Magnuszew Ghetto

Members of the Boys were imprisoned in the Magnuszew Ghetto.

The Magnuszew Ghetto was one of a network of ghettos set up by Nazi Germany in which Jews were forced to live in occupied Poland. As with other ghettos in Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, the Magnuszew Ghetto was established to contain the region’s Jews and isolate them from the rest of the population until the Nazi leadership could decide on an answer to the so-called “Jewish Question.”

The Boys and their families 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.

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

Magnuszew is 59km southeast of Warsaw. On the eve of World War II, about 700 Jews resided in Magnuszew, numbering about 45 percent of the total population of 1,500.

Overview

Magnuszew was invaded by the Wehrmacht in early September 1939. Once a civil administration was established in the newly formed General Gouvernement, Magnuszew was incorporated into Kreis Radom-Land, a part of Distrikt Radom.

^{The Boys who were held in the Magnuszew Ghetto}

Little is known about the Magnuszew Ghetto. In March 1941, the Germans established a ghetto in Magnuszew. It held about 1,200 Jewish people. The formation of the ghetto coincided with an outbreak of typhus in Magnuszew, where no medical services were available.

In September 1942, the ghetto was liquidated. Its inhabitants were taken to the ghetto in Kozienice or to the Treblinka extermination camp, and about 120 Jews were murdered on the spot.

Memorialisation

A memorial plaque near the former Jewish cemetery commemorates the victims of the Holocaust.