Mielec, Poland

Mielec, near Rzeszów, in southern Poland, was the first town in the Generalgouvernement from which the entire Jewish population, following a selection of 500-750 able-bodied men for slave labor, was deported by the Nazis, as early as 9 March 1942. Based on German documents, eyewitness accounts, diaries, and transcripts of war crimes trials, reconstructs the fate of Jews of the town and of the Mielec labor camp. In September 1939 ca. 40 Jewish men were burned in the town's main synagogue. In the following months, local Jews were victims of Nazi humiliations and random murders. In March 1942 the Jews of Mielec, ca. 4,500 people, were deported to the Lublin district, where most of them were murdered in the Sobibór and Bełżec death camps. Among the participants in the valiant escape from Sobibór in 1943 there was a deportee from Mielec, Eda Lichtman. In March 1942 a labor camp was established in Mielec, at the site of a prewar Polish airplane factory, in which 100-300 Jews of Mielec and hundreds of Jews from other places worked. Later the labor camp was transformed into a concentration camp, and in August 1944 it was evacuated. Dwells on the fate of Jews who managed to escape from Mielec and survive, many of whom were helped by Catholic Poles, and on war crimes trials at which some Nazi perpetrators from Mielec were tried. (From the Bibliography of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism - The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)