In 2009, a sculpture was erected on the main square of Międzyrzec Podlaski on the initiative of survivors. It commemorates over 17,000 Jews who were deported from there to the gas chambers of Treblinka or to forced labour camps in 1942/1943.
History
The town of Międzyrzec Podlaski (Yiddish: Mezritch), situated about 130 kilometres east of Warsaw, was home to about 12,000 Jews before the war. The Jews represented 75 percent of the total population. A ghetto was established relatively late in Międzyrzec Podlaski, at the beginning of »Aktion Reinhardt« – the planned murder of all Jews in occupied Poland (the General Government). Mid-1942, the Jewish Social Self-Help counted 17,490 Jews in the town, including thousands of refugees. Międzyrzec now became the largest transit camp for the deportations to death camps in the Lublin district.
During the first »Aktion« on August 25/26, 1942, members of the SS security police, Reserve Police Battalion 101 and Ukrainian helpers gathered about 10,000 Jewish children, women and men on the main square where they they forced them to cower for hours before deporting them in cattle cars to Treblinka. The Jews who were later forced to collect the bodies of victims in Międzyrzec counted 960 dead - they had been shot during the raid, either on the main square or on the way to the trains. Seven more »Aktionen« followed. During the last »Aktion«, security policemen shot about 170 remaining Jews after which the synagogue was blown up and Międzyrzec was declared to be »judenfrei« (»free of Jews«).
Victims
Over 17,000 Jews from Międzyrzec Podlaski and other towns in Poland as well as Western Europe were deported from Międzyrzec to the gas chambers of Treblinka by German police units, SS units and Ukrainian helpers in 1942/1943. A minority was deported to forced labour camps. Only a few Jews from Międzyrzec survived.
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 2009, members of the »Association of Immigrants of Mezritch Depodalsia in Israel« - survivors from Międzyrzec and their relatives - were able to erect a memorial on the town's main square. The realisation of the initiative had taken years of efforts and talks with the almost entirely catholic town population. The sculpture by Yael Artzi, which is dedicated to the Jewish men, women and children who perished, is entitled »Prayer« and refers to the motif of Jews waiting to be deported. Over 100 people from all over the world whose family roots can be traced back to Międzyrzec came for the memorial's dedication ceremony on August 4, 2009. Moreover, there are two monuments to the murdered Jews of Międzyrzec on the local Jewish cemetery.
The Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe published Naphtali Brezniak's record of his father Moshe's story entitled »The Birch Trees Stand Tall« in April 2011. This was the first German publication of the story of a survivor from Międzyrzec Podlaski.
