Qualla: Lubartów Ghetto

Lubartów Ghetto: Introduction

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Czarnecki Radek, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the morning of October 12, 1939, just over three weeks after the German army had entered the small town of Lubartów north of Lublin, every Jew in town was ordered to assemble in the market square. The square was ringed with machine guns. While the Jewish community of roughly several thousand people stood there all day under armed watch, German troops moved through their houses and shops, taking what they wanted. This was the first day. The Lubartów Ghetto did not formally exist yet. The mechanism that would end with thousands of Lubartów Jews dying in the gas chambers at Bełżec had begun.

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Image: Czarnecki Radek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lubartów Ghetto: An Old Jewish Town

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CzarneckiRadek, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before the war, Lubartów had been a Jewish town in the way many small Polish towns were Jewish towns: not exclusively, but profoundly. Jews had lived there since the sixteenth century. By 1939, after decades of emigration to America and elsewhere, the Jewish share of the populati...

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Image: CzarneckiRadek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lubartów Ghetto: The Judenrat

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Janmad, CC BY-SA 3.0. A Judenrat, the German-imposed Jewish council that the occupiers used to run the ghettos through Jewish hands, was set up in late 1939. Its first president, Jakub Modko Lichtenfel, did not last long. He was replaced by Dawid Perec. The final council had five members whose names s...

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Image: Janmad | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lubartów Ghetto: The Trains to Bełżec

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Yarek shalom assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The first deportation to a death camp left Lubartów on April 9, 1942, the last day of Passover. Eight hundred Jews who did not have work cards were ordered to the railway station. They were loaded into cattle cars and sent to Bełżec, the extermination camp roughly 130 kilometers ...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Yarek shalom assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Lubartów Ghetto: Helpers and Survivors

Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nikodem Nijaki, CC BY-SA 3.0. A few names survived because of acts performed at terrible cost. A Pole named Dąbrowski was executed by the Germans for the crime of helping Jews; he is one of many Polish neighbors of Lubartów's Jews who took the same risk and paid the same price. Others lived. Frank Bleichman, ...

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Image: Nikodem Nijaki | CC BY-SA 3.0