memorial in 1946. The central element is a column fragment from the destroyed New Synagogue. In front of the column is a granite slab bearing the following inscription in Hebrew and Polish: »25,000 Jews who were brutally murdered by the German bandits between June 11, 1942 and November 5, 1943 rest here«. Above it a quote from a poem by the Jewish poet Nachman Bialik (1873-1934) in Hebrew: »And the sun shone and was not ashamed«.

Tarnów, 2010, Holocaust memorial on the Jewish cemetery, Tajchman (Wikipedia Commons)

Tarnów, 2004, Memorial from 1975 remembering the first ever deportation to Auschwitz, Emmanuel Dyan

Open

The memorials in the city centre are accessible at all times. The keys to the Jewish cemetery is available at the local Tourist Information Centre »Tarnowskie Centrum Informacijne« (see contact details)

Contact

http://www.it.tarnow.pl/index.php

centrum@it.tarnow.pl

+48 (0)14 688 90 90

ul. Rynek 7
33-100 Tarnów

Tarnów, 2004, On the Jewish cemetery, Emmanuel Dyan

Tarnów, undated, The New Synagogue from 1908, www.jewishpostcards.com

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