Skarżysko-Kamienna is a city in northern

Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship The Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, also known as the Świętokrzyskie Province, and the Holy Cross Voivodeship ( pl, województwo świętokrzyskie ) is a voivodeship (province) of Poland situated in southeastern part of the country, in the histo ...

in south-central

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 ...

by Kamienna river, to the north of Świętokrzyskie Mountains; one of the voivodship's major cities. Prior to 1928, it bore the name of ''Kamienna''; in less formal contexts usually only the first part of the name (''Skarżysko'') is used. It belongs to historic Polish province of

Lesser Poland Lesser Poland, often known by its Polish name Małopolska ( la, Polonia Minor), is a historical region situated in southern and south-eastern Poland. Its capital and largest city is Kraków. Throughout centuries, Lesser Poland developed a s ...

. Skarżysko-Kamienna is an important railroad junction, with two main lines (

Kraków Kraków (), or Cracow, is the second-largest and one of the oldest cities in Poland. Situated on the Vistula River in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, the city dates back to the seventh century. Kraków was the official capital of Poland until 1596 ...

–

Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...

and Sandomierz –

Koluszki Koluszki is a town, and a major railway junction, in central Poland, in Łódź Voivodeship, about 20 km east of Łódź with a population of 12,776 (2020). The junction in Koluszki serves trains that go from Warsaw to Łódź, Wrocław, Cz� ...

) crossing there.

History

The present-day districts of Łyżwy and Nowy Młyn were the locations of

Paleolithic The Paleolithic or Palaeolithic (), also called the Old Stone Age (from Greek: παλαιός ''palaios'', "old" and λίθος ''lithos'', "stone"), is a period in human prehistory that is distinguished by the original development of stone too ...

industrial settlements, which are now archaeological sites, part of the Rydno Archaeological Reserve, consisting of several hundred former Paleolithic sites stretching from Skarżysko-Kamienna to

Wąchock Wąchock is a town in Starachowice County, Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, Poland, near Starachowice, within the historical region of Lesser Poland. In 2006, it had 2,777 inhabitants. History Wachock received its town charter in 1454, lost it i ...

. The sites were discovered in 1923–1925. In 1173, the knights' congress gathered in Milica village (now the town's district) led by

Casimir II The Just Casimir II the Just ( pl, Kazimierz II Sprawiedliwy; 28 October 1138 – 5 May 1194) was a Lesser Polish Duke of Wiślica from 1166–1173, and of Sandomierz after 1173. He became ruler over the Polish Seniorate Province at Kraków and thereby Hig ...

. Within the Polish Kingdom, Skarżysko was a private village of

Polish nobility The ''szlachta'' (Polish: endonym, Lithuanian: šlėkta) were the noble estate of the realm in the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth who, as a class, had the dominating position in the ...

, administratively located in the Radom County in the

Sandomierz Voivodeship Sandomierz Voivodeship ( pl, Województwo Sandomierskie, la, Palatinatus Sandomirensis) was a unit of administration and local government in Poland from the 14th century to the partitions of Poland in 1772–1795. It was part of the Lesser Poland ...

in the

Lesser Poland Province of the Polish Crown , subdivision = Province , nation = Poland , year_start = , event_end = Third Partition of Poland , year_end = , image_map = ProwincjaMalopolska.png , image_map ...

. Around 1885 Kamienna became an important rail junction on the newly built Ivangorod-Dąbrowa Railway. The main line of the railway connecting Ivangorod (

Dęblin Dęblin is a town at the confluence of Vistula and Wieprz rivers, in Lublin Voivodeship, Poland. Dęblin is the part of the agglomeration with adjacent towns of Ryki and Puławy, which altogether has over 100 000 inhabitants. The population of ...

) and Dąbrowa Górnicza ran through the town from north to south, and two branch lines to

Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski (), often referred to as Ostrowiec, is a city in southeastern Poland, in the historical region of Lesser Poland, with 66,258 residents (as of 2021). The town is one of historic centers of Polish industry and metallurgy, a ...

and

radiated from the town east and west, respectively. This spurred the growth of Kamienna from a village into a sizeable town by 1920, when it had about 20 enterprises employing 1000 workers, as well as railway workshops employing an additional 1000 workers.Official city website - history section
/ref>

Second Polish Republic

In 1923, the commune of Kamienna was granted the status of a town. In 1922 the government of Poland decided to build an ammunition factory in Kamienna, to be called ''Państwowa Wytwornia Uzbrojenia Fabryka Amunicji'' (''P.W.U. Fabryka Amunicji'', "National Armament Factory - Ammunition Plant") It began production in 1924 supplying munitions to the Polish Army. It employed 2760 workers in 1932, over 3000 in 1936, and over 4500 in 1939, becoming the principal employer in the town and driving its growth. The company still functions today under the name ''Zakłady Metalowe MESKO S.A.''). In 1928, town's name was changed to Skarżysko-Kamienna. In 1937 the town had 19,700 inhabitants, among them 2,800

Jews Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

(about 14% of the total).

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,'' Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945: Ghettos in German-Occupied Eastern Europe'',

Indiana University Press Indiana University Press, also known as IU Press, is an academic publisher founded in 1950 at Indiana University that specializes in the humanities and social sciences. Its headquarters are located in Bloomington, Indiana. IU Press publishes 140 ...

, 2012, pp. 308-311

German occupation of Skarżysko-Kamienna (1939–1945)

Following the September 1939

invasion of Poland The invasion of Poland (1 September – 6 October 1939) was a joint attack on the Republic of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union which marked the beginning of World War II. The German invasion began on 1 September 1939, one week aft ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

, which started

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 ...

, Skarżysko-Kamienna was under

German occupation German-occupied Europe refers to the sovereign countries of Europe which were wholly or partly occupied and civil-occupied (including puppet governments) by the military forces and the government of Nazi Germany at various times between 1939 an ...

until liberated by the Soviet army in January 1945. The Germans controlled the ammunition factory to support their own war effort, and from 1940 it was controlled by the company Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft (HASAG), which ran it as a subcontractor for the

Wehrmacht The ''Wehrmacht'' (, ) were the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany from 1935 to 1945. It consisted of the ''Heer'' (army), the ''Kriegsmarine'' (navy) and the ''Luftwaffe'' (air force). The designation "''Wehrmacht''" replaced the previous ...

. In 1940, the

Germans , native_name_lang = de , region1 = , pop1 = 72,650,269 , region2 = , pop2 = 534,000 , region3 = , pop3 = 157,000 3,322,405 , region4 = , pop4 = ...

carried out mass executions of

Poles Poles,, ; singular masculine: ''Polak'', singular feminine: ''Polka'' or Polish people, are a West Slavic nation and ethnic group, who share a common history, culture, the Polish language and are identified with the country of Poland in Ce ...

(360 people executed in February and 760 in June). The Polish underground resistance organization ''Orzeł Biały'' ("White Eagle") was organized in the town. Among its members were local monks, and a weapons depot used by Polish partisans was located in the local monastery. Several monks were arrested and murdered by the Germans in the massacre committed in February 1940, while one managed to escape arrest. The

ghetto A ghetto, often called ''the'' ghetto, is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially as a result of political, social, legal, environmental or economic pressure. Ghettos are often known for being more impoverished t ...

for the town's Jewish population was established by the Germans in April or May 1941. Between August 1942 and summer of 1943 Jews from the Radom district were brought to three camps near the munitions factory to work the factory. According to German records, of the total 17,210 brought in with 58 transports, 6,408 managed to survive long enough to be evacuated to other camps when the Germans closed the factory in 1944. The ghetto was liquidated in October 1942, with some inhabitants judged fit for work moved to the factory labour camps (about 500 out of 3000), and the rest were transported to

Treblinka Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the village of Treblinka in what is now the Masovian Voivodeship. The camp ...

. In the major monograph on the subject estimated that despite the incompleteness of German records which likely underestimate the number of inmates, about 25,000 Jewish inmates were brought to the camp and 7,000 were evacuated from it; about 18,000 died there. The secret Polish Council to Aid Jews "Żegota", established by the Polish resistance movement, operated in the town. There are several known cases of Poles, who were either executed on sight or imprisoned in the local prison and deported to concentration camps for rescuing and aiding Jews. At least nine boy scouts and two girls scouts from the town were murdered by the Germans during the occupation (see ''

Nazi crimes against the Polish nation Crimes against the Polish nation committed by Nazi Germany and Axis collaborationist forces during the invasion of Poland, along with auxiliary battalions during the subsequent occupation of Poland in World War II, consisted of the murder of ...

''). The monk who managed to avoid capture by the Germans in 1940, died in the Soviet bombing of the town in 1945.

From 1945 to present

On January 18, 1945 the town was liberated and restored to Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which remained in power until the Fall of Communism in the 1980s. About a dozen Jewish survivors returned to Skarżysko-Kamienna in the winter of 1945-1946 to retrieve Jewish property. Soon afterwards, in February 1946, five of them were murdered for profit by a small group of local criminals. The murderers, among them the head of the Soviet-installed town police and another communist policeman, were put to trial in Łodź. Three of them received the death penalty. The remaining Jews left Poland, except for Dr. Zundel Kahanel and his wife Bima who spent the rest of their lives in the city. 1WK15 Skarżysko-Kamienna (11) Travelarz

Meanwhile, in 1948 the leading HASAG managers were tried in

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

, then in the part of Germany occupied by the Soviet Union. Of the 25 tried, 4 were sentenced to death, 2 to life in prison, and 18 to terms between one and five years. In 1969, The White Eagle Museum was established. In 1984, town limits were expanded by including the neighboring settlements of Łyżwy and Nowy Młyn as new districts. In 1999,

Skarżysko County __NOTOC__ Skarżysko County ( pl, powiat skarżyski) is a unit of territorial administration and local government (powiat) in Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, south-central Poland. It came into being on January 1, 1999, as a result of the Polish local ...

was established as a result of the Local Government Reorganization Act (1998).

Mayors

* Jan Zbroja 1918 * Antoni Biernacki 1918–1923 * Tadeusz Miażdżyński 1924–1925 * Wawrzyniec Ergietowski 1925–1928 * Konstanty Bobowski ?–1934 * Franciszek Tatkowski 1934Tadeusz Wojewoda
Samorząd terytorialny Skarżyska-Kamiennej w okresie międzywojennym
"Z dziejów regionu i miasta", R. 1/2010, p. 105.

Points of interest

* The

White Eagle Museum The White Eagle Museum ( pl, Muzeum im. Orła Białego) is a Polish military museum located in the town of Skarżysko-Kamienna in the central Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship, opened in 1969. Museum The museum has a large collection of Russian, Polish ...

(Polish: Muzeum im. Orła Białego) - a regional museum with a large outdoor display of military equipment, most items dating back to the

period. # Indoor display –

uniforms A uniform is a variety of clothing worn by members of an organization while participating in that organization's activity. Modern uniforms are most often worn by armed forces and paramilitary organizations such as police, emergency services, se ...

ammunition Ammunition (informally ammo) is the material fired, scattered, dropped, or detonated from any weapon or weapon system. Ammunition is both expendable weapons (e.g., bombs, missiles, grenades, land mines) and the component parts of other weap ...

pistol A pistol is a handgun, more specifically one with the chamber integral to its gun barrel, though in common usage the two terms are often used interchangeably. The English word was introduced in , when early handguns were produced in Europe, an ...

s and smaller

gun A gun is a ranged weapon designed to use a shooting tube (gun barrel) to launch projectiles. The projectiles are typically solid, but can also be pressurized liquid (e.g. in water guns/cannons, spray guns for painting or pressure washing, pr ...

s, soldier equipment, photographs and documents # Outdoor display – one of Poland's few ships displayed onshore ( torpedo boat ''Odważny'' - ''The Brave''),

plane Plane(s) most often refers to: * Aero- or airplane, a powered, fixed-wing aircraft * Plane (geometry), a flat, 2-dimensional surface Plane or planes may also refer to: Biology * Plane (tree) or ''Platanus'', wetland native plant * Planes (gen ...

tank A tank is an armoured fighting vehicle intended as a primary offensive weapon in front-line ground combat. Tank designs are a balance of heavy firepower, strong armour, and good battlefield mobility provided by tracks and a powerful engin ...

s (including one of world's few preserved Sturmgeschütz IV vehicles),

helicopter A helicopter is a type of rotorcraft in which lift and thrust are supplied by horizontally spinning rotors. This allows the helicopter to take off and land vertically, to hover, and to fly forward, backward and laterally. These attributes ...

cannon A cannon is a large- caliber gun classified as a type of artillery, which usually launches a projectile using explosive chemical propellant. Gunpowder ("black powder") was the primary propellant before the invention of smokeless powder ...

s, etc. * Several scenes of

Steven Spielberg Steven Allan Spielberg (; born December 18, 1946) is an American director, writer, and producer. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, he is the most commercially successful director of all time. Spie ...

's '' Schindler's List'' were filmed at ''MESKO''. File:Skarzysko kamienna rejow stadion.jpg, Rejów Lake and stadium File:Kościół Najświętszego Serca Jezusowego w Skarżysku-Kamiennej - fotopolska.eu (562302).jpg, The Sacred Heart of Jesus Church File:Skarzysko kamienna rzeka.jpg, Kamienna River in Skarżysko File:Sanktuarium Matki Boskiej Ostrobramskiej 01 ssj 20061226.jpg, Sanctuaty Our Lady of the Gate of Dawn

Sports

The town's most notable sports clubs are

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

team ZKS Granat Skarżysko and

volleyball Volleyball is a team sport in which two teams of six players are separated by a net. Each team tries to score points by grounding a ball on the other team's court under organized rules. It has been a part of the official program of the Summ ...

team , which both compete in the lower leagues.

Notable people

Daria Pikulik Daria Pikulik (born 6 January 1997) is a Polish professional track cyclist. She rode in the women's team pursuit at the 2016 UCI Track Cycling World Championships. Her sister, Wiktoria, is also a professional cyclist. Major results ;2015 :1st ...

(born 1997), track cyclist * Wiktoria Pikulik (born 1998), racing cyclist * Krzysztof Ratajski (born 1977), professional darts player *

Sylwia Spurek Sylwia Iwona Spurek (born 29 January 1976) is a Polish politician, lawyer, attorney-at-law and lecturer who currently serves as a Member of the European Parliament. For 2015 to 2019 she was Deputy Polish Ombudsman (serving Polish Ombudsman at ...

(born 1976), politician and lawyer

International relations

Twin towns — Sister cities

Skarżysko-Kamienna is twinned with: *

Stafford Stafford () is a market town and the county town of Staffordshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It lies about north of Wolverhampton, south of Stoke-on-Trent and northwest of Birmingham. The town had a population of 70,145 in t ...

* Zhmerynka * Kavarna *

Franklin Park, Illinois Franklin Park is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. The population was 18,467 at the 2020 census, up from 18,333 at the 2010 census. It was named for real estate broker Lesser Franklin who bought acres of the area when it was a maj ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

* Langfang

References

External links

skarzysko.pl
- official site of the town's municipality * {{DEFAULTSORT:Skarzysko-Kamienna Cities and towns in Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship Skarzysko Kamienna Radom Governorate Kielce Voivodeship (1919–1939) Prehistoric sites in Poland Holocaust locations in Poland Nazi war crimes in Poland