Baranów is a

village A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to ...

Puławy County __NOTOC__ Puławy County ( pl, powiat puławski) is a unit of territorial administration and local government (powiat) in Lublin Voivodeship, eastern Poland. It was first established in 1867, but its current borders were established on January 1, 1 ...

Lublin Voivodeship The Lublin Voivodeship, also known as the Lublin Province (Polish: ''województwo lubelskie'' ), is a voivodeship (province) of Poland, located in southeastern part of the country. It was created on January 1, 1999, out of the former Lublin, Che� ...

, in eastern Poland. It is the seat of the

gmina The gmina (Polish: , plural ''gminy'' , from German ''Gemeinde'' meaning ''commune'') is the principal unit of the administrative division of Poland, similar to a municipality. , there were 2,477 gminas throughout the country, encompassing over 4 ...

(administrative district) called Gmina Baranów. It lies approximately north-east of

Puławy Puławy (, also written Pulawy) is a city in eastern Poland, in Lesser Poland's Lublin Voivodeship, at the confluence of the Vistula and Kurówka Rivers. Puławy is the capital of Puławy County. The city's 2019 population was estimated at 47,417 ...

and north-west of the regional capital

Lublin Lublin is the ninth-largest city in Poland and the second-largest city of historical Lesser Poland. It is the capital and the center of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 336,339 (December 2021). Lublin is the largest Polish city east of t ...

. The village has a population of 1,672.

History

Baranów was founded as a town on the basis of

Magdeburg Law Magdeburg rights (german: Magdeburger Recht; also called Magdeburg Law) were a set of town privileges first developed by Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor (936–973) and based on the Flemish Law, which regulated the degree of internal autonomy within c ...

in 1544. By the 19th century the town was in economic decline and in 1870 it lost its town status.

History of Jews in Baranów

The first historical mention of the Jewish inhabitants of Baranów comes from records dating from 1621 during the

Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, formally known as the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and, after 1791, as the Commonwealth of Poland, was a bi-confederal state, sometimes called a federation, of Crown of the Kingdom of ...

. In 1930 the village had a population of 2071, including 1092 Jews.'' The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe'' by

Geoffrey P. Megargee Geoffrey P. Megargee (November 4, 1959 – August 1, 2020) was an American historian and author who specialized in World War II military history and the history of the Holocaust. He served as the project director and editor-in-chief for the ''En ...

Christopher Browning Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian who is the professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust, Browning is known for his work documenting ...

, Martin Dean, Indiana University Press, 201
pp. 611–612
/ref> In

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, the Germans occupied Baranów in September 1939 and immediately took both Christians and Jews as hostages. They were later released. Afterwards, Germans began robbing and plundering Jewish homes and shops. Polish police participated in the robberies but Polish authorities often mitigated the impact of the anti Jewish policies of the Germans. A

Nazi ghetto Beginning with the invasion of Poland during World War II, the Nazi Germany, Nazi regime set up ghettos across German-occupied Europe, German-occupied Eastern Europe in order to segregate and confine Jews, and sometimes Romani people, into small ...

was established in late 1941, containing both local Jews and hundreds of Jewish refugees who had fled to Baranów. Many healthy Jews were sent to

Nazi concentration camps From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as concen ...

called

Arbeitslager ''Arbeitslager'' () is a German language word which means labor camp. Under Nazism, the German government (and its private-sector, Axis, and collaborator partners) used forced labor extensively, starting in the 1930s but most especially during ...

(labor camps) nearby, leaving behind the elderly and sick in the ghetto who often died of malnutrition and starvation. In May 1942, the German SS with their Ukrainian auxiliary troops came to town to round up the Jewish community to be deported to the killing camp

Sobibor Sobibor (, Polish: ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland. As an ...

. About 500 were deported that day. At least 100 Jews fled to the forests or hid with Polish acquaintances. Some were murdered by

anti-semitic Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism. Antis ...

Polish partisans in the forests, others fled to other ghettos. Most of those hiding in the forest were killed later by German SS, Ukrainian auxiliaries, and Polish police in 1943 and 1944. Fewer than 25 Baranów Jews survived the war, and the Jewish community was not reestablished in the village afterwards. Except for the remnants of the Jewish cemetery and the name of one of the streets, few traces of the former Jewish presence remain in the village today. The town is the ancestral home of the historian

Harold Shukman Harold Shukman (23 March 1931 – 11 July 2012) was a British historian, specialising in the history of Russia. Shukman was born in London to a family of Jewish immigrants escaping from the Russian Empire. His father, David Shukman, whose first n ...

and his sons, the science journalist

David Shukman David Roderick Shukman (born 30 May 1958) is a British journalist, and the former science editor of BBC News. Early life Shukman was born in 1958 in St Pancras, London. He is of Jewish ancestry – his grandfather, whom he is named after, was p ...

and the travel writer and novelist

Henry Shukman Henry Shukman (born 1962 in Oxford, Oxfordshire) is an English poet and writer. He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford. His father was the historian Harold Shukman and his brother is the BBC News reporter David Shukman. He is of Jewish an ...

. Harold Shukman's father, David Shukman, whose first name he gave to his first born son, was part of the Jewish community of Baranow during the

Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...

, before emigrating and settling in the United Kingdom.

References

External links

History of the Jewish community in Baranów
from

Virtual Shtetl The Virtual Shtetl ( pl, Wirtualny Sztetl) is a bilingual Polish-English portal of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, devoted to the Jewish history of Poland. History The Virtual Shtetl website was officially launched on June 1 ...

website {{Authority control Villages in Puławy County Lesser Poland Lublin Governorate Lublin Voivodeship (1919–1939) Holocaust locations in Poland