1941 Szczuczyn pogrom

The Szczuczyn pogrom was the massacre of hundreds of Jews by ethnic Poles in Szczuczyn, Poland. This happened during World War II, when the European Axis powers invaded the Soviet Union. Those who survived the pogrom were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. 

The pogrom is considered part of the Holocaust in mainstream historiography.

Background

About 56% of Szczuczyn's 4,502 pre-war residents were Jewish.Kopstein, Jeffrey S., and Jason Wittenberg. "Deadly communities: Local political milieus and the persecution of Jews in occupied Poland." Comparative Political Studies 44.3 (2011): 259-283. By June 1941, about 2,000 Jews lived in the town as many Jewish families had been deported by the Soviet occupiers to Siberia. When the Nazi Germans invaded, they bypassed the town, leaving it to local Poles.

June massacre

June 25

Jews were killed by local Poles in three incidents. 

June 28

Local Poles armed with axes killed about 300 Jews, including entire Jewish families. Jewish women had begged the local Catholic priests and Polish intelligentsia to stop the mass murder; they refused her pleas.Kopstein, Jeffrey S., and Jason Wittenberg. "Deadly communities: Local political milieus and the persecution of Jews in occupied Poland." Comparative Political Studies 44.3 (2011): 259-283. The women finally asked a passing German unit for help, who stopped the mass murder.

July massacre

In late July 1941, Polish officers incited local Poles to attack Jews. About 2,500 Jews were forced into a Jewish cemetery, while their homes were looted and burned. 97 men were killed. All but 103 were released.

August massacre

On August 8, 1941, the Gestapo took over the town. About 600 Jews were murdered in the cemetery, with the survivors sent to a ghetto. 

On November 2, 1942, the ghetto's Jews were sent to the Treblinka extermination camp. In the same month, about 20 Jewish women were raped, robbed and killed by their Polish bosses during field work in Bzury. Only one man was sentenced for the atrocities.Polish group closes probe into Holocaust murders, Times of Israel, 11 March 20131941 rape and murder of Jews by Poles was 'genocide' , Radio Poland, March 11, 2013

Legacy


Despite abundant evidence, many in Polish society refuse to acknowledge the pogrom. Robert Rozett, “Competitive Victimhood and Holocaust Distortion,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, XVI (2022); “Distorting the Holocaust and Whitewashing History: Toward a Typology,” XIII: 1 (2019); Yehuda Bauer, “Creating a “Usable” Past: On Holocaust Denial and Distortion,” XIV: 2 (2022); and Jan Grabowski, “The Holocaust and Poland's 'History Policy'” X: 3 (2016).
 Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Politics of the Memorialisation of the Holocaust in Poland: Reflections on the Current Misuses of the History of Rescue,” Jewish Historical Studies—Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, LIII: 1 (2022); Piotr Forecki, Po Jedwabnem: Anatomia pamięci funkcjonalnej (Kraków, 2018); Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne (Princeton, 2001).
 Piotr Forecki, “Domestic ‘Assassins of Memory’: Various Faces of Holocaust Revisionism in Contemporary Poland,” presentation at a symposium in honor of Professor Antony Polonsky called “The Holocaust in Eastern Europe: sources, memory, politics,” March 16, 2021, UCL, London.
  Antony Polonsky and Joanna Beata Michlic (eds.), The Neighbors Respond: The Controversy over the Jedwabne Massacre in Poland (Princeton, 2009) and Laurence Weinbaum, “Amnesia and Antisemitism in the ‘Second Jagiellonian Age,’” Anti-Judaism, Antisemitism, and Delegitimizing Israel, Robert Wistrich (ed.) (Lincoln, 2016).

  Some scholars say this denial was going mainstream 

  amid the rise of nationalism across Europe. There, Jews were sometimes equated with the disliked Soviet communists against whom the Holocaust was considered "a reaction". 



Related pages

 Iași pogrom
 Kristallnacht
 Lviv pogroms  
 Jedwabne pogrom

Footnotes

References

Category:Pogroms
Category:Massacres
Category:The Holocaust
Category:1940s in Poland
Category:Antisemitism in Europe