Józefów, Biłgoraj County

Józefów [juˈzɛfuf] is a town in Biłgoraj County, Lublin Voivodeship, Poland, with 2,436 inhabitants (2006).

Jewish extermination

A Jewish massacre took place in Józefów during World War II. Roundups, deportations and the mass killing of Jews were not uncommon during the war. Polish Jews suffered severely, being the first targeted in 1939; originally placed in Ghettos, they were eventually deported or murdered. Józefów was one of such villages. The near 1,800 Jews that resided in Józefów in 1942 were nearly all murdered in a single day. On July 13, 1942 a unit from a German reserve police battalion rolled into the village from nearby Biłgoraj. In sixteen hours with 482 (12 of them did not take part) men the police unit killed approximately 1,500 Jews and sent three hundred able-bodied men to a workcamp. The sick were shot in the beds they lay in, infants were torn from the hands that held them and murdered, while the elderly, women and children were dragged from their homes and taken to the marketplace. Shooting squads were established and each executioner was paired with a victim. The policemen would then march the Jew back into the woods where the Jew would be forced to lie down and was subsequently shot in the back of the head. At the end of the night the German police officers returned to their housing in Biłgoraj leaving the bodies of nearly 1,500 Jews behind unburied in the woods.

Browning, Christopher (1992), Ordinary Men Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York: Harper Perennial 

ARC (28 May), Jozefow Bilgorajski