Remember Jewish Opole Lubelskie

Prononciation: O-pole Loo-bell-skee

HISTORY OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

NEARBY JEWISH COMMUNITIES

OPOLE LUBELSKIE DURING THE HOLOCAUST

In March 1941, Nazis set up a ghetto in the western part of Opole Lubelskie. It was enclosed by Nowa, Ogrodowa and Nowy Rynek Streets. The area of the Jewish district was originally fenced in with wire entanglements, which were later replaced with a solid wooden fence. Over 10,000 people were confined in the ghetto, including Opole Lubelskie Jews as well as people deported from Puławy, Kazimierz Dolny, Wąwolnica, Józefów and Austria, France, Slovakia. Two water wells within the ghetto hardly met the needs of several thousand inhabitants.

Immediate executions and assaults were committed by Nazi military police on a daily basis. Due to poor living conditions, the death rate in the ghetto was high: on average, 50 people died or were killed in Opole Lubelskie every day. Jewish men aged fourteen to sixty years old, were forced to slave labor for occupying Germans. Workers had to work in sugar factories, or were hired for cleaning works, road construction and various forest and agricultural jobs.

Land Commissioner Horst Goede, a psychopathic sadist, infamous for many executions, such as murder on a few dozen patients at a Jewish hospital, was the terror of the ghetto. Upon his command, the Judenrat had to single out women to participate in orgies organized by Germans at the palace in Niezdów. The first mass deportations of people confined in the ghetto in Opole Lubelskie started in the Spring of 1942. On March 31, 1942, a group of 1,950 people were shipped to the camp in Bełżec Extermination Camp. In May, circa 2,000 people were packed to gas chambers in Sobibór. The final liquidation of the place where the entire Jewish population was gathered was carried out on October 24th, 1942. Eight thousand people who still remained in the ghetto were sent to Poniatowa Concentration Camp and Sobibór Death Camp. About five hundred people were killed on the spot.

WHAT REMAINS

Zachor - We Remember. Please review the site content below.
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[Poniatowa Sub-Camps] [Poniatowa Concentration Camp]
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Living quarters for Austrian Jews in the ghetto in Opole Lubelski, in 1941. Source: Centropa.