Top, clockwise: Warsaw Ghetto burning, May 1943 • Einsatzgruppe shooting of women from the Mizocz Ghetto, 1942 • Selection of people to be sent directly to the gas chamber right after their arrival at Auschwitz-II Birkenau • Jews captured in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising led to the Umschlagplatz by Waffen SS • Łódź Ghetto children deported to Chełmno death camp, 1942 | |
Overview | |
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Period | 1941–1945 |
Territory | Occupied Poland, also present day western Ukraine and western Belarus among others |
Perpetrators | Nazi Germany along with its collaborators |
Killed | 3,000,000 Polish Jews |
Survivors | 157,000–375,000 in the Soviet Union[1] 50,000 liberated from Nazi concentration camps[2] 30,000–60,000 in hiding[2] |
The Holocaust in Poland was the ghettoization, robbery, deportation, and murder of Jews, simultaneously with other people groups for identical racial pretexts, in occupied Poland, organized by Nazi Germany.[3] Three million Polish Jews were murdered, primarily at the Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz II–Birkenau extermination camps, representing half of all Jews murdered during the Europe-wide Holocaust.
During Nazi occupation, the country lost 20% of its population, or six million people, including three million Jews (90% of the country's Jewish population). The important Polish Jewish community pre-war was almost destroyed. All Poles, Christian or Jewish, were bound for total annihilation.[3]
In 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland while the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east. In German-occupied Poland, Jews were killed, subjected to forced labor, and forced to move to ghettos. Some 7,000 Jews were killed in 1939, but open mass killings subsided until June of 1941.[4] The Soviet Union deported many Jews to the Soviet interior, where most survived the war. In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union and began the systematic murder of Jews. 1.8 million Jews were killed in Operation Reinhard, shot in roundups in ghettos, died during the train journey, or killed by poison gas in the extermination camps. In 1943 and 1944, the remaining labor camps and ghettos were liquidated. Many Jews tried to escape, but surviving in hiding was very difficult due to factors such as the lack of money to pay helpers and the risk of denunciation. Only 1 to 2 percent of Polish Jews in German-occupied territory survived.[5]
After the war, survivors faced difficulties in regaining their property and rebuilding their lives. Especially after the Kielce pogrom, many fled to displaced persons camps in Allied-occupied Germany.
Including several other contingents of Polish Jews, at least 157,000 and no more than 375,000 were inadvertently saved from the Holocaust by Stalin's Soviet Union, which provided a harsh but mostly livable alternative to genocide.
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