cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2743823
Janowska was a hybrid camp that the Axis situated in western Ukraine and used for transit, neoslavery, and extermination. As the Axis was getting ready to liquidate the latest supply of prisoners, a number of Jews heroically staged an uprising against their oppressors. Sadly, though, most of them did not make it out alive; the Axis recaptured some and massacred six thousand prisoners.
Quoting Christopher Mick’s Lemberg, Lwow, and Lviv 1914–1947: Violence and Ethnicity in a Contested City, page 308
On November 19, 1943, the Gestapo set about murdering the last Jews in Janowska camp. About three hundred men from the Gestapo, the Ukrainian auxiliary police, and a few dozen soldiers of the Waffen‐SS took part in the extermination. The OUN‐B estimated that at this point around 2,700 Jews were still living in the camp. The Gestapo ordered the Jews to undress completely. But Jews took that moment to attack the Gestapo men with knives.
The Gestapo fired on the Jews with machine guns and threw hand grenades, killing almost all of them. A few Jews used the confusion to climb over the barbed wire fence and flee. Fifty Jews fled at the start of the carnage along with three hundred Russian SS‐men, who were serving in the camp and had sold the Jews weapons and ammunition. The Gestapo was unable to get the situation under control by itself and called on the Ukrainian auxiliary police, which brought the surviving Jews to Lysnych. On the way there forty Jews overpowered the five‐man guard and fled in the car.364
Laurence Gonzales’s Surviving Survival: The Art and Science of Resilience:
In the midst of the madness of singing dancing after their unspeakable work, the inmates were actively plotting their own escape. There was a thriving black market at Janowska and in preparation for escape, Leon’s group had amassed gold and money equivalent to a small fortune. Much has been made of the puzzling way in which many Jews went to their deaths without protest.
Leon’s answer was that they were completely broken, and with all their family members already dead, they had nothing to go home to. But Leon had the indomitable will of a true survivor. And on the night of November 19, 1943, he and several others staged a charade. Once again, the [Axis] organization carried the seeds of its own destruction.
For months, the prisoners had been stealing some of the gold that they collected from the corpses. At night, they traded it with the guards for food, medicine, liquor. They would also take the guards things they wanted, such as a watch or a new pair of boots that had been taken from the dead. Each night they also carried firewood for the guard houses. So the guards were accustomed to seeing prisoners go in and out of the gate at will.
On this particular night, two groups of prisoners went out carrying wood and a new pair of boots that one of the guards had ordered. They attacked two guards at once, killing them outright and taking their machine guns. As soldiers poured out of the guardhouse firing their weapons, everyone in the camp made a chaotic break for the woods. The members of the orchestra, who had been playing the dance music for the evening, threw down their instruments and made a break for it.
Leon took off into pitch blackness. They had chosen a moonless night for the escape. Now stumbling through the woods, he ran into two of his comrades by chance. They made their way to a friend’s house and once again went into hiding.
Unfortunately, this did not put the camp out of operation.
Arkadiusz Morawiec’s Polish Literature and Genocide:
In mid‐1943, anticipating the liquidation of the camp, the prisoners attempted to form a resistance group. The [Axis] began the liquidation on November 19, 1943, and probably accelerated it in order to prevent a possible uprising. It was completed on November 23. Despite the murder of the Jewish prisoners, the camp continued to function, although to a limited extent: several hundred Poles, Ukrainians, Volksdeutsches, and Jews captured on the “Aryan” side were held there. Those Jews who had a suitable profession were sent to work in workshops.
The Janowska camp existed until the [Axis] withdrew from Lvov (the Soviet army re‐entered the city on July 22, 1944). The surviving prisoners were evacuated, first to Przemyśl, where they were forced to build fortifications, and then to the camp in Plaszów near Krakow and, as the front line approached, to camps in the Reich. […] The […] number of victims is estimated to be at least tens of thousands. These include Polish‐Jewish writers, such as Halina Górska, Rachmil Grün, Emanuel Szlechter, and Maurycy Szymel.
Click here for other events that happened today (November 19).
1877: Giuseppe Volpi, Fascist Italy’s Minister of Finance, polluted the environment.
1906: Franz Schädle, Obersturmbannführer, was unfortunately born.
1907: Hans Liska, Axis propagandist, started his life.
1926: Giuseppe Umberto ‘Pino’ Rauti, Fascist politician, became a burden.
1940: Three hundred fifty‐seven Axis aircraft bombed Birmingham overnight, dropping 403 tons of high explosive bombs and 810 incendiary bombs, which resulted in about 900 dead and 2,000 injured, but Greek troops drove Axis ones across the Kalamas River in northwestern Greece.
1941: Franz Halder noted in his diary that, in a meeting that Adolf Schicklgruber held with his top military leaders on this date, Schicklgruber no longer talked about ending the war in 1941; instead, Berlin made plans for Soviet targets east of Moscow for spring and summer of 1942. Meanwhile, west of Moscow, the German 4th Panzer Army attempted to penetrate the gap between the Soviet 30th and 16th Armies which were pushed back on the previous day, but defiant Soviet resistance slowed the Axis advance in the area of Istra. In Oceania, Axis raider HSK Kormoran intercepted HMAS Sydney west of Shark Bay, with HSK Kormoran firing the first shot at 1730 hours and leaving both ships heavily damaged after the 20‐minute battle. In Africa, the Axis Ariete Division halted the advance of British 22nd Armoured Brigade at Bir el Gubi, Libya, and destroyed or disabled forty British Crusader tanks, but elsewhere the Axis lost the Sidi Rezegh airfield around the same time that the tanks of the British 4th Armoured Brigade engaged Axis tanks of the 21st Panzer Division.
1942: The Axis started losing the Battle of Stalingrad as a surprise counterattack encircled Friedrich Paulus’s German 6th Army, but Axis forces under General Walter Nehring assaulted and penetrated the Vichy defense line at Majaz al Bab, Tunisia. A raid on the Axis‐controlled Vemork heavy water plant at Telemark, Norway, came to grief when the gliders carrying thirty‐four commandos crashed, and the Axis shot all of the survivors after torturous interrogations.
1944: The Waffen‐SS assaulted thirty members of the Luxembourgish resistance in the town of Vianden.