Metzritch Poland Jewish Community Print Page

Monument erected by the Metzritcher Landmanschaft in memory of their families and Jews of Mezritch (Międzyrzec) and surrounding areas who perished in the Holocaust during World War Two. 

In 1939, during the Nazi–Soviet Invasion of Poland, the city was overrun by Wehrmacht on 13 September 1939, and ceded to the Russians on 25 September, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Two weeks later, it was transferred back to Germany after the new Boundary Treaty. In 1940 six separate slave-labor camps were set up by the Nazis for some 2,000 local Jews; along with Judenrat, and the Jewish police. 

On 25–26 August 1942, the first mass deportation of Jews from Międzyrzec took place with around 10,000 prisoners forcibly put on 52 cattle cars and sent to Treblinka extermination camp. Two days later, the Międzyrzec Podlaski Ghetto was established under the management of Judenrat. Several more mass deportation actions followed. On 17 July 1943, the ghetto was officially liquidated, along with the local transit camp. Fewer than 1% of the Jewish population of the city survived the Nazi mass executions and deportations to death camps.

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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