[People standing o]nly in their underwear, up to their knees in the boggy mud,
devastated spiritually and physically, waiting for three days for their turn –
this is the image of the unprecedented tragedy in Równe.⁸⁴⁷
Lublin
The Ausrottung policy could recently be noted also in the General
Government. The best evidence is demonstrated by the history of the events
in Lublin, cwhich are still in progress at the time of writing this report.c57
At night on Monday, 16 March this year, all buildings on Lubartowska
Street and on its cross streets (Ruska and Czwartek) were cordoned off by
Ukrainian auxiliary police functionaries. A totally unexpected “resettlement
campaign” began. The entire population was rushed out onto the floodlit
streets and escorted to the gathering point. That was where the first selection
took place. Holders of work records, that is, those professionally active,
were released and ordered to move to the newly established ghetto consisting
of two streets – Grodzka and Kowalska (a total of 50 half-destroyed little
houses). The rest were sent to the synagogue on Jateczna Street, which served
as a transit camp. From there, larger groups were directed to the municipal
slaughterhouse in the Wola [town] district, where a train was waiting on
a railway sidetrack.
The first night the toll of the Aktion was over two hundred brutally killed
men, women, and children who were massacred by the German slaughterers.
The clearing of the original Jewish ghetto was conducted non-stop. Every day
different streets were cleared and then surrounded with barbed wire. Jews
were forbidden to go there under threat of death. Each day increased the number
of the victims of the Hitlerites.
All those with permits were squeezed into the new ghetto. The housing
and sanitary conditions, not to mention the provision of food, became truly
dreadful if one considers that the number of card holders and their relatives
[4] was 25,000.
After only a few days it became apparent that possession of work records
did not mean exemption from resettlement. The panic and commotion became
unbearable. To avoid imminent death the desperate people hid in hideouts in
backyards, risked crossing the ghetto border illegally, or had people transport
847 See Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, pp. 1459–1461.
