Mielec, Poland : the shtetl that became a Nazi concentrations camp

On March 9, 1942, the Jewish community of Mielec, Poland, ceased to exist. The Nazis dismantled the entire town in a single day, executing the elderly, deporting the able-bodied for slave labor, and transporting the rest to the Lublin district, where they were later murdered in Sobibor and Belzec. The Germans had taken over a Polish aircraft factory on the outskirts of Mielec, where they manufactured Heinkel 111 bomber planes for the Nazi war machine. Following the March 9, 1942, deportation, the factory complex became part of the Mielec Nazi slave labor camp, later a concentration camp. Using rare photographs and records, Nazi documents, witness statements, survivor interviews, and war criminal trial transcripts, Rochelle G. Saidel tells the story of the flourishing Mielec Jewish community, the unusual way it was wiped out by the Nazis, the few survivors who managed to run and hide, and the almost unknown brutal Mielec slave labor camp that operated from March 1942 until July 1944. This illuminating study gives Mielec its due place in Holocaust history. 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) Rochelle G. Saidel. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 210-218) And Index.