1 Killing site(s)
Kazimierz S., born in 1929: "Jews hid in a forest near the village. They were shot in 1942 or 1943. When they came out of the forest, the Germans were waiting for them. I heard everything from the barn of my house; the meadow where it happened was about 1 kilometer away. The next day, when I went to graze the cows near that meadow, I saw the bodies lying on the ground. Both men and women had been killed. The people of Dębów loaded the bodies onto carts and carried them to a pit. Their remains are still there.” [Testimony N°YIU250P, interviewed in Dębów, on October 18, 2013]
"On September 11, 1943, I was in the village of Holeszow, about 2 km from where the Jews were shot. At about 8 a.m., I heard shots coming from the meadows in the village of Kaplonosy. The shooting continued for 2 hours. I was not a direct witness of this event. Around 12 noon, my father and I went in a horse-drawn cart to get hay behind the village of Debow, a few hundred meters from the place of the shooting. When we arrived, we heard from the locals that the Germans had shot 64 Jews who were hiding in the forest. We went to the place [of the shooting]. Villagers from Debow and Holeszow were digging the pit. Next to it were the bodies of those who had been shot. My father said that among the dead were 50 men and 14 women. I recognized some of the victims. One of the women was named Marta Weisberg. As far as I know, the victims were buried in the pit. The grave site remained but was not commemorated. Local villagers said that the shooting was committed by the gendarmes from Wisznice." [IPN - OKL, Ds 7/67/ copied: vol. 10. pp. 1745 – 1746; Testimony of Mr. Popielewicz, born in 1927, collected on September 21, 2005]
Dębów is a village in the administrative district of Sosnówka, located in the Lublin Voivodeship in eastern Poland. It lies approximately 72 km northeast of the regional capital, Lublin, and about 30 km from the Bug River and the border with Belarus.
According to a local witness interviewed by Yahad, there were no Jewish residents in Dębów prior to the war.
At the end of September 1939, the village of Dębów was briefly occupied by the Soviet Army, which quickly withdrew and left the area to the Germans in early October.
Although the German administration did not establish a post in Dębów itself, a gendarmerie post was set up in the nearby town of Wisznice, located 19 km to the north. Polish and Ukrainian police posts were also established there. Due to the high level of participation by the local population in the resistance movement, Wisznice became a significant center of Nazi repression.
Among the partisan units active in the Wisznice area were People’s Guard units led by Teodor Kovalev, a Russian soldier, and Chyl Grynszpan, a Jewish partisan. Grynszpan’s unit included several Jews engaged in armed resistance as well as Jewish families in hiding. In September 1943, a group of these Jews was captured and executed by the Wisznice gendarmes at the edge of the Dębów forest.
According to Polish archival records, the execution occurred on the morning of September 11, 1943, and claimed the lives of 64 individuals—14 women and 50 men. A local witness interviewed by Yahad reported that the day after the massacre, the bodies of the victims were buried in a meadow by residents of Dębów. These villagers were requisitioned by the sołtys (village head) to dig the pit and perform the burial. To this day, the site remains unmarked and without commemoration.
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