Memorials to the Victims of the Przemyśl Ghetto

Pomniki ku czci ofiar getta w Przemyślu

Several memorials in east Polish Przemyśl, a town located in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains, honour the 24,000 Przemyśl Jews, whom the SS deported from the ghetto to Bełżec death camp in 1942. Members of an SS Einsatzgruppe shot about 600 Jews in Przemyśl already in 1939.

History

The Polish town of Przemyśl lies on the banks of the River San in eastern Galicia. Until World War I, Przemyśl was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At the beginning of the 20th century, the town was turned into a fortress. During World War I, two major battles were fought over the Przemyśl fortress. After 1918, the town became Polish. At the time, about a third of the total population was Jewish; before World War II, the Jewish community had some 24,000 members. Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Wehrmacht occupied Przemyśl. The River San was now the border between the German and Soviet occupation zones of Poland. In the autumn of 1939, Przemyśl was divided along the river: the area on river's eastern bank came under Soviet occupation in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Prior to this, members of SS Einsatzkommando I (SS mobile killing squad) shot about 600 Jews. The Germans forcibly moved all of the remaining Jews into the eastern part of Przemyśl. During the two years of Soviet occupation, about 7,000 Jews were arrested by the Soviet authorities and deported to the inner Soviet Union.
After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, all of Przemyśl came under German occupation. In autumn 1941, the German occupation authorities set up a ghetto for the 17,000 Jews in Przemyśl at the time. The ghetto was located in the eastern part of Przemyśl. In the summer of 1942, the SS murdered about 10,000 Jews from Przemyśl at the Bełżec extermination camp. By the end of 1943, nearly all of the Jews from Przemyśl and surrounding areas had been deported to various death camps via the Przemyśl ghetto. The SS also murdered several thousand Jews on site: in the summer, German units shot several hundred women, children and elderly in a nearby forest; on September 11, 1943, a further 1,500 Jews were shot in a school courtyard in the town centre. In February 1944, the ghetto was dismantled. Only about 500 Jews from Przemyśl survived the war in hiding.

Przemyśl, around 1910, The city's Old Synagogue seen from across the town square, Muzeum Narodowe Ziemi Przemyskiej

Przemyśl, 2009, School building on ulica Kopernika, Marek Król

Victims

Most probably 15,000 Jews were deported from Przemyśl to the Bełżec death camp in the summer of 1942 and murdered there. In November 1942, a further 4,000 Jews were taken to Bełżec. Most of the Jews originally came from Przemyśl itself, about 5,000 came from the surrounding areas. They had been forcibly resettled into the Przemyśl ghetto in the summer of 1942.

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

In 1956, the Jewish Social and Cultural Society (TSKŻ) set up a memorial in the school courtyard, in which over 1,500 had been shot in September 1943, in honour of the victims. A further memorial plaque in memory of the ghetto inmates was affixed to the front façade of the school building - during the war, the building housed the offices of the Judenrat. In 2002, a memorial stone in the forest near Grochowce outside of Przemyśl was dedicated to the Jews who were shot there in the summer of 1942 during the deportations. Further memorials on the Jewish cemetery honour the murdered Jews of Przemyśl. Most recently, a memorial plaque was set up at the former Scheinbach Synagogue in 2009.

Przemyśl, 2009, Memorial plaque on the school building, Marek Król

Przemyśl, 2008, 1956 memorial on the site of the mass shootings in the school yard, Marek Król

Open

The memorials are always open to the public.

Contact

37-700 Przemyśl

Grochowce near Przemyśl, undated, Memorial stone on the site of mass shootings in the forest, Łukasz Biedka

Przemyśl, May or July 1942, Jews were forced to move into the ghetto, YIVO Archives

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