Baranów is a

village A village is a human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand. Although villages are often located in rural areas, the term urban v ...

Puławy County __NOTOC__ Puławy County () 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, 1999, as a result of t ...

Lublin Voivodeship Lublin Voivodeship ( ) is a Voivodeships of Poland, voivodeship (province) of Poland, located in the southeastern part of the country, with its capital being the city of Lublin. The region is named after its largest city and regional capital, Lu ...

, in eastern Poland. It is the seat of the

gmina The gmina (Polish: , plural ''gminy'' ) is the basic unit of the administrative division of Poland, similar to a municipality. , there were 2,479 gminy throughout the country, encompassing over 43,000 villages. 940 gminy include cities and tow ...

(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 River, Kurówka Rivers. Puławy is the capital of Puławy County. The city's 2019 population was Cen ...

and north-west of the regional capital

Lublin Lublin is List of cities and towns in Poland, the ninth-largest city in Poland and the second-largest city of historical Lesser Poland. It is the capital and the centre of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 336,339 (December 2021). Lublin i ...

History

Baranów was founded as a town on the basis of

Magdeburg Law Magdeburg rights (, , ; 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 cities and villages gr ...

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, also referred to as Poland–Lithuania or the First Polish Republic (), was a federation, federative real union between the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania ...

. 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,

Christopher Browning Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian and is 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 the ...

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

World War II World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

, 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 regime set up ghettos across German-occupied Eastern Europe in order to segregate and confine Jews, and sometimes Romani people, into small sections of towns and cities furtheri ...

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 (), including subcamp (SS), subcamps on its own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe. The first camps were established in March 1933 immediately af ...

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 durin ...

(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 ( ; ) 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 Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), ...

. 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 or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemi ...

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 and his sons, the science journalist David Shukman and the travel writer and novelist Henry Shukman. 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 that spanned most of northern Eurasia from its establishment in November 1721 until the proclamation of the Russian Republic in September 1917. At its height in the late 19th century, it covered about , roughl ...

, before emigrating and settling in the United Kingdom.

References

External links

History of the Jewish community in Baranów
from Virtual Shtetl website {{Authority control Villages in Puławy County Holocaust locations in Poland