Bełżec, to the camp there. [. . .] The rumour is spreading among the Jewish
population of the Lublin district that the Jews in the Bełżec camp are
being murdered in the same manner as in Chełmno, that is to say they
are being poisoned with gas.
When they published Kronenberg’s testimony, which does not mention
Bełżec, in the bulletin of 12 April, they did not supplement that information
either. As may be seen, the information from the two sources was not compiled.
It seems that Oyneg Shabes included accounts of events in the form in
which they reached Oyneg Shabes at a given moment, even if the information
did not tally with earlier sources. Nonetheless, some bulletins contain
evidence that the editors did compare various testimonies. For instance, the
first issue of Oyneg Shabes’s bulletin (before 3 April) (document 47) reported
that the Germans had been executing dozens of Jews in Wąwolnica since
mid-March 1942 and that on 22 March they had conducted a mass execution,
as a result of which the Jewish population of the town ceased to exist.
The information about that execution came from a 20-year-old refugee girl,
whose story Abraham Lewin wrote down in his diary under the date of
26 March 1942.
Last Sunday three lorries with Germans arrived. The Germans escorted
all the captured Jews, including members of the Judenrat, to the market
square, where the latter were executed. Many Jews hid in Christian
homes. Consequently, the Germans searched all Polish homes, escorted
the encountered Jews out and executed them immediately the moment
they crossed the threshold. The number of the Jews executed in Wąwolnica
is approximately 90. I did not receive a clear answer to my question:
how many Jewish inhabitants does this small town have? The
girl said only that “all, [literally] all Jews from Wąwolnica have
been killed.”⁵³
On 5 April a letter from Pesach Goldbaum, who had been resettled from
Kazimierz to Opole Lubelskie, reached Warsaw and Oyneg Shabes. The man
reported that all the Jews from Puławy, Kazimierz, and Wąwolnica were in
53 Lewin, A Cup of Tears. . .
