Łuck Ghetto

The Lutsk Ghetto (, ) was a Nazi ghetto established in 1941 by the SS in Lutsk, Western Ukraine, during World War II. In the interwar period, the city was known as Łuck and was part of the Wołyń Voivodeship (1921–1939) in the Second Polish Republic.Joshua D. Zimmerman (2015),
The Polish Underground and the Jews, 1939–1945.
' Cambridge University Press via Google Books, p.193. "The Home Army nevertheless noted armed resistance in the Łuck ghetto. Consequently, some managed to flee and join partisan groups in the forests."

Background

Łuck was in the eastern part of Poland throughout the interwar period. According to the Polish census of 1931, Jews constituted 48.5% of the Łuck's diverse multicultural population of 35,550 people.Central Statistical Office (Poland), Drugi Powszechny Spis Ludności. Woj.wołyńskie, 1931. PDF file, 21.21 MB. The complete text of the Polish census of 1931 for the Wołyń Voivodeship (1921–39), page 59 (select, drop-down menu). Wikimedia Commons. Łuck had the largest Jewish community in the province. The secret annex to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact meant that during the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 Łuck was conquered and occupied by the Red Army. The region was Sovietized in an atmosphere of terror. Bernd Wegner (1997).
From peace to war: Germany, Soviet Russia, and the world, 1939–1941.
' Berghahn Books. p. 74. .Marek Wierzbicki
Stosunki polsko-białoruskie pod okupacją sowiecką.
''Bialorus.pl'' (Warszawa), pp. 1/3. Political, communal and cultural institutions were shut down, and Jewish community leaders were arrested by the NKVD. In June 1940 the Soviet secret police uncovered the Zionist "Gordonia" organization and imprisoned its leaders. Polish-Jewish families who fled to Łuck from western Poland ahead of the Nazis were rounded up and deported to the Soviet interior, along with train-loads of dispossessed Christian Poles.Tadeusz Piotrowski (1998),
Poland's Holocaust
' (Google Books). Jefferson: McFarland, pp. 17-18, 420. . Some 10,000 people were sent in cattle trains to Siberia in four waves of deportations from Łuck county beginning in February, April and June 1940.Feliks Trusiewicz
Zbrodnie – Ludobójstwo dokonane na ludności polskiej w powiecie Łuck, woj. wołyńskie, w latach 1939–1944.
(War crimes committed against Polish nationals in the Łuck county, 1939–44). Retrieved July 22, 2015.

NKVD prisoner massacre

The German Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union on , in Operation Barbarossa. Many young Jews left Łuck with the retreating Red Army, but very few Jewish families followed them. The escaping NKVD, responsible for political prisons, purported to offer amnesty to the inmates of the Łuck prison and in the morning of ordered them to exit the building to the courtyards en masse. The gates were locked, and all prisoners were mowed down by heavy machine guns and grenades thrown from prison windows; 2,000 people died on the spot. Document size 1.63 MB. A small group of survivors was forced by the NKVD to bury the bodies over the next two days, in five mass graves.Berkhoff 2004, p. 241. In total, some 4,000 captives including Poles, Jews and Ukrainians were murdered by the Soviet secret police before their withdrawal.Piotrowski 1998, p. 17.

The Germans rolled into the city on . They overlooked the Soviet killings of Poles and Jews. But the killings of Ukrainians were documented, and, by the Nazi ideology of Judeo-Bolshevism, the Jews were to be held responsible for what the Soviets did. The Ukrainian People's Militia vented their rage by organizing a pogrom. The Synagogue along with the Jewish homes were set on fire.Ronald Headland (1992),
Messages of Murder: A Study of the Reports of the Einsatzgruppen of the Security Police and the Security Service, 1941–1943.
' Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, p. 125. . The Nazi's wave of mass executions began a week later. A mobile killing squad, Einsatzgruppe C's ''Einsatzkommando 4a'', assisted by an infantry platoon, massacred 1,160 Jews on .Headland 1992, chpt. ''Army Cooperation with the Einsatzgruppen''
p. 141.
/ref> On at Lubart's Castle 3,000 Jews were shot and killed by heavy machine gun fire. Overall, some 2,000 Polish Jews were murdered by the ''SS-Sonderkommando'' 4a alone, as reprisal for the NKVD killings of Ukrainians (9.2 percent of population in 1931), even though Polish Jews had nothing to do with the Soviet atrocities.

Ghetto history

The draconian restrictions on Jews were imposed in August 1941. In October, a group of 500 Jewish carpenters and craftsmen (including 50 seamstresses)Yad Vashem, testimony of Shmuel Shulman (Shmulik Shilo), . Retrieved July 21, 2015. were moved to a new forced labour camp set up in the Jewish school building. The Łuck Ghetto was established by the German occupation authorities in December 1941, and sealed from the outside with the provision of only starvation food rations. The ghetto population was about 20,000 people. The newly formed ''Judenrat'', a council of Jewish leaders for the ghetto, made every effort to feed the hungry and control epidemics.Dr Pawel Goldstein
Lutsk (Luck) Ghetto.
Geni.com. "In the spring of 1942 a group of young Jews attempted to escape from the ghetto to the forests, but most of them were caught and murdered by the Ukrainians. A few, however, managed to join the Soviet partisans and fought the Germans as part of the Kowpak units."Yad Vashem
Luck, town.
On September 3, 1942 about 2,000 Jews who remained in the Luck ghetto were shot near the city. 2. On December 12, 1942 ca. 100 (500) Jewish craftsmen, the last surviving Jews in the work camp, were killed. The Jewish Ghetto Police was also organized by the ''Judenrat''.Yad Vashem, Note: village Połonka ( or it
Połonka Little Hill
subdivision) is misspelled in the documentary, with testimony of eyewitness Shmuel Shilo. Retrieved July 24, 2015.

Jewish uprising and the ghetto liquidation

The fate of ghettoised Jews across occupied Poland was sealed at Wannsee in early 1942, when the Final Solution was set in motion. The first large-scale ''aktion'' in the Łuck Ghetto took place on . About 17,000 Jews were rounded up by Nazi Order Police battalions and the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police during a four-day period, assembled at the square by the pharmacy, and taken in lorries along with women and children, to the Górka Połonka forest,Andrzej Mielcarek
Wieś i kolonia Hnidawa, inaczej Gnidawa, powiat Łuck


Interactive 1936 map included. ''Strony o Wołyniu'' Wolyn.ovh.org in Polish. Retrieved July 24, 2015. on the outskirts of Łuck ''(see map)''. They were shot into the prepared trenches. During the deportations, the small ghetto in Hnidawa (Gnidawa) was also emptied. A few families survived in the pharmacy cellars, including eyewitness Shmuel Shilo (age thirteen), along with his mother and brothers; Shmuel's sister was rescued by the Poles. Meanwhile, the labor camp remained in operation for a few more months. The main ghetto ceased to exist; Jews who were still alive were relocated back to the small ghetto in Gnidawa. They were rounded up on and marched to Lubart's Castle; from there, they were to Połonka and murdered. Young Shmuel Shilo survived again, but all alone this time; he hid under a floor plank in the castle for two nights.

In the final extermination phase of Operation Reinhard, on the German and Ukrainian police entered the camp building of the former Jewish school to conduct the liquidation of the SS enterprise. The Jews barricaded themselves inside determined to die in combat. They did not have guns; they had axes, pickaxes, factory tools and bottles of acid. The siege lasted for the entire day. The Germans used artillery to suppress the resistance. Towards the evening, the police forces set the building ablaze, and machine-gunned any escaping prisoners. The rare eyewitness, Shmuel Shilo who found refuge with the insurgents, survived again, this time by hiding beneath a work bench; he jumped out the window under the cover of night. The revolt took place in the depth of winter, four months before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. The Łuck Ghetto was liquidated entirely through the ''Holocaust by bullets'' (as opposed to the ''Holocaust by gas''). Retrieved 20 July 2015. In total, more than 25,600 people were executed at point-blank range at Połonka, men, women and children.YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
Lutsk.
In the spring of 1942, a group of youths was killed trying to escape. Following the Soviet liberation of Łuck in February 1944, only about 150 Jews returned. By 1959, just 600 Jews were living in Lutsk. The fortified synagogue was turned into a movie theater and later into a sports hall. A residential area was constructed on the site of the Rabbinite and Karaite cemeteries. Several participants of the rebellion escaped to freedom.

End of World War II

The Red Army rolled into the city on . Only about 150 Jews emerged from hiding, including families of Dr. Faiwel Goldstein, Dr. Schneiberg and Dr. Marek Rubinstein rescued by the Catholic families of Strusińskis, and Ostrowskis, Polish Righteous Among the Nations from Łuck and nearby farm in Kroszowiec respectively. Zygmunt Strusiński received his Righteous medal posthumously, murdered for saving Jews in winter 1943. His wife Wiktoria, expelled from USSR along with all Poles in 1945, corresponded with the survivors from Israel for decades to come. She did not sell any of the jewellery given by Jews in hiding to buy food for them, and gave it back with a sense of pride during a visit in 1963.

Following World War II, at the insistence of Joseph Stalin during Tehran Conference confirmed (as not negotiable) at the Yalta Conference of 1945, Poland's borders were redrawn and Łuck – then again, Lutsk (Cyrillic: Луцьк) – was incorporated into the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union. Glenn Dynner, François Guesnet
Ghetto of Łuck.
BRILL 2015, p.462; ''Warsaw: The Jewish Metropolis'', . The remaining Polish population was expelled and resettled back to new Poland before the end of 1946. The Jewish community was never restored. The USSR officially ceased to exist on 31 December 1991.Sylwester Fertacz (2005)
"Krojenie mapy Polski: Bolesna granica" (Carving of Poland's map).
Magazyn Społeczno-Kulturalny ''Śląsk.'' Retrieved from the Internet Archive on 5 June 2016.

See also

* Stanisławów Ghetto in occupied eastern Poland

References

External links

* Yad Vashem,
* Yad Vashem,
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Luck Ghetto
Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Poland
Jewish resistance during the Holocaust
World War II sites in Ukraine
Ghetto uprisings