The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has material from the State Archive in Bialystok on legal efforts of individuals to recover property after World War II.  A finding aid was prepared by the USHMM that lists the names of the people involved from the town of Bialystok, the Bialystok district and the following districts in the Bialystok region: Augustow, Bielsk Podlaski, Grajewo, Lomza, Sokolka, Suwalki, and Wysokie Mazowiecki. BIALYGen has indexed the names from the districts within the BIALYGen area -- Bialystok, Bielsk Podlaski, and Sokolka -- as well as the Augustow district. For each name in the index, there are one or more record numbers that refer to 19 reels of microfilm as follows:

Each record number contains a dozen or so legal and other documents (in Polish) that were part of individual efforts to recover property the person or their heirs owned on September 1, 1939.  The documents often indicate a number of the members of a family.

Although there were a considerable number of Jewish names listed on the finding aid, there are also non-Jews.  The list of names is alphabetical.  In searching the list one should look at surrounding names as well as exact spelling.  In some cases, it is difficult to distinguish vowels because of the quality of the printing.  The names are spelled in the original Polish without Polish accent marks. Also, many of the surnames contain endings that identify grammatical usage in Polish.  

To access this collection you can go to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC or find someone willing to go on your behalf. The Call number of this microfilm collection is Acc.1998.A.0239. Both the finding aid and the reels are easily accessible at the Archive desk in the USHMM Library, which is on the fifth floor. 

For BIALYGenners, Sidney Zabludoff has graciously agreed to copy all the information in a file for each name you find in the index for $15 per file, which will be donated to BIALYGen. The contents of the file will be in Polish. Please contact Sidney at SJZ@intergate.com to make arrangements. This offer only relates to those records indexed on this website.

To access the Surname Index as an Excel file click All restitution records.xls

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Last Updated on 22 February 2005.