1941 Szczuczyn pogrom

The Szczuczyn pogrom refers to the massacre of hundreds of Jews by ethnic Poles in Szczuczyn, Poland, when the European Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union. Those who survived the pogrom[a] were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. The pogrom is considered part of the Holocaust in mainstream historiography.[3][4]

Background

About 56% of Szczuczyn's 4,502 pre-war residents were Jewish.[5] By June 1941, about 2,000 Jews lived in the town as many Jewish families had been deported by the Soviet occupiers to Siberia.[3] When the Nazi Germans invaded, they bypassed the town, leaving it to local Poles.[4]

June massacre

June 25

Jews were killed by local Poles in three incidents.[3]

June 28

Local Poles armed with axes killed about 300 Jews, including entire Jewish families.[3] Jewish women had begged the local Catholic priests and Polish intelligentsia to stop the mass murder, who refused their pleas.[6] The women finally asked a passing German unit for help, who stopped the mass murder.[3]

July massacre

In late July[b] 1941, Polish officers incited local Poles to attack Jews.[8] About 2,500 Jews were forced into a Jewish cemetery, while their homes were looted and burned. 97 men were killed. All but 103 were released.[8]

August massacre

On August 8, 1941, the Gestapo took over the town. About 600 Jews were murdered in the cemetery, with the survivors sent to a ghetto. On November 2, 1942, the ghetto's Jews were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp.[4] In the same month, about 20 Jewish women were raped, robbed and killed by their Polish bosses during field work in Bzury. Only one man was sentenced for the atrocities.[9][10]

Legacy

Further information: Historical revisionism

Despite abundant evidence, many in Polish society refuse to acknowledge the pogrom.[11][12] Some scholars said that such denial was going mainstream[13] amid the rise of nationalism across Europe,[14][15] where Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction".[15][16]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ A pogrom is a form of riot that targets an ethnic or a religious group. It is derived from the Russian word погром ("pogrom"); from "громить" IPA: [grʌˈmitʲ] ‒ to wreak havoc, to demolish violently.[1][2]
  2. ↑ 24[7] or 28[8]

References

  1. ↑
    • "Pogrom | Meaning, History, & Facts". Britannica. September 23, 2024. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
    • "Pogroms | Holocaust Encyclopedia". Holocaust Encyclopedia. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
    • "Pogroms". Encyclopédie d’histoire numérique de l’Europe. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
    • "What Were Pogroms?". My Jewish Learning. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
    • "Global leaders react to Amsterdam pogrom". The Jerusalem Post. November 8, 2024. Retrieved November 9, 2024.
  2. ↑
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 "Yad Vashem Ghetto Encyclopedia: Szczuczyn". Yad Vashem. Retrieved May 30, 2025.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Spector, Shmuel; Wigoder, Geoffrey (2001). The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life Before and During the Holocaust: Seredina-Buda-Z. p. 1276. Retrieved May 30, 2025.
  5. ↑ Kopstein, Jeffrey S., and Jason Wittenberg. "Deadly communities: Local political milieus and the persecution of Jews in occupied Poland." Comparative Political Studies 44.3 (2011): 259-283.
  6. ↑ Kopstein, Jeffrey S., and Jason Wittenberg. "Deadly communities: Local political milieus and the persecution of Jews in occupied Poland." Comparative Political Studies 44.3 (2011): 259-283.
  7. ↑ From the Inferno Back to Life (unpublished translation of published Hebrew book - מהתופת בחזרה לחיים, Itzhak Wertman, translated by Sara Mages, page 63
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) (2012). Encyclopedia of camps and ghettos, 1933–1945. Vol. 2, Ghettos in German-occupied Eastern Europe. Part A. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. p. 968. ISBN 978-0-253-00202-0. OCLC 776990144.
  9. ↑ Polish group closes probe into Holocaust murders, Times of Israel, 11 March 2013
  10. ↑ 1941 rape and murder of Jews by Poles was 'genocide', Radio Poland, March 11, 2013
  11. ↑
    • Robert Rozett, “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, XVI (2022); “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” XIII: 1 (2019); Yehuda Bauer, “Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” XIV: 2 (2022); and Jan Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland's 'History Policy'” X: 3 (2016).
    • Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Politics of the Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescue,” Jewish Historical Studies—Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, LIII: 1 (2022); Piotr Forecki, Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Kraków, 2018); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).
    • Piotr Forecki, “Domestic ‘Assassins of Memory’: Various Faces of Holocaust Revisionism in Contemporary Poland,” presentation at a symposium in honor of Professor Antony Polonsky called “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: sources, memory, politics,” March 16, 2021, UCL, London.
    • "Polish appeals court dismisses claims against Holocaust book historians". Euractiv. August 17, 2021. Retrieved January 4, 2025. An appeals court ruled that two historians accused of tarnishing the memory of a Polish villager in a book about the Holocaust need not apologise, overturning a lower court ruling that raised fears about freedom of academic research.
  12. ↑
    • Antony Polonsky and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2009) and Laurence Weinbaum, “Amnesia and Antisemitism in the ‘Second Jagiellonian Age,’” Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, Robert Wistrich (ed.) (Lincoln, 2016).
    • Grabowski, Jan (2024). "Whitewash: Poland and the Jews". The Jewish Quarterly. London, United Kingdom. Retrieved May 25, 2025. In this ground-breaking essay, Jan Grabowski, a world-renowned Holocaust historian, examines how the government, museums, schools and state institutions became complicit in delivering a message of Polish national innocence during the Holocaust. He recounts his own experience as the victim of smears and a notorious lawsuit for questioning the complicity of Poles in the destruction of the country's Jews, and examines the far-reaching consequences of Poland's historical distortions, which have been repeated and replicated worldwide to challenge the truth of the Holocaust.
    • Fleming, Michael (2024). "Whitewash: Poland and the Jews (Reviewed by Michael Fleming)". Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs. 18 (3). Retrieved May 25, 2025.
  13. ↑
  14. ↑ Petrović, Zorica (2018). "The Roman Catholic Church and Clergy in the Nazi-Fascist Era on Slovenian Soil" (PDF). Athens Journal of History. 4 (3): 227‒252. doi:10.30958/ajhis.4-3-4. Retrieved May 25, 2025.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Becker, Matthias J.; Troschke, Hagen; Bolton, Matthew; Chapelan, Alexis (October 16, 2024). "Holocaust Denial and Distortion". Decoding Antisemitism. pp. 237–260. Retrieved May 25, 2025.
  16. ↑
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