Zagłada Żydów wadowickich w świetle relacji ocalałych
The Annihilation of the Jews of Wadowice in Light of Survivors’ Account

Summary/Abstract: Wadowice, the home town of John Paul II, like nearly every town in Poland, had its Jewish population. They were the only ethnic majority of any size in the Polish-dominated town, accounting for approximately one-fourth of its population (2000 persons). From the middle of the 19th century they were a permanent element of the town’s cultural image. During World War II they met the same fate as almost all the Polish Jews: they became the target of the Germans’ criminal Holocaust programme. Barely 150 of them survived. The Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw contain 13 accounts of Jews from Wadowice who survived the Holocaust, prepared right after the war, and in just one instance in the 1960s. They are an interesting and special supplement to the stories of the fate of that community known from literature and reminiscences contained in the „Remembrance book” of Wadowice Jews published in Israel in the 1960s. Starting with reprisals in the early months of the Nazi occupation in 1939 (including the burning down of the synagogue and confiscation of the Jews’ businesses), through restrictions on movement in certain areas of the town in 1940, the first mass deportations to the Bełżec death camp in July 1942, to the establishment of the Wadowice Ghetto immediately afterwards, to its liquidation on a symbolic date commemorating the destruction of the shrine in Jerusalem, i.e., on 10 August 1943. The survivors’ reminiscences contain many names of the Wadowice Jews. In the footnotes the Author attempted to shed more light on these persons and the history of their families as this was an additional opportunity to show how vast was the institutional network of the small community of Wadowice Jews and how well organized it was before the war. The survivors’ stories can be quite long. They concern their dramatic fate throughout World War II. Therefore the author decided to summarise in parentheses the “non-Wadowice” threads from these stories, with only the experience from Wadowice itself published at length.

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