KONIN COUNTY
KONIN
After July 1941, Warsaw ghetto, author unknown, testimony recorded by
Daniel Fligelman, “Konin.” The situation of the Jewish population after
the entry of the Germans in 1939; expulsion of the Jews from Konin to
Ostrowiec [Świętokrzyski], Grodziec, Zagórów, Łódź, and Izbica Lubelska
in November 1939 and July 1941.
[1] Konin
People speak sometimes about the ‘bestial’
cruelty of man, but that is terribly unjust and
offensive to beasts; no animal could ever be so
cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.
F. Dostoyevsky⁸⁶⁷
Before the war Konin — a district seat in the Poznań region — had 15,000 in -
habitants, of whom 7,000 were Jewish.⁸⁶⁸ The military operations did not really
take much of a toll on Konin. Later, however, fate apparently wanted to
867 Quote from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
868 In 1939 Konin had approximately 2,500 Jewish inhabitants, who made up about 20 per cent of its population. Families from the surrounding villages also belonged to the Konin Jewish Community. On 30 November 1940 approximately 1,000 Jews were deported to the General Government, to Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski and to the vicinity of Lublin. Those remaining had to live in a designated area, inhabited mainly by Jews before the war. The Judenrat was established; among its members, Józef Aberman was also the head of the Order Service. In the summer of 1940 most of the Jews were deported to rural ghettos in Grodziec, Zagorów and Rzgów, while the rest could live only on Grodzka Street and had to work in town. Between March and November 1941, over 2,000 Jews from the rural ghettos were deported to Józefów Biłgorajski, Izbica Lubelska, and Krasnystaw (Lublin District). The few who remained in the Zagorów ghetto were murdered in nearby forests in the autumn of 1941. See Encyclopaedia of Camps…, p. 64.
