Łapanka (round-up)

Round-ups were carried out by the SS, police, gendarmerie and army, often so that labour offices could meet the numbers of workers demanded for the Reich. People were seized in the streets, on trams and trains, at markets and outside churches. Those caught were held in transit camps and then sent to forced labour or concentration camps, or shot in reprisal executions. In September 1940 Witold Pilecki deliberately let himself be caught in a Warsaw round-up in order to be sent to Auschwitz.

Round-ups became one of the symbols of the occupation terror, especially in Warsaw and Kraków, where the largest of them took place on 6 August 1944. The Germans and their allies staged similar raids, including raids aimed at Jews, across occupied Europe – in France they were called rafles. The word survives in Polish as a term for random selection.