"Here Their Stories Will Be Told…"

Following the mass aktion of 6 October 1941, in which more than one-third of the Jews of the city were murdered, the remaining Jews of Nadwórna made great efforts to acquire work permits in occupations vital to the German economy. Some 600 Jews worked daily in the saw mill. At the same time, young Jews were abducted to labor camps in the region.

In April 1942, there were some 3,600 Jews in Nadwórna. During this period, preparations were made to establish a ghetto in the city. The Jews were ordered to supply planks of wood and barbed wire in order to erect a fence around the area allocated for the ghetto. On 30 April 1942, the Jews were sealed off in two enclosed ghettos. Those able to work and those laboring in essential factories were taken to Ghetto A; a few of these managed to make contact with farmers in the area and thus smuggle a little food into the ghetto. Ghetto B was for Jews deemed unfit for work. Here, hunger, typhus and dysentery spread rapidly, causing many deaths. A hospital was set up in Ghetto B, but the German and Ukrainian policemen would periodically take out the patients and murder them in the Jewish cemetery. An orphanage was also established in Ghetto B for children whose parents had been murdered in the aktion of October 1941, but most of the children in the orphanage died of hunger due to insufficient food allocation. The Judenrat endeavored to organize help for those in need, but its resources were extremely thin. In May and June 1942, more Jews from settlements in the area were brought to Nadwórna's two ghettos.

In August 1942, some of the members of the Judenrat, headed by Maksymiljan Schell, were taken to the Gestapo in Stanisławów, where they were tortured for giving permission to groups of Jews to work in the city of Stryj without the Gestapo's permission. The background for the event was a conflict between different German authorities. The interrogated Jews were returned to Nadwórna, and the ghetto residents were forced to pay a hefty fine.

In the summer of 1942, murderous aktionen were carried out among the Jewish communities surrounding Nadwórna. The surviving Jews from these communities were brought to the Nadwórna ghettos. At the same time, the Germans and Ukrainians would enter the Nadwórna ghettos and murder Jews at will. In September 1942, hundreds of Jews were taken out from the Nadwórna ghettos and murdered in aktionen in Stanisławów. Some of the workers in the Nadwórna ghettos were brought to a labor camp established in the city.

In the summer and fall of 1942, the Jews in the ghetto increased their attempts to escape. The Milbauer brothers worked in falsifying and selling "Aryan" documents in order to help Jews escape the ghetto and the city. Groups of Jews fled to Hungary, and some to the surrounding forests, but most were turned over to the Germans or murdered by local residents or gangs of supporters of the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera.

The Nadwórna ghettos were liquidated on 24 October 1942. The Jews were brought into the synagogue in one of the two ghettos, their belongings plundered, and then they were murdered. Other Jews were taken to Stanisławów, where they were murdered. During this action, the last survivors of the surrounding Jewish communities were killed. A few dozen craftsmen remained in Ghetto A in Nadwórna, but in November 1942 they were also murdered in the nearby forest. The Jewish community of Nadwórna ceased to exist.