1 Killing site(s)
Józef W., born in 1933: "One day, while I was playing football with friends, some Germans arrived with two Jewish men. They took them behind a neighbor’s barn and shot them. One of the men tried to escape but was killed as well. On their way back to the village, after the executions, one of the Germans saw another Jewish man passing by and shot him too. The sołtys (village head) then requisitioned villagers with carts to transport and bury the bodies in the Las Judnicki forest." [Testimony N°YIU1449P, interviewed in Wesołówka, on August 11, 2023]
Wesołówka is a village in Łuków County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. It lies approximately 15 km (9 miles) southwest of Łuków and 80 km (49 miles) north of the regional capital, Lublin.
According to local witnesses interviewed by Yahad - In Unum, there were no Jewish residents in Wesołówka before the war. However, a Jewish community of approximately 160 people lived in nearby Stanin, just 2 km away. The wider Łuków county—then a feudal district (fief)—was home to a Jewish population of around 6,000 before the outbreak of World War II.
Following the outbreak of the Second World War, the German administration for the district was centralized in Łuków, located approximately 15 km from Wesołówka.
According to a local witness interviewed by Yahad - In Unum, several Jews were killed in Wesołówka during the German occupation. On one occasion, likely in 1941, the witness observed two Jewish men being led to an area near the village school by German soldiers, situated on the estate of Stanisław Pac-Pomarnacki, on the northern edge of Wesołówka near the border with Stanin. The two men were taken behind a barn and shot. That same day, a third Jewish man encountered in the village was also shot by a German soldier. The bodies of all three victims were transported and buried in a section of the forest known as Las Judnicki.
The witness also recalled another massacre, likely occurring in the fall of 1942, after the deportation of the Jews from Stanin. On this occasion, five Jews hiding in the nearby forest were discovered; four of them were killed. The day after the shooting, the witness saw their bodies lying scattered around the site of their hiding place, severely mutilated by automatic gunfire. He believed that the perpetrators were not German forces, but local partisans. The victims were thought to be Jews from Stanin.
According to the same witness, all Jews killed in Wesołówka during the occupation were buried in the same area of the Las Judnicki forest. The Yahad - In Unum research team was able to locate the approximate burial site, which remains unmarked to this day.
For more information about the killing of Jews in Łuków and Stanin, please refer to the corresponding profiles.
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