Remembering survival

Based on ca. 300 accounts by survivors of the Wierzbnik ghetto and the nearby factory labor camps of Starachowice, relates the history of the ghetto and the camps. During the first months of the German occupation, Wierzbnik's Jewish population swelled following the transfer of Jews from Płock, Łódź, and other places. A ghetto was established in Wierzbnik in April 1941, and Jewish labor was exploited from the very beginning. Hundreds of Jews worked at the factories of the Starachowice camps, among them Strelnica, Tartak, Majówka, etc. In October 1942 the Wierzbnik ghetto was liquidated; its 4,000 inmates were sent to Treblinka, while 1,600 men and women were transferred to Starachowice. Dwells on the personalities of the Germans who ran the camps, among them police chief Walther Becker, commandants Ralf Alois "Willi" Althoff, Walter Kolditz, Willi Schroth and others, as well as on prominent Jews in the ghetto and in the camps. Notes that the social history of Starachowice was complex: there were also privileged Jews and Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in some form, and there were Ukrainian guards, Poles, and even Germans who helped Jews. Spontaneous acts of resistance occurred in Starachowice, and there was an escape in 1944 in which some of the escapees survived. The Starachowice camps were liquidated in July 1944; the last inmates were sent to Birkenau. After the war, some of the main perpetrators in Starachowice were tried in Germany; paradoxically, Walther Becker was acquitted. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)