Sometime during the night of November 2, 1942, the inhabitants of the Lunna-Wola Ghetto were ordered to assemble at the Lunna market-square. The Jews were allowed to take with them only small packages containing their personal effects. They took along some grain and sugar. Some Jews hid small pieces of jewelry, including watches and rings, in their clothes. The Christians residing in Lunna and the neighboring villages were told by the Germans to bring their wagons (many of them open horse-drawn wagons called "telechki" which the locals still use to this day) and assemble in the market-square. The Jews were then forced onto these wagons, usually one family per wagon. They were told and believed that they were being sent to work camps.

The night of November 2, 1942 was a cold, dry night. The horse-drawn carts left Lunna during the early hours of the morning, while it was still dark, and drove approximately forty kilometers on unpaved roads through various villages, guarded by several German soldiers. The Jews arrived in the Kelbasin transition camp located four kilometers SSW of Grodno only after an arduous 12-14 hour journey. To this day, some Lunna residents say that the Jews, during this time of despair, chose to stay closely together with their families, even if, as some Lunna residents have claimed - without verification - that some Jews may have somehow had an opportunity to escape the journey to Kelbasin.

The Kelbasin camp had previously been used as a camp for Russian prisoners-of-war captured by the Germans. These Russian prisoners had lived in underground dwellings (Zimlanki) which they had been forced to dig out, 50-100 meters long, 6-8 meters wide and two meters high (the floor was a half meter deep under the ground). Most of the Russian prisoners in Kelbasin had died, and the rest were deported to Germany.

In late 1942, the Nazi murderers issued the order to make the Grodno region "Judenrein", or "rid of Jews". This extermination operation began in November 1942, when the Germans began to send Jews from the region to the extermination camps at Treblinka and Auschwitz. Due to the lack of available trains, however, the Germans instituted "Transitlager" or "transit camps". About 30,000 Jews were sent to the Kelbasin transit camp from towns in the Grodno vicinity in Bialystok district, including Lunna, Skidel, Ozory, Sopotskin, Sydra, Amdor, Ostryna, Porzeze, Sokolka, Krynki, Yanov, Sochwola, Dobrowa, Ostryni, and also from the Grodno Ghetto and other towns in the area. [See map of the Jewish communities in Bialystok district.]  Another transitional camp was set up near Volkovysk, to which, during this same period, Jews from neighboring towns such as Volpa, were deported, before being sent to their deaths in Treblinka.

In Kelbasin, there were six blocks, each consisting of fourteen underground barracks, with each barrack containing about 500 individuals. The underground barracks were assigned by town, according to the number of Jews from each town. The Jews of Lunna, numbering approximately 1,600, were forced into three barracks within the Krynki section shown in the attached sketch of Kelbasin camp. Each village had an oven of sorts for cooking within the camp kitchen which was located outside the huts. The food products that the Jews had brought with them from their towns were collected and used in the kitchen. The Germans also provided a small portion of soup per person with a few unpeeled potatoes (usually frozen or rotten) or scraps of rotten cauliflower cooked in water and 100-150 grams of bread per day.

For more than a month, until December 5, 1942, the Jews from Lunna, regardless of age, sex, or health, were forced to live in these three shallow, cold and damp, underground dwellings. Despite these horrific living conditions, the Jews of Lunna continued to attend religious services, using a Torah scroll secretly brought from Lunna by Chaykel Friedman. As a result of these terrible living and virtually non-existent sanitary conditions, many Jews died of typhus. The ill were transferred to separate barracks and treated by Jewish physicians and nurses who were inmates in the camp. The Germans did not come close to these barracks since they were afraid of infection. Contrary to what the Germans had led the Jews to believe before they were taken to Kelbasin, only a few prisoners in the transit camp were engaged in forced labor, with such labor being limited to cutting wood for kitchen use and digging large burial pits for the dead.

The Kommadant, or Commander, of the Kelbasin camp was a Romanian-born German, Karl Rinzler. Rinzler was a sadistic brute who used to walk amongst the prisoners with a big hard rubber stick and hit them randomly. Eyewitnesses say that Rinzler murdered people every single day. It is known that Berl Pacowski's daughter, a hairdresser from Lunna, was forced to shave Rinzler every day. One day, for no particular reason, Rinzler shot and killed her. Rinzler was never brought to justice for his crimes; his whereabouts at the end of the war were unknown. For a more detailed description of the hell of Kelbasin please refer to "The Scroll of Kelbasin" by Dov Rabin.

During November and December 1942, Jews were deported, in six separate transports from the Bialystok district Ghettos and from Kelbasin camp to their extermination in the Treblinka and Auschwitz concentration camps (see www.grodnoonline.com/P111-END.htm). Towards the end of December 1942, the Germans liquidated the Kelbasin transit camp. The Lunna-Wola Jews were deported from Kelbasin on December 5, 1942.


 

This site is hosted at no cost by JewishGen, Inc., the Home of Jewish Genealogy. If you have been aided in your research by this site and wish to further our mission of preserving our history for future generations, your JewishGen-erosity is greatly appreciated.