The Stanisławów Ghetto

On 1 December 1941 the forced resettlement of the Jews of Stanisławów (Ivano-Frankivsk) into a Jewish district designated by the Germans began. All Jews living outside its boundaries had to move into it by 15 December, while Poles and Ukrainians living in the designated area had to leave it. Some 20,000 people were crammed into the ghetto – those who had survived the Bloody Sunday of 12 October and the further shootings of the autumn of 1941. On 20 December the ghetto was sealed: it was surrounded by a fence with three gates, and from then on its inhabitants could leave it only under guard, in labour columns, or with special passes.

Popular calendars record these events in two entries: under 1 December, that some 20,000 Jews were ordered to move into the ghetto and non-Jews to move out of it; and under 20 December, that the ghetto was “officially closed from the outside and surrounded by walls”. Both entries broadly agree with the scholarly studies, but they need two qualifications. The decision to create the ghetto, and its boundaries, had been settled earlier, in October; 1 December was the first day of a two-week deadline for the move. As for the enclosure, accounts differ: most describe a high wooden fence, some a wall; the windows of houses facing outwards were boarded up.

A ghetto “as small as possible”

Before the war Stanisławów had been one of the largest centres of Jewish population in Eastern Galicia – in 1931 nearly 25,000 Jews lived there. In the summer of 1941, after a brief period of Hungarian administration, together with the refugees of 1939 and the Jews expelled by the Hungarians from Carpathian Ruthenia, there were, according to various estimates, between 40,000 and more than 50,000 of them in the town and its surroundings. On 1 August the town became part of the new District of Galicia of the General Government, under German civil administration: the district governor (Kreishauptmann) Heinz Albrecht and the town commissioner Emil Beau.

The fate of the Jews of Stanisławów, however, was decided above all by the head of the local Security Police outpost, SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger. As early as August he had the town’s Jewish and Polish intelligentsia murdered in the Czarny Las forest, and in the autumn he began murdering entire Jewish communities of the region. The ghetto was part of his plans from the start. After the war Krüger and other witnesses testified that it was to be as small as possible, and that Jews who could not fit into it and were unfit for work were to be killed. On the eve of Bloody Sunday, 11 October, Commissioner Beau set new, reduced boundaries for the future Jewish district. The next day the police shot between 10,000 and 12,000 people in the Jewish cemetery. According to studies of the Stanisławów ghetto, its final boundaries were fixed by the end of October.

For the ghetto the Germans chose the oldest and most run-down part of the town. It consisted of a central area and two or three “islands” separated from it. Non-Jewish residents of these streets were ordered to move out, while Jews from other districts had to abandon homes in which their families had lived for generations and take only what they could carry. Many of them had nothing left to take anyway: after Bloody Sunday the homes of those killed and of those herded to the cemetery had been taken over by neighbours, and the victims’ property had been looted.

The move and the sealing

The resettlement lasted from 1 to 15 December 1941, during the first hard frosts of that winter. There were far too few dwellings. The Judenrat, then headed by the lawyer Michał Lamm (its first chairman, Izrael Seibald, had disappeared after Bloody Sunday), put people into every available space – warehouses, sheds and synagogues. Several families lived in a single room.

On 20 December the ghetto was sealed. The fence had three gates. On the outside they were guarded by German policemen of the Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) and members of the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police; on the inside by the Jewish Order Service set up under the Judenrat. Leaving was permitted only for work. Moreover, since 15 October leaving a Jewish district without permission had been punishable by death throughout the General Government – Hans Frank’s decree also covered Jews who tried to hide on the “Aryan side” and Poles who might help them.

At the same time, and on a similar pattern, the Germans were creating ghettos in other towns of the district. In Lwów (Lviv) too the Jews had to move into a designated district by 15 December 1941; on the way, under the railway viaduct on Pełtewna Street, the police picked out the old and the sick and shot them outside the city (Lwów Ghetto). In Galicia a sealed ghetto was not so much a place of confinement as a stage: it gathered together people whom the Germans intended to kill as soon as the weather and their resources allowed.

The winter of 1941–1942

From the first weeks conditions in the ghetto were catastrophic. Official food rations were far too small to live on. Extra food could be bought only on the black market, at prices few could afford, and smuggling through the fence was punishable by death. People died of hunger and cold. In the overcrowded dwellings, without fuel or water, disease spread, above all typhus. The Judenrat tried to save the inhabitants through work: workshops producing for the Germans were set up in the ghetto, and employment with an important firm offered hope of survival.

A particular place of horror was the so-called Rudolf’s Mill (Rudolfsmühle), a three-storey former grain mill. The Germans locked up the old and the sick there, together with the Jews expelled by the Hungarians from Carpathian Ruthenia, and later also people without valid work papers and those caught smuggling. Crammed together without food or care, the prisoners died in large numbers; according to accounts, an epidemic broke out there two weeks after the first people were brought in. The mill was directly under the Jewish affairs officer of the Stanisławów Security Police outpost, Heinrich Schott, who personally took part in the shootings. Until July 1942 most executions in Stanisławów took place in the mill.

The great shooting operations that swept through the region in the autumn – from Nadwórna through Stanisławów to Bolechów, Rohatyn and Kałusz – were halted in December. The ground had frozen and pits could not be dug. Sealing the ghetto at precisely this moment was no accident: over the winter the Germans wanted to keep the survivors under control, use them for labour and prepare the next stage. At that time the first extermination camp in the General Government was already being built at Bełżec, on the border between the Lublin and Galicia districts.

Place in the war

The Stanisławów ghetto was part of a vast process in which, within a few months of 1941, the Germans confined the Jews of the occupied territories of eastern Poland in ghettos, from Białystok and Wilno (Vilnius) to Lwów and Stanisławów. In Galicia, the only district of the General Government in which the mass murder of entire communities began even before the gas chambers came into operation, ghettos were created only after the first great shootings, and their boundaries were drawn so that only some of the Jews could fit inside.

The ghetto existed for a little over a year. During the night of 31 March–1 April 1942, on the eve of Passover, German and Ukrainian police surrounded it and set houses on fire to drive out those in hiding; Lamm had earlier refused to hand over the number of people demanded by Krüger. Thousands of inhabitants were deported to Bełżec, and the ghetto was reduced in size. The rest were divided into categories according to their usefulness for work; thousands judged unfit were killed. On 22 August 1942, in reprisal for the killing of a Ukrainian collaborator whose death was blamed on the Jews, the Germans shot more than a thousand people and publicly hanged the chairman of the Judenrat, Mordechaj Goldstein, and some twenty members of the Jewish police. In September, at Rosh Hashanah, between 3,000 and 5,000 Jews were deported to Bełżec, and further transports and shootings continued until the winter.

Krüger was recalled in August 1942, but his successor, Oskar Brandt, completed the work. On 22–23 February 1943 the police surrounded the ghetto and for four days shot its last inhabitants in the Jewish cemetery. The Germans then put up notices declaring Stanisławów “free of Jews” (judenfrei), although the hunt for those in hiding went on for months, and the last Jews working “legally” were shot in June 1943. According to the German historian Dieter Pohl, the Stanisławów outpost organised the shooting of some 70,000 Jews from the whole region within sixteen months and the deportation of a further 12,000 to extermination camps. When the Red Army entered the town on 27 July 1944, about a hundred Jews had survived in hiding, often with the help of Polish and Ukrainian neighbours. In all, about 1,500 of the Jews of Stanisławów survived the war, most of them outside the town.