Yad Vashem

Płońsk, situated in the district of Warsaw, had a Jewish population of 4,913 in 1931. The invading German army conquered the city on September 5, 1939, instituting a regime of forced labor and extortion. As a destination for many refugees from other areas of Poland, Płońsk’s Jewish population almost doubled. The Germans established a Judenrat in July 1940, and a ghetto was established in May 1941. A typhoid epidemic immediately broke out with the establishment of the ghetto, which was only brought under control in April 1942. On Oct. 28, 1942, 2,000 elderly and sick Jews were deported from Płońsk to Auschwitz. Three more transports, each carrying 2,000 Jews, left from Płońsk for Auschwitz in the next six weeks. Yad Vashem Photo Archives 7309/2

An opera singer Else Berkowitz (née Shteg) lived with her husband, a pianist and conductor Gerhard Berkowitz and their daughter Brigitta (b. 1937) in Erwinstraße 3, Hannover, Germany. Gerhard's parents, Ernestina Shumakher and David Berkowitz lived with them. Gerhard Berkowitz was sent to the forced labor unit building a railway in Eastern Europe. He was murdered during the Holocaust. Else Berkowitz and her daughter Brigitta were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, presumably in 1944. David Berkowitz died in the doorstep of his house in Erwinstraße, when he and his wife were arrested in 1941. Ernestina Shumakher was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto and murdered in 1942. Their relative Ruth Bloom submitted to Yad Vashem photos and Pages of Testimony in memory of her family members murdered in the Holocaust. #WorldOperaDay

October 1929, the laying of the cornerstone of the YIVO Building in Vilna, Poland The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, Yiddish Scientific Institute) was founded in Vilna, Poland, in 1925. YIVO dealt with collecting cultural artifacts and in research, primarily in history, philology, literature, economics, statistics, psychology and education. Its goals were to translate into Yiddish the classics of world culture, so that most Jews would be able to encounter them, as well as gather materials for the study of Yiddish and Jewish subjects for Jewish scholars and scholars of Judaism. YIVO’s collections included more than 200,000 Jewish and secular books, Yiddish newspapers from all over the world, photographs of Jewish paintings and musical collections. These cultural treasures served as a source of Jewish identification, connecting the different sectors of the Jewish people. The institute’s publications were in Yiddish, accompanied by abstracts in English, German and Polish. As an additional step in their attacks against Jewish cultural life in the Vilna Ghetto, the Germans confiscated books from the YIVO Library in April 1943, after a year of relative calm. As part of “Operation Rosenberg”, the Germans forced Shmerke Kaczerginski and others to collect Jewish documentary materials from YIVO to be transferred to Germany. Since YIVO was situated outside of the ghetto, Kaczerginski, assisted by the poet Sutzkever and others, managed to rescue books, manuscripts and portions of the Vilna Ghetto Archive. Amongst the workers for the Germans was also Herman Kruk, who organized the ghetto’s library and was its director. With the German conquest of Vilna in June 1941, YIVO’s leadership moved to New York, where the institute continues its work today. Yad Vashem Photo Archives 3380/642

Dr. Mojzis Woskin-Nahartabi, an expert in Semitic languages and a Hebrew and Arabic lecturer at Halle University in Germany, was one of the heads of the Hebrew Committee in the Theresienstadt ghetto. In the ghetto he lectured in Hebrew on Eretz Israel, the development of the Hebrew language, and Modern Hebrew. Among his lectures, he also taught literary Arabic. On October 19, 1944 Dr. Mojsses Woskin-Nahartabi was deported to Auschwitz, where he was murdered. Portrait of Dr. Mojsses (Moise) Woskin-Nahartabi (1884-1944), Theresienstadt ghetto, by fellow Theresienstadt inmate Max Plaček, 1943, pencil on paper, 30x21cm. Yad Vashem Art Collection.

On this day, 16 October 1941, 4,500 Jews from the area were murdered near Lubny, Ukraine. On October 10, 1941 the German commander of Lubny ordered all Jews from the town and the rest of the county to gather by October 16 in the outlying part of Lubny named Zasulye (another source says Zamostye Street), on the pretext that they were being relocated. At 9:00 AM that day, about 4,500 Jews who had assembled, were surrounded by Sonderkommando 4a and their local collaborators near the rope factory and forced to undress. They were then forced to run, in groups of 35-40, to anti-tank trenches near the factory, where they were shot.

Post-war meeting, Survivors of the Sobibor death camp who took part in the revolt in Sobibor on October 14, 1943 The Sobibor death camp was established in March 1942 as part of Aktion Reinhard and shut down at the end of 1943 after a prisoners’ uprising. About 250,000 Jews were murdered at Sobibor. About 50 of the 300 prisoners who escaped Sobibor during the uprising survived the war. Yad Vashem Photo Archives 2C05