Białystok

At the beginning of the Second World War, the northeastern Polish city of Białystok was briefly occupied by German forces, but then handed over to the Soviets. After the outbreak of hostilities between Germany and the Soviet Union, Białystok was occupied by Germany within a few days. In early August 1941, all 50,000 Jews of that city and its surroundings were confined in a ghetto. In October, German authorities tried to move all Jews from Białystok to the town of Pruzhany, some 100 km south, turning it into a “Judenstadt” – Jewish town. However, the project failed and was abandoned.

In August 1943, the ghetto was to be dissolved, and its inhabitants to be sent to various labor camps. However, several Jews of the ghetto underground staged an uprising. The resulting heavy fighting lasted for five days, and ended with all resisting Jews getting killed. The remaining Jews were deported to various labor camps, some via Treblinka, although the orthodoxy insists that they were killed there.

Orthodox literature abounds with claims about several large-scale executions in the Białystok District between late June 1941 and the clearing of the ghetto in August 1943, with a total death toll of some 30,000 victims. There is no documental proof backing this up. The Ein­satz­grup­pen’s Event Reports only list a total of a little more than 400 victims.

Anecdotal evidence deposited during Soviet investigations and Polish postwar show trials is limited mostly to Jews who claimed to have been forced in late spring and early summer of 1944 to exhume and burn the victims of these claimed large-scale executions. This includes Szymon Amiel, Salman Edelman and Avraham Karasik. Their claims of the number of corpses they presumably exhumed and burned forms the basis for orthodox assertions on execution figures. However, a critical analysis of these witnesses’ testimonies does not instill confidence in their reliability.

Forensic efforts to locate mass graves of the expected size, or traces thereof, and to analyze any contents evidently have not taken place.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2022c, pp. 631-640.)