New Source Material on the Holocaust!!

by Marzena Dubiel

Never Before Published!!

Some weeks ago I received the following e-mail:

"Dear Mrs. Kramer, name is Marzena Dubiel, maiden name Patryn. My family has lived in Strzyzow for generations. I teach history in a high school in Strzyzow. I have many documents about Strzyzow Jews (my thesis was about local Jews during the WWII). I thought some might be useful to you. Please get in touch, preferably in Polish but correspondence in English is also possible."

After viewing some of the material, I requested and received Marzena's permission to place it on the Strzyzow web page. My next task was to locate someone to do the translation. Luckily I remembered Monika Hendry. Monika was born in Jaslo and lives in Hong Kong with her new baby and had offered assistance "for the benefit of not only Jewish communities but also of future generations of Poles, to help them shed prejudice, broaden their horizons"; Monika gladly translated Marzena's material. The following is just the beginning; we expect to receive additional pages each month.

The Holocaust in Strzyzow

One of the most tragic parts of Hitler's population policy in the occupied Poland was extermination of Jews. Annihilation of Jews, of which more than 95% had Polish nationality, lasted throughout the occupation. In the Rzeszow region it was carried out in three stages:

1. Until the end of 1939
2. From 1940 until 1941
3. From 1942 until the liberation (August 1944)

In the initial four months of the war, in the absence of central guidelines for dealing with Jews in areas occupied by the Wermaht, their fate depended basically on decisions of local commanders and administrators. These officials shared a view that Jews must unconditionally submit to the demands of Germany's racial policy and that their personal freedom must be severely restricted. Contrary to some researchers' view that in 1939 Nazis pursued only indirect and „bloodless" persecution of Jews, statistics show that by 31 December 1939 Nazis killed 7,000 Jews in Poland. First bloody pogroms in the Rzeszow region were carried out by divisions of the 14th army of General List and police divisions of General Streckenbach.

In the second period, Jews were mainly concentrated in camps and ghettos and exterminated through starvation and hard labour. They were also robbed and expelled from their homes. During that period, which lasted until the attack on the Soviet Union, Nazis forced them to work on reinforcement of embankments of the San river.

The mass and planned extermination of Jews in the Rzeszow region started in March 1942, when the first transports of prisoners were directed to the Belzec camp. Before the war, Strzyzow's Jewish community had 1,050 members. There was a very well organized kehilla, with a rabbi who was the highest authority not only for the local Jews but also for those from Czudec, Niebylec, Domaradz and Frysztak. Literacy was very high - the rabbinical school was very active and many Jews studied in the local high school. Many had tertiary education (lawyers, doctors). According to the Town Council records, in 1939 the Jewish library had 1,250 books and 245 members. The kehilla owned a beautiful, 18th century synagogue. Many enterprises were Jewish-owned.

When the Wermaht took Strzyzow, the Nazis started extermination of Jews. On 15 September 1939, German soldiers shot 4 Jews on the outskirts of Strzyzow:

1. Puderbeitel Józef from Frysztak
2. Schlesinger Berisch from Frysztak
3. Stern Mates from Koraczyce
4. Zanger Chune Wolf from Frysztak.

On 24 June 1942, in accordance with the plan of total liquidation of Jewish residents in Galician Gubernia, Germans started resettling Strzyzow's Jews in the ghetto in Rzeszow. The operation was carried out by local and Rzeszow police and took 3 days ending on 26 June 1942. Jews were ordered to gather on the main square with little luggage allowed. Strzyzow's council was to provide horse carts, more than one hundred of them, and the kehilla paid for their hiring.

Rzeszow's ghetto was established on 1 January 1942 and divided into two parts: one for the old, children and women (who usually didn't survive for very long), and the other for men aged 18-45, who were used as slave labour around the city. The ghetto was liquidated in July 1943 by the gestapo, police and SS battalion Truppenübungsplatz from Pustkow. The Jews had to give up all their belongings and were led to the train station in Staroniw, from where in cattle carriages they were taken to different places for extermination. Strzyzow's Jews shared their fate with those from Rzeszow. Most were killed in Belzec, some shot dead in Rzeszow, some in the Glogow forests and in Pustkow.

The table below lists surnames of Strzyzow's Jews whose place of demise I was able to establish based on information from Regional Archives in Rzeszow and archives of the Regional Commission for Investigating Nazi Crimes:

Lot of Jews - IV

Strzyzow Jews put up no resistance during arrests and deportations to the ghetto. There are few cases of survival or attempts to avoid anihilation. It is known that in September 1939 the Goldberg family left for Lwow: Fischel (1876), his wife Feiga (1869) and children: Markus (1900), Rachela (1905) and Eliasz (1906). In 1942 the house they lived in was surrounded by the Germans who set fire to it, on a pretext that some shots were fired from it. They all perished in the fire.

On 31 December 1942 German gendarme G. Kopf shot in a forest near Niebylec a 19 year old Jewish girl from Strzyzow who was hiding there called Sprynca Rieder.

On 18 April 1943 in Wysoka Strzyzowska gendarme H. Drewitz shot in a village Graby three Jewish women sheltered by Franciszek Pilch. They were buried in a forest.

In June 1943 H. Drewitz murdered a 16-year old Jewish girl near the cemetery. A witness describes the scene: "He made it into a game and a joke, he let her run waua and then shot her and wounded. The poor girl was in agony for 10 mins, bleeding and staggering around in paralysing fear." In the summer 1943 the Germans shot in Strzyzow a Jew called Diament who came from Oparówka. In 1944 local gendarmes shot on the former Jewish cemetery a man and a woman. Two Jewish women (aged 18 and 20), who came from the Krosno and were hiding in a forest near Wysoka Strzyzowska were discovered by the Nazis, murdered, and buried on the spot. The property of killed and deported Jews was stolen or burnt, the records of the kehila destroyed, the kirkut flattened and matzevas used to pave the market square. The synagogue was saved thanks to action of mayor W. Górnicki. Not many Jews survived.

The following are survivor surnames that were cofirmed:

1. Acht Fryderyk, lawyer, survived in the Soviet Union,
2. Apperman F.
3. Berglas,
4. Diamant,
5. Dienstag,
6. Deutsch J.,
7. Feit, a girl of extraordinary beauty taken away by a besotted senior-officer pilot as a "labourer" to his parents in Germany as a Pole with false documents,
8. Felber F.,
9. Frenkel Joachim, lawyer, after losing wife and two daughters, he escaped from the ghetto, got false ID and pretending he was German worked as a translator for Lwow gestapo (!),
10. Frydman M.,
11. Goldberg Natan, doctor, survived in the Soviet Union,
12. Heschel D.,
13. Hoff,
14. Mendel D.,
15. Neubart A.,
16. Proseisen A.,
17. Sterngast Z.

Return to Table of Contents

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List of Victims, April 7, 1940 from Yad Vashem

To see the original lists, please go to yadvashem.org and click on "shoah related lists" under Digital Collections, then key Strzyzow in the search box.

Return to Table of Contents

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Sefer Strizhuv, the Yizkor Book

Here, some photographs taken from the Yizkor Book, and sent to us from the Library of Congress:

Recognize anyone?? Harry Langsam wrote and said that "on the top row to the right is my brother (in a black hat) and on the very top on the left there is a little boy visible, that's me".

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You will find the table of contents and the index on the JewishGen Yizkor Web page at The Strzyzow Yizkor Book . Let me suggest you go directly to the .... list of Names from the Index. Once you get the page numbers you are interested in, you can view the page in English or Hebrew....because....

A wonderful thing has happened!!

The New York Public Library, Dorot Division, has imaged hundreds of yizkor books and made them available on the web!

Isn't the world wide web wonderful!!

Return to Strzyzow's Table of Contents