1 Killing site(s)
Henryk L., born in 1930: "My brother and I were grazing our cows in the fields when we noticed a group of men. I believe there were about 18 on one side of the road and 20 on the other. They were seated on the ground, with five or six gendarmes standing guard over them. Some of the men in the group were digging pits. We didn’t see anything more because the soldiers ordered us to leave. Moments later, the only thing I heard was the sound of automatic gunfire."[Testimony N°YIU259P, interviewed in Łyniew, on October 20, 2013]
"Questionnaire on Mass Killings and Mass Graves
1. Date and place of killing: autumn 1941, Łyniew, Wisznice commune, Lublin voivodship, forest.
2. Method of killing/shooting, hanging or other: Shooting.
3. Details of victims killed:
- Poles, Jews, foreigners: Jews
- Number of people executed: 30
- Origin of victims: captured in the forest
- Names, ages, professions and addresses: unknown
4. Do we know what the victims were accused of, or was the killing an order of reprisal or other? Racial motive: they were Jews.
5. Who carried out the execution: The gendarmerie
6. Are the names of the perpetrators known? Unknown
7. Were the bodies burned? Or destroyed in some other way? No
8. Where were the bodies buried? In the Łyniew forest
9. Description of the grave: Two pits
10. Was the grave exhumed? No.
[IPN GK 163/18, Questionnaire on Mass Executions and Mass Graves in the Lubelskie Province, Districts: Wlodawa. Based on the testimony of Jozef Wladyczuk, 42 years old, resident of Wisznice, collected on October 3, 1945].
Łyniew is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Wisznice, located within Biała Podlaska County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. It lies approximately 7 km (4 miles) southeast of Wisznice, 35 km (22 miles) south of Biała Podlaska, and 72 km (45 miles) northeast of the regional capital, Lublin.
According to a local witness, there were no Jewish residents in Łyniew before the war. However, some historical records indicate that between 1911 and 1913, a few Jews from Łyniew were affiliated with the synagogue district of the nearby town of Wisznice, a significant center of the regional Jewish community. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Jews made up more than half the population of Wisznice. They owned most of the houses, market stalls, and local steam mills, playing a vital role in the town’s economic development. By the eve of the Second World War, approximately 1,100 Jews lived in Wisznice, though it is likely that Łyniew itself had no Jewish population at that time.
The Germans occupied Łyniew and the entire Wisznice district on September 21–22, 1939, but promptly handed it over to the Red Army. The Soviet troops controlled the area until October 6, 1939, when they withdrew, leaving the Wisznice district definitively under German occupation. Soon after the Wehrmacht took control of Wisznice, the persecution of Jews began. In November 1939, a Jewish Council was established, and in June 1940, the first ghetto was created. A second ghetto followed in March 1941, which housed more than 1,000 people.
In September 1942, during the liquidation of the ghetto, most of the Jews from Wisznice were transferred to the ghetto in Międzyrzec Podlaski. On October 27, 1942, they were deported from there to the Treblinka death camp.
To police the area, a significant zone of Polish armed resistance, the Germans established a gendarmerie post and stationed a unit of the Sonderdienst, composed of local Ukrainians, as well as a detachment of the Polish (Blue) Police in Wisznice. According to several local witnesses interviewed by Yahad - In Unum, the gendarmes from Wisznice carried out particularly brutal anti-Jewish repression and anti-resistance pacification operations throughout the district.
During one such operation in Łyniew, German gendarmes from Wisznice killed about 30 Jews who had been captured in a nearby forest. Polish archival records date this killing to the autumn of 1941. A local witness interviewed by Yahad reported that in 1942/1943, he saw a group of 38 Jewish men gathered at the edge of the Łyniew forest on both sides of the road before being executed by automatic gunfire. The victims were buried at the killing site in two parallel pits.
The pits were dug by a group of Jews who were not executed during the Aktion. According to the witness, these individuals were later driven to the Wisznice ghetto after completing the burial. The bodies of the victims remain at the unmarked burial site, which has not been commemorated.
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