In the small Polish town of Izbica several memorial stones at the Jewish cemetery remember the city's approximately 5,000 Jews who were deported and murdered by the Germans. For more than 12,000 other Jews Izbica became a transit ghetto to the extermination camps of Sobibór and Bełżec.
History
Izbica is located in central Poland near Lublin. The place was first mentioned in the 15th century. From the 18th century onwards it was almost exclusively Jews who settled there and Izbica received its town charter. The number of inhabitants grew rapidly and Izbica developed into a typical Shtetl: Besides other religious institutions the synagogue was the central place for the predominantly Yiddish speaking community. In 1939 Izbica had about 6,000 inhabitants, more than 5,000 of them Jews. With the start of World War II. Izbica came under German occupation and the whole surroundings of Lublin became part of the Generalgouvernement. Because of the high Jewish share of the population the whole of Izbica was declared a ghetto by the German administration. The Jews had to wear armbands and had to conduct forced labour. From 1940/41 onwards the German administration deported Jews from Łódź, Głowno, Kalisz and Lublin to Izbica. From March 1942 onwards the SS murdered under the code name »Aktion Reinhardt« almost all the Jews from the Generalgouvernement in the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. To gather the victims the SS established transition camps. Since Izbica was located at the railway line to Bełżec, the place became a transit ghetto for thousands of people. Jews from the Generalgouvernement but also from the German Reich, from Bohemia and Slovakia were transported to Izbica from 1942. In spring 1942 about 12,000 Jews lived in the Izbica ghetto under the worst of conditions. At the same time the SS started mass deportations to Bełżec. Almost all were murdered there by the SS
Victims
Of the approximately 5,000 Jewish members of Izbaca's pre-war community only 14 survived. Between 12,000 and 15,000 Jews were deported via Izbica to the Sobibór and Bełżec extermination camps and murdered there. Hundreds more were shot by members of the SS in Izbica itself.
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
Only few traces remember the Jewish town of Izbica. After the war a number of memorial stones had been erected at the Jewish cemetery of Izbica. However, for decades the Jewish cemetery remained in a very poor condition. Only in 2006 the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (Polish: Fundacji Ochrony Dziedzictwa Żydowskiego) and the film production company Tvschoenfilm had the former Gestapo prison in Izbica demolished: The building had partly been erected with headstones from the Jewish cemetery. SS-men had forced Jews to dismantle the headstones. The headstones returned to the Jewish cemetery of Izbica in 2006; a section of the headstones was attached to the walls of a tomb, the orel (Hebrew literally: tent). The dismantling of the Gestapo building as well as the return of the headstones to the cemetery was recounted by Tvschoenfilm in a documentary. In addition a memorial stone remembering the Jewish community of Izbica was dedicated in November 2006.
