After the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland, which started World War II, it was occupied by Germany from 1939 to 1945. Before the war, 30% of the population of the village was Jewish. Almost all were murdered in the Holocaust. Some were slaughtered in the town itself by Germans and local ethnic Germans (the Volksdeutsche). Others were deported to Treblinka and Auschwitz where they were murdered. A few escaped and joined the partisans. A Polish doctor staffed the small Jewish hospital and helped quell the epidemic of typhus. Nazi Germany also operated a transit camp for Poles expelled from the region at the local school.