Rymanów Ghetto

Members of the Boys were imprisoned in a network of ghettos by the Nazis across eastern Europe between 1939-45.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

The Boys and their families were forced to move from their homes and were held in ghettos in Nazi controlled Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, where they spent years living in dire conditions. The ghettos were not designed for the vast numbers of people forced to find space to live within them. As a result, multiple families shared cramped and insanitary accommodation.

Rymanów is a town located in the Subcarpathian Voivodeship, in the southeastern tip of Poland.

Overview

Before the war, about 2,000 Jews lived in Rymanów, almost half of the city’s population. The Germans seized Rymanów on 9 September 1939. A ghetto was established in the town in the winter of 1941-42. Jews from surrounding towns and from Krosno were brought to the ghetto in July 1942, which led to severe overcrowding.

Liquidation

The Germans began to liquidate the ghetto in August 1942. On 13 August, the SS and police surrounded the town and ordered all Jews to gather in the market square. Some 200 Jewish men were transported to the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp or sent to the road construction labour gang run by the Kirchof company. Some men had already been sent to Kraków-Płaszów.

Women, children, people considered unfit for work, and people living on the outskirts of Rymanów were shot in the woods near Barwinek and at the Jewish cemetery. The remaining 800 Jews were forced to walk to the station in Wróblik Szlachecki, where they were loaded onto trains and taken to the Bełżec extermination camp.

A few days after the deportation, the police combed the city to find Jews in hiding, who were then murdered. The people working at Kirchhof were employed for a few more weeks and then sent to the Rzeszów ghetto. Their fate remains unknown.

Jewish Resistance

There is little information about the ghetto in Rymanów and there is no recorded resistance movement.

Aftermath

The Red Army liberated the town on 20 September 1944.

Memorialisation

Since 2008, the Meeting Rymanów Association has organised a commemorative walk from the Jewish cemetery in Rymanów to Wróblik Szlachecki station.