According to a census carried out in Poland in 1921, the Jewish community of the village of Babice in southeast Poland had only 18 Jewish inhabitants. Based on Pages of Testimony painstakingly collected over half a century by Yad Vashem, the names of a few of its inhabitants have been traced: a local merchant named Shmuel Feif, Yosef Tintenfish, the Volf family, the Szwecer family, and the Rogal family. According to the testimony of Avraham Holer, who lived in a neighboring village, in the summer of 1942, following the massacre in Józefów, Jews from the villages in the vicinity, among them those in Babice located some 19 kilometers southwest, were given two weeks to move to Józefów. There they were murdered outside the town together with the remaining local Jews. From the tiny community of Babice, only Israel Volach (Volf), his aunt Sarah Tintenfish, and a woman by the name of Niche are known to have survived the Holocaust.
Investigations of deportations from villages where only a few Jewish families had lived, such as Babice, poses particular challenges. Lack of systematic documentation makes it especially challenging to identify individual transports, and the exact numbers of deportees or the exact route of the journey, or even the exact date cannot always be reconstructed.
In recent months, Yad Vashem's “Transports to Extinction,” part of the International Institute for Holocaust Research, has been researching the fates of many such Jewish communities in towns and villages of the Biłgoraj County, in the Lublin District of German-occupied Poland (General Government).
In investigating the final transport from Szczebrzeszyn, for example, researchers employed testimonies of local Polish witnesses collected by the District Commission Investigating Nazi Crimes in Lublin, as well as investigation reports collected for the trial of Hans Augustin, the Biłgoraj county commissioner. Among these was the testimony of the head of the local gendarmerie, who participated in the events. These sources come from the Yad Vashem Archives, as well as from other collections worldwide, such as the Jewish Historical Institute archive in Warsaw.
In the early morning of 21 October 1942, German policemen surrounded the small town and, together with local gendarmes began to deport its Jewish inhabitants. A total of 934 Jewish men, women and children were sent to the Bełżec annihilation camp. Devorah Fleisher, a local who survived hiding in the area, recalled: "Quite early in the morning, we heard shooting. I barely made it into Isrulke Germanovitch's house. There was nobody left there except for his little four-year-old daughter, Ruchele, who, in the turmoil, had been left behind. I took her to me and calmed her down, and together, quickly, we got into an attic cupboard. There, we found her mother… We lay there a whole day in great fear. We heard the houses being demolished. The murderers were running around searching every hole… Shooting could be heard from all sides, mixed with the cries of parents, the wailing of children. You could go mad listening to it."
Everyone who was discovered was led to the town square. From there, the deportees were marched out of the town, beaten with rifle butts and shot at along the way. They were taken to the village of Brody Małe, about 2.5 kilometers south, were they were held on a factory site, in the cold and rain. The next morning, they were marched to the local train station. On 22 October, at around 12 noon, they were forced into freight cars, though about four hours passed before the train started to move. They travelled south, some 60 kilometers, to Bełżec, from where no one returned alive. There are no accounts of this transport and no known survivors. In Szczebrzeszyn, the slaughter continued alongside the deportation and beyond.
"The aim of our project is not only scholarly – it is also commemorative," says Project Director Dr. Cornelia Shati-Geissler. "We aim to retrieve the deportees' names, to make their voices heard."
However, the limits of research define those of commemoration. "We strive to expand these limits with each new place we embark upon. The project’s online database, where each researched transport is available to the public, is organized geographically as well as chronologically, and can be employed as a tool to comprehensibly chart the destruction of Jewish communities by means of deportations."
"Transports to Extinction," the online research project on deportations during the Holocaust, is made possible through the generous support of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany; the estate of Isaac Jacques Cohen of France, survivor from Thessaloniki; SNCF - Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français; and Canadian donors through the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem.
This article originally appeared in the "Yad Vashem Jerusalem Magazine," volume 97.
