Rozwadów () is a suburb of

Stalowa Wola Stalowa Wola () is the largest city and capital of Stalowa Wola County with a population of 58,545 inhabitants, as of 31 December 2021. It is located in southeastern Poland in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship. The city lies in historic Lesser Polan ...

Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It is divided into 16 administrative provinces called voivodeships, covering an area of . Poland has a population of over 38 million and is the fifth-most populous ...

. Founded as a town in 1690, it was incorporated into Stalowa Wola in 1973. The Rozwadów suburb of Stalowa Wola included a thriving Jewish

shtetl A shtetl or shtetel (; yi, שטעטל, translit=shtetl (singular); שטעטלעך, romanized: ''shtetlekh'' (plural)) is a Yiddish term for the small towns with predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish populations which existed in Eastern Europe before ...

prior to

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 ...

, closely associated with the Jewish communities of

Tarnobrzeg Tarnobrzeg is a city in south-eastern Poland (historic Lesser Poland), on the east bank of the river Vistula, with 49,419 inhabitants, as of 31 December 2009. Situated in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship (Polish: ''Województwo podkarpackie'') sinc ...

and other nearby shtetls including

Ulanów Ulanów is a town in Nisko County, Subcarpathian Voivodeship, Poland, with 1,491 inhabitants (02.06.2009). It has grammar schools and high schools along with 2 churches. One of the churches was set on fire in 2004, and was closed for repairs. A ...

Mielec Mielec ( yi, מעליץ-Melitz) is the largest city and seat of Mielec County. Mielec is located in south-eastern Poland (Lesser Poland), in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship (Województwo Podkarpackie). The population of Mielec in December 2021 wa ...

, and Dzików. These communities, infused with vitality before 1939, were utterly destroyed by the Germans during 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 ...

. During the German occupation of Poland (1939-1945) two Polish doctors,

Eugene Lazowski Eugene Lazowski born Eugeniusz Sławomir Łazowski (1913 in Częstochowa, Poland – December 16, 2006 in Eugene, Oregon, United States) was a Polish medical doctor who saved thousands of people during World War II by creating a fake epidemic ...

and Stanisław Matulewicz created a fake typhoid fever epidemic in Rozwadów: "the quarantined area that Lazowski and Matulewicz created became a haven for Polish Jews, who could hide in Rozwadów under the cover of the fake epidemic without fear of the Nazis discovering them. All told, the doctors saved an estimated 8,000 people from being killed or imprisoned during their three-year campaign with the help of a UTI-causing bacterium." Rozwadów is a major rail junction, see Stalowa Wola-Rozwadów (PKP station). There exists a Memorial Book ( Yizkor Book) for Rozwadow. Rozwadow Memorial Book
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References

Stalowa Wola County Holocaust locations in Poland {{StalowaWola-geo-stub