Under the Fourth Hague Convention of 1907, also ratified by Germany, the occupying power was fully responsible not only for maintaining public order, but also for ensuring the safety of the civilian population in the area it controlled. Meanwhile, the years of German occupation brought the opposite - the invader, through its legislation and criminal practice, condemned entire population groups to extinction.¹ During the period of the Third Reich’s greatest victories, the extermination of the Jewish people became one of its priority objectives. Genocidal actions carried out on a local scale were the consequence of German plans on a European scale.

Local communities under German occupation

A regulation issued by the Germans on 15 October 1941 restricting freedom of movement in the General Government was intended to counteract any form of aid to the Jewish population. It announced that the death penalty would be imposed not only on Jews “who leave their designated district without authorisation”, but also on anyone who hid them². In a subsequent regulation issued a year later, the restrictions were further extended:

“Whoever obtains information that a Jew is illegally staying outside the perimeter of the residential area and does not report this to the police, will face police security measures”³.

Under threat of repression, the occupiers demanded the civilian population’s active cooperation in enforcing orders - both those directed against Jews in hiding and against anyone they considered to be working against the Third Reich, including those hiding in the forests. They also rewarded collaborators who informed about illegal activities or cases of sabotaging German orders. In this way, individuals - trusted people of the German authorities - extended the scale of intimidation and ensured that the occupiers had fuller control over entire localities⁴.

The starostes became particularly important in the occupation administration. They became a strong governing body with very broad powers, often staffed by Germans coming from the Reich. In many places, the removed officials were replaced by Volksdeutsche. However, the Germans, carrying out extensive war and occupation tasks, were not able to fill the lower positions of local administration at the level of municipalities and individual villages with their compatriots. Therefore, some of the existing officials were retained in the General Government, imposing new rules of operation and new duties on them - in line with the occupation orders. Village heads, on the other hand, who were residents of individual villages, were usually not replaced, but were not even allowed to resign their positions under the penalty of imprisonment. Full obedience to the new orders was enforced by the threat of severe repressions. The Rzeszów Kreishauptmann (district chief) announced this on posters:

“[…] Polish officials have been reinstated. They perform their duties using the means prescribed to them by their superior authorities. There are many cases where these Polish officials (e.g. commune heads, village heads, tax officials, etc.) are being resisted and obstructed in their work. […] those who resist the orders of the authorities will be punished with heavy imprisonment or even the death penalty. Such authority is also held by those Polish officials who act on the direct or indirect instructions of the German authorities”⁵.

It became an essential duty of village heads to relay the occupier’s orders to the local community. They were personally responsible for ensuring their implementation. The Germans further divided larger villages into districts, for which they made the so-called district officers responsible. They were subordinate to the village heads and shared responsibility for enforcing the orders of the occupation authorities.

The Germans treated the potential of the villages as a free logistical base for the operations carried out in the area. For example, village heads were often ordered to provide a sufficient number of coachmen with wagons. In 1941, these were to be an additional means of transporting war equipment to the Eastern Front. Similar orders were addressed to village heads in 1942. This time the wagons were to be used to transport Jews to railway stations or directly to labour camps.

It was announced that the death penalty would be imposed not only on Jews “who leave their designated district without authorisation”, but also on anyone who hid them.

According to occupation regulations, the rural community was obliged to look for the hiding Jews or partisans. At the request of the Germans, village heads had to organise searches for designated groups of “criminals” or manhunts for them. Neither the village heads nor the residents could avoid this. A refusal to do so would have been treated as rebellion against the occupation authorities and the whole village would have been exposed to ruthless pacification, carried out by the Germans on the basis of collective responsibility. In the case of carrying out the occupier’s orders, the scale of actual involvement and zeal of people participating in this type of search was particularly important. After the war, this also became the subject of criminal proceedings and court hearings.

From 1942, night guards, also known as village guards, were appointed. Formally, they were supposed to support the maintenance of peace and order in the village and to counter crime, which included the hiding of Jewish people. The guards were subordinate to village heads. They were headed by commanders, in Polish called “dziesiętniki” – from number “ten”. They held their positions for extended periods of time and were remunerated from village funds. Many of the larger villages also had a separate guard, made up of members of the fire brigade.

In order to terrorise the society and enforce compliance with occupation legislation, the Germans also applied a form of personalised collective responsibility. They appointed groups of hostages, responsible with their lives for the meticulous execution of their order, handed over - under duress - by blue policemen or village heads. In occupation practice, the hostages also became a group used for specific tasks. Non-cooperation on their part could result in exile to a labour camp or, in the case of more serious offences, execution. It was therefore a sophisticated method of using fear as a form of pressure. In this way, all residents were warned who would be the first to pay for insubordination. Then, the responsibility fell on the other residents.

Orders to start organising manhunts or search for people in hiding were received by the village heads directly from the Germans or through commune heads. They were responsible for the effective mobilisation of members of the guard, fire brigade and hostage groups. If necessary, they had to appoint ordinary villagers to carry out this task. Often, the implementation of German orders was directly supervised by the blue policemen, and sometimes by the Germans themselves - gendarmes or policemen.

The Germans realised that, despite the restrictive orders, many Jews were still hiding in Markowa as well as in other villages and in the nearby forests.

Those who were captured were taken to the blue police stations or to the village community detention centre. There they awaited the arrival of representatives of the occupation authorities. Those found usually faced a tragic end: during the implementation of the “final solution”, the Germans committed individual or collective murders. They carried out most of the executions on their own, occasionally using the blue police.

The tragedy of the times was that even those village heads and members of the guard who were sympathetic towards the wanted could not pretend to be searching or attempt to free those who had been captured. If there was a secret informant or collaborator of the Germans among those carrying out the task, such conduct was punishable by death for sabotaging the orders. Just as dangerous as the occupiers were those who zealously cooperated with them⁶.

Nevertheless, incidents of sabotage did occur. It is worth quoting here an excerpt from the justification of one of the post-war sentences concerning participation in the action of capturing people in hiding:

“The court sees a difference between passive participation in the capture or escort and participation in the capture. During the period of German occupation, at least 1/4 of the total Polish rural population was forced to participate in raids on themselves. Sometimes the entire partisan section of the population took part in raids on themselves [i.e. took part in the search for partisans] and of course found no one. Often peasants going on a manhunt made it easier for those in hiding to avoid being captured. Many people, including Jews, owed their lives to the fact that Polish peasants pursued them or escorted those who had already been captured in such a way that they were able to hide or escape after capture”⁷.

The extermination of the Jews in Markowa in 1942.

One of the thousands of Polish towns where the Germans implemented the principals of their criminal ideology was Markowa. The village had a population of around 4,500 at the time of the war. In the interwar period, there was a well-organised cooperative movement there. For example, in 1935, the first health cooperative in Poland was established in Markowa. Politically, the people’s movement was the most influential here. The vast majority of the residents were Polish, but there was also a fairly small Jewish community. The 1921 census shows that 126 people declaring Jewish faith lived in Markowa. This number may have dwindled to around 120 by the outbreak of war. The houses of Jewish families did not form a major cluster and were scattered throughout the village. Most of the local Jews were engaged in trade; two families farmed. Relations between the Poles and the Jews in Markowa were good. Religious and cultural considerations meant that the two communities lived side by side, without intermingling. However, this did not affect the relationships between the children, who naturally took to playing together and also attended the same school. According to data from the last years before the war, in the school year 1938/1939 there were 22 Jewish pupils attending the village school in Markowa. No major conflicts in the mutual relations of Polish and Jewish children were ever reported there. At most, the custom of young people hanging a “Judas puppet” on trees in front of Jewish houses during Holy Week could be a reminder of the divisions.

In order to terrorise the society and enforce compliance with occupation legislation, the Germans also applied a form of personalised collective responsibility. They appointed groups of hostages, responsible with their lives for the meticulous execution of their order, handed over - under duress - by blue policemen or village heads.

During the war, the Germans abolished the Przeworsk district. Markowa remained the seat of the municipality, but became part of the occupying Jarosław district⁸. As a large village, it was divided into more than a dozen districts. There was a blue police station in the village. Between three and five policemen served there. One of them was the particularly dangerous Volksdeutsche Konstanty Kindler from Wielkopolska. He quickly became known as an overzealous executor of German orders. He personally participated in the execution of the captured people. He saw this as a chance for promotion and the possibility of moving into service in the German gendarmerie.

From 1 January 1941, police officers from Markowa were supervised by the newly established German gendarmerie post in Łańcut, 10 km away. The commander there was Lieutenant Eilert Dieken - a German from the north-western regions of the Reich. In the following years Dieken commanded a number of pacification actions around Łańcut. He took part in the murder of Jews and Poles. He was the main organiser and executor of the anti-Jewish Operation Reinhardt in the area. The main part of this action in the Jarosław district took place in the summer and autumn of 1942. The aim was to gather all the local Jews in the Pełkinie camp and murder them. The Germans intended to transport some of the prisoners from Pełkinie to the extermination camp in Bełżec.

The deportation of Jews from Łańcut and the neighbouring villages, including Markowa, began at the beginning of August 1942. That same month, the Germans introduced a ban on Jews staying in Markowa. The German gendarmerie meticulously inspected the conduct of the blue police every few days, as well as the execution of occupation orders by the village heads and their subordinates, i.e. district officers, guards and hostages. An order was issued for local peasants to turn up with carts to provide a means of transport for the Jews. Although it was announced that they were going to work, by that time most Jews understood that death awaited them. Despite this, six or eight Jews from Markowa volunteered to leave. Dozens of others hid in fields, forests or various buildings. They tried to wait it out. Some were hidden by Polish farmers in their homes, others hid in their barns or stables without their permission. The hiding Jews would turn up in the village in the evenings, asking for food and accommodation. A group found shelter in the forests in Husów, while the Ryfka Tencer or Trinczer family, with the help of Józef Ulma, built themselves a dugout in the ravines near the stream. At least one family - the Riesenbachs - was warned by two blue policemen from the local police station.

Many peasants were afraid to provide help. They knew that it would be punishable by death. The German gendarmes, together with the blue policemen, conducted ad hoc searches in one or several houses. The days were getting colder and some Jews, unable to find a suitable hiding place, reported to the station themselves. At least one woman in hiding died of exhaustion. It is difficult to say how many Jews from Markowa were murdered in 1942 - between the beginning of August and 13 December. Some of them were shot by the policeman mentioned above - the Volksdeutsche, Kindler. When he was promoted to a gendarme and transferred to another post, the Jews were killed by the German gendarmes from Łańcut. Between a few and a dozen people may have been killed at that time, as indicated by the number of bodies exhumed after the war and the fact that the shooting of Jews in Markowa took place even before the displacement action.

The Germans realised that, despite the restrictive orders, many Jews were still hiding in Markowa as well as in other villages and in the nearby forests. At the beginning of December 1942, they organised a search for the hiding Jews in Husów and shortly afterwards in Markowa. On Sunday 13 December, the Germans ordered the village head, Andrzej Kud, to undertake a search. The village head could not refuse to carry out the order, but, what is important, on that day before noon he publicly informed the residents about the action as part of the announcements he gave every Sunday in front of the church. In this way, he warned of the planned action (but it is difficult to determine whether this was his intention) and thus enabled the farmers hiding the Jews to be extra cautious and to better camouflage their hiding place. It is known that immediately after returning from church, the family of Józef and Julia Bar, who were hiding the Riesenbachs, did so, and that Franciszek Bar prepared a new hiding place for Jakub Einhorn.

The village chief involved firefighters, guards and district officers in the search. The latter were to select people in their districts who would take part in this action. Witnesses interviewed after the war most often stated that firefighters participated in the action (as was mentioned in later accounts, collected in 2003), guards, hostages, district officers and sometimes civilians were also mentioned. The latter included the aforementioned hostages and district officers. It is difficult to determine how many people took part in the search, but there were at least 26. Aware of what had happened a few days earlier in Husów, everyone knew that those captured would be murdered by the Germans.

The largest group of Jews was taken in by Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, who were raising their children Stanisława, Barbara, Władysław, Franciszek, Antoni and Maria at the time. Among those who found shelter in their house was: Saul Goldman and his four sons (called the Szalls in Łańcut), as well as Chaim Goldman’s two daughters and granddaughter from Markowa - probably Lea (also called Layka) Didner with a daughter of unknown name and Gienia (also called Gołda) Grünfeld. All of them, together with the entire family who hid them, including the pregnant Wiktoria, were murdered by the German gendarmerie on 24 March 1944.

It is not certain whether the blue policemen took part in the search itself. Their involvement was hinted at by witnesses only during the subsequent stages of the post-war criminal trials. Andrzej Rewer, one of those tried after the war, testified - followed by some other witnesses - that on 13 December, while searching for Jews, a Gestapo officer Fryszko was in Markowa⁹. Regardless of whether the latter information is true, there is no doubt that the search for hiding Jews took place on the orders of the Germans and that it was the Germans who shot those captured. It was not possible to precisely determine the number of those captured that day. The following numbers appear in various documents: 25, 20, 17 and the word “several”. The number 25 is probably closest to the truth. This included his siblings: three brothers Markiel, Abraham, Nuchym and two sisters, as well as Rywka/Ryfka Tencer/Trinczer with two daughters and a granddaughter; Zelik/Zelig/ Zeilig with his wife and two children; the Najderg/Neüberg family and a person hiding with false documents in the name of Stanisław Ciołkosz.

The blue policemen locked the captured Jews in the so-called communal detention centre, located at the main intersection of the village. There they were held all night from 13 to 14 December. The next morning German gendarmes arrived in Markowa. They led all the detainees out of the building and executed them in a former trench (later used as an animal burial ground), used by them as an execution site during the war.

There are no accounts to confirm that such searches were organised at a later date. It is known, however, that after the events of December 1942, many peasants in Markowa continued to give shelter to Jews in defiance of German prohibitions. Michał and Maria Bar, who lived with their children Stefania, Janina, Weronika, Antonina and Antoni, hid Chaim and Ruzia Lorbenfeld and their child Pesia. Józef and Julia Bar were hiding the Riesenbach family: Jakub and Ita and their son Josek and daughters Gienia and Mania. At the home of Antoni and Dorota Szylar, who lived with their five children: Zofia, Helena, Eugeniusz, Franciszek and Janina, six members of the Weltz family had been hiding since January 1943: Miriam and her children Moniek, Abraham, Reśka and Aron, as well as the latter’s wife called Shirley, and after a few months they were joined by Aron and Shirley’s son Leon, who was a few years old. In the house of Michał and Katarzyna Cwynar, who were raising their grandson Jan, survived a Jew using the name Władysław. Perhaps it was Mozes Reich, who testified after the war that he had been hiding in Markowa. Jakub Einhorn hid in Husów and Sietesza, as well as in Markowa, where he had several hiding places. At first, he was helped by Michał and Wiktoria Drewniak, who lived with their children Antoni and Józef, as well as by Katarzyna Bar and her son Franciszek Bar and daughter Stefania Bar (the latter was raising her daughter Helena at the time). After the death of Michał Drewniak in 1943, Einhorn found new shelter with Jan and Weronika Przybylak, who lived with their children Bronisław and Zofia. According to a post-war account by Eugenia Einhorn, Jakub’s widow, a Jewish family of three who were friends of Einhorn were also hiding with the Przybylak family. From the summer of 1943, Abraham Segal, who claimed to be Roman Kaliszewski, stayed and worked on the farm of Jan and Helena Cwynar, who had two daughters: Maria and Czesława. According to accounts, his employers became aware of his Jewish background after a while, but continued to hide him. This was all the more dangerous because Cwynar was at that time a member of the leadership of the underground folk movement in Przeworsk district, and one of the denunciations that was intercepted stated that “he was a subversive folk provocateur”.

The largest group of Jews was taken in by Józef and Wiktoria Ulma, who were raising their children Stanisława, Barbara, Władysław, Franciszek, Antoni and Maria at the time. Among those who found shelter in their house was: Saul Goldman and his four sons (called the Szalls in Łańcut), as well as Chaim Goldman’s two daughters and granddaughter from Markowa - probably Lea (also called Layka) Didner with a daughter of unknown name and Gienia (also called Gołda) Grünfeld. All of them, together with the entire family who hid them, including the pregnant Wiktoria, were murdered by the German gendarmerie on 24 March 1944.

Difficult settlements

Thanks to the help of the inhabitants of Markowa, 21 of the above-mentioned Jews survived. They survived until the end of the German occupation, which ended in this village on 27 July 1944.

In their post-war testimonies before the courts, Jewish survivors spoke of the varied attitudes of the inhabitants of Markowa. There were some peasants who secretly and illegally helped them, but there were also those in the village of several thousand people who zealously committed themselves to the German orders.

The activities of the latter became the subject of several criminal proceedings in the post-war period. The author managed to find court records of cases against four Markowa residents and a prosecutor’s investigation against another. They took part in the search for Jews ordered by the Germans in 1942. On the basis of these documents, it can be concluded that originally there were also 22 other people associated with Markowa who were under suspicion, but twenty of them - probably due to the lack of evidence - were refused prosecution or the proceedings were soon discontinued; the two other cases took longer, but were also discontinued.

According to the testimonies collected, it can be concluded that a significant role in directing the course of the search for Jews in December 1942 - apart from the village head, Andrzej Kuda, who ordered the search upon the instructions from the Germans, was played by Andrzej Rewer, the hostage and then commander of the community guard, and Franciszek Homa, the head of the local voluntary fire brigade (in the latter case, however, it cannot be ruled out that attempts were made to implicate him in acts committed by other people, as the criminal proceedings were conducted after his death). The person who was personally involved in the search and beat the captured Jews was Wojciech Krauz. Who were the other people looking for Jews? Most testimonies and witness accounts point to firefighters. In addition to the aforementioned Franciszek Homa, among the firefighters was Michał Szpytma and probably some of the other people whose names appear in the files as suspects. Was their participation in the search compulsory, as was the case with community guards, and did they face death or other punishment if they refused? The files of the proceedings analysed do not allow these questions to be answered categorically. The firefighters themselves wrote the following in the chronicle of the Voluntary Fire Brigade (OSP):

“In 1941 [it should be 1942] the Fire Brigade, as an organisation, was caught up in a roundup of Jews, which was a great trouble for the Brigade. However, the firefighters were later acquitted, as they searched in a way so as not to find anyone”¹⁰.

Today it is not possible to clearly establish the responsibility of individual people for what happened in Markowa in the summer and autumn of 1942. However, there is no doubt that these were the most tragic days in the village’s history.

_{The text was published in the “IPN Bulletin” No. 6/2017}

¹ _{The article uses excerpts from the study: M. Szpytma, Zbrodnie na ludności żydowskiej w Markowej w 1942 roku w kontekście postępowań karnych z lat 1949– –1954 [Crimes against the Jewish population in Markowa in 1942 in the context of criminal proceedings from 1949- -1954], “Zeszyty Historyczne WiN-u” 2014, no. 40, pp. 39-66.}

² _{The Third Regulation on Residence Restrictions in the General Government of 15 October 1941 [in:] Polacy ‒ Żydzi 1939–1945. Wybór źródeł/Polen – Juden 1939–1945. Quellenauswahl/Poles – Jews 1939–1945. Selection of documents, developed by A.K. Kunert, introduction by W. Bartoszewski, Warsaw 2001, pp. 484–485.}

³ _{Regulation of the Higher SS and Police Commander of the GG on the creation of Jewish residential quarters in the Radom, Krakau and Galizien districts of 14 November 1942, [in:] “Żegota”. Rada Pomocy Żydom 1942–1945. Wybór dokumentów poprzedzony wywiadem A. Friszke z W. Bartoszewskim, developed by A.K. Kunert, Warsaw 2002, p. 52.}

⁴ _{Kreishauptmann’s announcement promising a reward for helping to denounce Jews and the Poles hiding them, Grójec, 19 December 1941, [in:] Polacy ratujący Żydów. Teka edukacyjna IPN, Warsaw 2008, k. 9.}

⁵ _{Kreishauptmann’s announcement regarding obstructing the work of commune heads, village heads, tax officials, etc, Rzeszów, 11 May 1940, [in:] Propaganda i rzeczywistość, exhibition albums: “Życie na papierze. Niemiecka okupacja Rzeszowszczyzny w afiszach, obwieszczeniach i plakatach (1939‒1944)”, “Wczorajsze dzisiaj. Rzeszów z lat okupacji 1939‒1945. Ze zbiorów Bogusława Kotuli”, introduction by M. Krzanicki, consultant: K. Kaczmarski, Rzeszów 2007, p. 29.}

⁶ _{J. Grabowski, Społeczność wiejska, policja granatowa i ukrywający się Żydzi: powiat Dąbrowa Tarnowska 1942–1945 [in:] Zarys krajobrazu. Wieś polska wobec zagłady Żydów 1942–1945, ed. B. Engelking, J. Grabowski, Warsaw 2011, pp. 143–159.}

⁷ _{Archive of the Institute of National Remembrance in Rzeszów (hereinafter: AIPN Rz), 357/106/ DVD, Files of the District Court in Rzeszów regarding Władysław Szpunar, Justification of the judgement in case IV K 168/48 regarding Władysław Szpunar, Stanisław Ruszel, Stanisław Pasierb, Rzeszów, 11 March 1949, k. 264.}

⁸ _{The village heads were Germans: Carl Hermann Rieger, Georg Eisenlohr, Juliusz Renz, Michael Andreas Zuzic. The commune head of the Markowa municipality until March 1942 was Józef Szatkowski, who had performed these duties before the war, then Władysław Urban until March 1943, and later, until the end of the occupation, Michał Barakasza. None od them came from Markowa.}

⁹ _{No further details were provided, the name was probably distorted.}

¹⁰ _{L. Cyran, J. Lonc, Kronika OSP w Markowej 1911–1961, mps, www.markowa.osp.org.pl/ downloads.php?cat_id=1&download_id=2 [accessed: 9 June 2017].}