What happened to Będzin under Nazi occupation?

The memorial book connects the Nazi invasion of Będzin with the burning of the Great Synagogue during the first days of occupation. The destruction of this central religious building marked an assault on the visible institutions of Jewish communal life.

Accounts identify a ghetto for Będzin Jews and describe deportations alongside labor camps. Other testimony records Jewish prisoners working for a German firm in the ghetto, showing how persecution combined confinement, exploitation, and the threat of deportation.

The book records a first deportation to Auschwitz in which about one thousand people reported with their belongings after receiving personal summonses. It also states that later deportations sent thousands directly to gas chambers and others to camps, revealing the escalating process described by survivors and witnesses.

On June 22, 1943, German forces again attacked the ghetto and seized about four thousand Jews for deportation to Auschwitz. The account preserves the scale of the roundup as a decisive stage in the destruction of Będzin’s Jewish population.

The memorial book remembers named families and individuals, including Hershkowitz and his two sons, who were murdered together. Such accounts make clear that destruction reached across generations and family networks, not only anonymous population totals.