Nazi Germany began its invasion of Poland on Friday, September 1st, 1939. Ostrow quickly began to fill with refugees from towns and villages closer to the front lines, as in World War I, and the local community began to organize relief for them. Early in the morning of Wednesday, September 6th, the war came to Ostrow, with Nazi aircraft flying over the city and dropping bombs that shattered windows, caused a few deaths and brought terror to the population.
On Friday, September 8th, German tanks and soldiers entered the town. Persecution of the Jews started the next day, with the looting of Jewish stores by Nazi soldiers and Poles alike and many cold-blooded murders. On Sunday, the Jewish men were rounded up in the town square and made to either stay in one place for long periods of time or run from place to place, many being beaten and shot. On the following Thursday and Friday, which was the holiday of Rosh HaShana, the Jews prayed in fear and secret. Many men were dragged out of their homes and forced to do hard labor on the holiday.
On Sunday, September 17th, Jewish houses were ransacked, and Jewish community leaders were rounded up and interrogated. Looting and persecution continued throughout the following week. On Yom Kippur, when most people stayed in their houses in fear, many men were rounded up and forced to work on the most sacred day on the Jewish calendar.
Shortly thereafter, the community heard rumors that the Russians would be coming back. On the first day of Succos, the Germans disappeared, and on the second day of Succos, the Russians arrived. The Jews were relieved. But then, on the third day of Succos, they heard that the Germans were coming back, and the Jews went back into hiding. The torture and looting became worse, with many local Poles assisting the Nazis; also, prayer houses were desecrated. their cruel regime began on a large scale. Robbing, torturing, desecrating the prayer houses by dragging the torah scrolls into the street.
On the 4th day of Succos, the German commandant advised the Jews to leave the town as life would only get worse for them. Many left quickly, with few remaining possessions, heading for the Russian border. Most got through, ending up as refugees in the woods near Zaromb; but some did not get through because the Soviets closed the border.
In early November, a German soldier was seen entering a formerly Jewish wooden house across from the town hall and setting fire to the building. The fire quickly spread to the adjacent wooden buildings. When the fire brigade arrived, the Nazis would not let them put out the fire until most of the Jewish neighborhood had caught on fire. Then the Germans spread the word that the Jews had caused the fire and would be held responsible. Several were arrested, and Berel Tejtel’s hanging corpse was displayed by the Nazis at the town hall with a sign “this is the Jew who burned down the city”.
After that the Germans arrested all the Jews left in the city, a total of 560-700 (mostly refugees or older people who had not been able or were unwilling to leave their homes and businesses to cross over to the Soviet side), for the crime of setting fire to the town, placing them in the cellars at city hall, in the city jail and in the ice-cellar of the Tejtel brewery. Late the next afternoon – November 11, 1939 – the men were driven out to the southern end of the town, were stripped naked and ordered to dig a large pit. All except six were then shot with machine guns. A German officer ordered the six remaining Jews to throw the other bodies into the pit and to cover it. After covering the pit with a little earth, they were ordered to pour lime over the bodies. Then the women and children were brought out, shot, and then buried by the six surviving men. By 7 a.m. the next morning, the process was finished and they too were killed. In the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. is a photograph of a Nazi soldier standing next to an elderly man at the edge of a pit, with the caption “The Last Victim.” (According to German records accompanying that photograph, 364 men, women and children were executed by the 4th Police Battalion, commanded by Police Colonel Brenner.)
After finishing the work, the Nazis sprayed carbolic acid and a tank leveled the earth so that there would be no mound, and they planted young trees. However, there were Poles who witnessed what had happened, and the site was later dug up by people searching for valuables that might have been left behind. Many years later, a monument was placed at the location of the massacre.
Many of the Jews who fled from Ostrow took up residence in eastern Poland, in such towns as Bialystok and Slonim. Most of them perished following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet-occupied area in June 1941.
Those who survived were mainly those who had moved deep into the U.S.S.R., well away from the border, or were sent to labor camps in Siberia.
The Germans wanted to remove any traces of Jewish occupation. They had the fences to the two Jewish cemeteries (the “old” and “new” cemeteries – the “old” one had become filled late in the 19th century) knocked down and the stones taken away. As in other local towns, the stones were probably used as foundations or pavements for buildings.
During the German occupation, there was a large power plant operating in the town that provided electricity to the Treblinka death camp, which was not far from Ostrow. One resident who was a child living across the street from the power plant at the time said in 1996 that when he heard the plant in operation (usually late at night), he knew that Jews were being killed.
When the Germans retreated from Poland in 1944, they burnt down the town. About 60% of the buildings were destroyed.
After the war, while a few Jews returned to the town, they did not stay, and the Jewish community of Ostrow was not rebuilt. Only two Jewish persons settled there, one of them an Ostower who had survived the massacre in the forest by running away. He remained in the forest until the end of the war and returned to Ostrow , but the trauma of those years had left him half-mad. The community lived on, however, through landsmenschaften throughout the world, principally in the United States and Israel.
Note: The principal source of information for this summary is the Yizkor book for the town – Sefer Hazikaron L'kehilat Ostrov Mazovietzk – which was published in 1960. Information also came from other published sources about the town and the region, vital records and interviews, as well as books about the Jews of Poland between the World Wars.
*© 1999Michael B. Richman
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