STROPKOV, SLOVAKIA

                                THE HOLOCAUST

By 1942, the Jews were  effectively removed  from the social and economic life of Slovakia.  In early spring,   the  Nazis demanded that the Slovakian government provide  20,000 young, healthy Slovakian Jews for slave labor.

The first transport  left Stropkov on March 24, 1942, carrying several hundred of  the town's  young  women, as well as some from her "daughter" villages.
These  women were destined for  Auschwitz.  Nearly all perished within a year of their arrival.
 

Later that week, hundreds of  men aged 16 through 50 were also transported, bound for the horrors of Majdanek.  None survived. With their husbands, sons, and daughters gone,  the  remaining Jews were  now left  defenseless and broken.   Bowing to  pressure from the Vatican and influential Jewish groups,  the Slovakian government  then decided to deport those who remained--generally mothers, children, and the elderly--in  "humanitarian family  transports."
 

And so on May 23, 1942, two very large "family transports" left Stropkov.
 

One transport carried  c. 1,000 people to  a ghetto in Rejowiec, a small town near Lublin, Poland.  There, many died under the harsh conditions;  the  rest  perished in Sobibor in August, 1942.  Read about their last hours in an eye-witness account written by one of the few  Jews who escaped with his life that fateful day.

The other transport  carried c. 600  Jews to  Zilina, Slovakia.  From there, they were evidently  sent to Auschwitz.  None survived.

Other, smaller transports left Stropkov through the summer of 1942.  By this time, even those  few Jews who were protected by economic exemptions lived in constant fear.

A small number of Stropkov Jews  evaded the  transports
through bribery,
adoption of Aryan identities,
escape  over the Hungarian border,
hiding in bunkers in the deep Slovakian forests--any or all of the above.
 

To see a comprehensive  list of those Stropkovers and villagers who perished in the Holocaust (and those who survived), arranged family by family, press here.
 

In 1942, before the Holocaust, there were approximately  2000 Jews in the Stropkov region.  By 1945, only some 100 were still alive.

Some Holocaust survivors  were emotionally unable  to  return  "home" to Stropkov after the war.   Others stayed briefly, then moved on.  Over time, most of those who did re-settle in the town  left too.  Some were drawn   to the security of  nearby cities  or to relatives  overseas.    Most, however,  immigrated to the new State of Israel.

By the time  the Communists occupied Slovakia,  only a handful of Jews still lived  in the Stropkov area.   One of them, Jakub  Grunfeld, cared for the Stropkov cemetery until his death  in 1985.  When he--the last Jew-- was buried  there,  a  circle spanning centuries of Jewish history came to a close.

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