Mlawa Ghetto Print Page

The monument commemorates the victims of the Holocaust who were contained at Mlawa Ghetto between 1939 and 1942 in Poland and the Holocaust between 1939 1945. The monument is a tree sculptured in the shape of a menorah.

At the beginning of December 1940, rumors spread saying that the Jews will be expelled from the town of Mlawa. The Judenrat tried the cancel the edict. In prevention from being thrown into exile, the Jews of Mlawa, with the help of the Judenrat, paid 55,000 Marks to the Germans during the month of December 1940. In spite of this, on December 6, 1940, at dawn, hundreds of German policemen arrived to Mlawa. The policemen raided every Jewish house and ordered the residents to evacuate it within five minutes. In great panic, accompanied by beatings, yelling and dog barks, the soldiers herded all the Jews of Mlawa to the yard of one of the gymnasiums in town.

From those at the yard, 3,000 were selected and the rest were freed back to their homes. After the transport of Jews on December 6^th, 1940, Mlawa was officially left with 2,450 Jews. A ghetto was later formed for these remaining 2,450 Jews and for several months the ghetto remained opened, but by May 1941, the ghetto was completely sealed up. Mlawa's ghetto had also made room to accommodate about 1000 Jews from Szrensk, Radazanów, and Zielun. By that time, due to the secret reappearance of some Mlawer deportees, the population of the ghetto rose up to around 5,000 Jews. By the end of 1942, the majority of Mlawa's Jews and its environs were exterminated in Auschwitz.

The Holocaust was a genocide in which Adolf Hitler'`s Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about six million Jews. The victims included 1.5 million children and represented about two-thirds of the nine million Jews who had resided in Europe. Some definitions of the Holocaust include the additional five million non-Jewish victims of Nazi mass murders bringing the total to about 11 million.

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