HOLOCAUST, PART II

Zolynia in relation to other cities and towns along one of the routes to Belzec.

Zolynia was within an area designated the "General Government," governed directly by German authorities and intended to eventually be absorbed into the new Greater Germany (Zolynia was officially part of a new. German-designated Jaraslow County in Crakow Province). By early 1941, thousands of German troops began massing in the area. On June 21, the town was again on the front lines as Germany attacked the Soviet Union (Field Marshal Von Rundstedt, commanding Germnan Army Group South, and his top officers used the Lancut castle as their headquarters and residence at the start of the invasion).

On January 20, 1942, at a conference at the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, Nazi Party officials worked out details of their infamous "Final Solution" to the Jewish situation in Europe. It was now the goal of the Reich to eliminate the Jews of Europe. Extermination camps -- at Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Birkenau and Belzec -- would carry out killings on a mass scale. Jews died from starvation, shootings and beatings in camps throughout occupied Europe, including labor camps, transit camps and concentration camps. But the death camps were solely killing zones, where there was no "selection" process and no slave labor, except for prisoners needed to clear bodies and perform menial labor.

On July 19, 1942, it was ordered that the entire General Government area (provinces centered around Warsaw, Cracow, Lublin, Radom and Lvov, a large portion of occupied Poland) was to be completely cleared of Jews by the last day of the year.

Towns and villages throughout the former Galicia Province were being cleared of Jews. Those capable of work were to be sent to various labor camps according to skills and labor needs at the time (by mid-1942, perhaps a million Polish Jews had already been sent to Germany as slave labor in factories and camps). Those who were not considered capable of work were sent on trains, supposedly for resettlement in Russia, but actually to one of the death camps. Often, this sorting took place in "transit camps" along the railroad lines. Such a camp was located at Pelkinie ("Pehw-kin-ie" in Polish), a small town in the forests just northwest of Jaraslow, where the Jews of Zolynia would be sorted out.

It was in August 1942 when the Jews of Zolynia and the other remaining Jewish communities in the area were herded together, sorted and processed in the vast system of murder and slavery.

S.S. troops and Gestapo agents came to the town and herded the Jews onto the roads leading east. The elderly and the children were put on trucks while the rest were force marched to the Pelkinie transit camp about fifteen miles (24 km) away. Pelkinie had been a prison for Russian prisoners in 1941, but was now a holding pen for the Jews of Zolynia and the surrounding towns. Some never made it out of Pelkinie. On August 4, 2,750 Jews from Lancut were marched from the camp and shot in the forest. After about a week, about three-quarters of Zolynia's Jews were put on trains which would lead to Belzec.

12,000 Jews from Zolynia, Lancut, Lezajsk and Radymno (southeast of Jaroslaw, on the San River) were transported on the trains from Pelkinie to Belzec that August. The Belzec research of Robin O'Neil puts the transport date at August 21.

Belzec (pronounced "Behw-zhetz" in Polish and "Bel-zetz" in Yiddish) was where the Nazis perfected many of their mass killing techniques, such as the large-scale use of gas chambers and methods of corpse disposal. After an initial fine-tuning period during March and April of 1942, sections of the camp were reconstructed to take into consideration what had been learned, including new, more effective gas chambers. By the summer, operations could be taken to new, unprecedented levels. Trains ran to Belzec mostly at night on complex schedules timed to the minute. they would empty their human cargo and return up the line. The location and details about the camp were a secret, and its existence was unknown in the west until the Nuremburg Trials. When the camp had fulfilled its function in May 1943, the Germans dismantled it, plowed it over and created a farm over the site, so there would be no "discovery" of Belzec by liberating armies. Over 600,000 Polish Jews were gassed at Belzec, most within minutes of entering the camp. Only two Jews sent there are known to have survived until the end of the war (they worked on the camp's labor gang).

Some of Zolynia's young men were sent to a series of labor camps throughout the Reich. Some young men from the town ended up together in the enormous Auschwitz complex of camps in 1944. While outside the camp on a work detail, some of them bolted from guards. Most were captured and killed, but at least one was only wounded, made it to the Soviet lines and then to New York after the war.

In Zolynia itself, some Jews had evaded the round-up and went into the forests or into hiding, seeking help from Polish neighbors and partisan fighters. Some received that help. At least two Gentile residents of Zolynia who lost their lives aiding Jews have been named one of the "Righteous Among Nations" by the Yad Vashem holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Jakob Tokarz of Biedaczow, about three kilometers or two miles north of the center of Zolynia, hid four members of the Jewish the Hersz Mejloch Ruemler family in August 1942. A neighbor informed on him and gendarmes killed the Ruemlers and then killed Tokarz in a Lesajsk cemetery. Jan Niecpon was shot by local gendarmes along with a Jewish woman from Bialobrzegi (about three miles or 5 km southeast of Zolynia) whom he sheltered. The incident took place in May, 1944. There were other local Poles who risked their lives to hide or help Jewish neighbors, but this was not the norm in occupied Poland, making these heroic efforts that much more notable.