Grabowiec (; uk, Грабовець) 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 ...

Zamość County __NOTOC__ Zamość County ( pl, powiat zamojski) is a unit of territorial administration and local government (powiat) in Lublin Voivodeship, eastern Poland. It was established on January 1, 1999, as a result of the Polish local government reforms ...

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 Grabowiec. It lies approximately north-east of

Zamość Zamość (; yi, זאמאשטש, Zamoshtsh; la, Zamoscia) is a historical city in southeastern Poland. It is situated in the southern part of Lublin Voivodeship, about from Lublin, from Warsaw. In 2021, the population of Zamość was 62,021. ...

and south-east 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 current population of 922.

History

Before the outbreak of the

Holocaust The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; a ...

, 2,356 Jews lived in Grabowiec. The Jewish population was quickly and violently rounded up for slave labor. After a while, the Germans evicted the Jews from their houses and concentrated them in a ghetto. Some 2,000 Jews were crowded into a few streetsa few families to each apartment. The Germans set up a labor camp from Grabowiec and employed workers from there and nearby towns. They appointed a ''

Judenrat A ''Judenrat'' (, "Jewish council") was a World War II administrative agency imposed by Nazi Germany on Jewish communities across occupied Europe, principally within the Nazi ghettos. The Germans required Jews to form a ''Judenrat'' in every com ...

'' in the town, whose task it was to provide Jews for slave labor and to obey German orders. In November 1941, 50 Jews from Krakow arrived in the ghetto. During the autumn of 1941, the situation deteriorated, even more, when the ghetto was fenced in and exit from it forbidden. In May 1942, 600 Jews from nearby towns were crammed into the ghetto. The total number of inmates in the Grabowiec ghetto at this point was 2,050. In the winter of 1941 and 1942 furs, gloves, fur hats and gold were confiscated from local Jews. On May 21, 1942 the German troops shot 33 Jews. On June 8th, 1942, in the early morning, '' SS'' troops, aided by Polish police, dragged the Jews from their houses and assembled them in the market square. They were taken to the station at Miaczyn, some away, where they were sorted. Some scores of ill people were murdered on the spot; about 800 Jews fit for work were sent back to Grabowiec at the request of their Nazi employers, while the remaindersome 1,200 soulswere dispatched in wagons to the extermination camp at

Sobibór 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 ...

. In October 1942, the remaining Jews in Grabowiec were likewise sent there and murdered. This October transport is described by eyewitness Dr. Michael Temchin, who also was on the transport but was able to escape one of the train cars destined for Sobibór, in his book "The Witch Doctor". The Jewish population ceased to exist and was never reconstituted.

References

Villages in Zamość County Belz Voivodeship Kholm Governorate Lublin Voivodeship (1919–1939) {{Zamość-geo-stub