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1 Killing site(s)
Aleksandra S., born in 1921: "Before the war, my parents were farmers who worked 10 hectares of land the village of Parszykow. Only Polish people lived in our village, while the Jewish population lived in nearby Stawiski. I went to school for four years in Stawiski and later became a seamstress, learning my profession from a Jewish woman named Sara Brzostawiecka. The Jewish residents of Stawiski worked as merchants and craftsmen, and they occasionally came to our home to sell goods. They were good people. They suffered under the Germans, but the Poles were the worst. When the German occupation began, the Jewish residents tried to hide everywhere—in the forest, in trenches, and in makeshift dugouts. A man named Zejer helped them. A pregnant Jewish woman named Lajka came to my house asking to give birth there, but I sent her to a neighbor’s house for the delivery. I was afraid of getting caught by the Germans and killed for helping her. The end of the Jews of Stawiski came with mass shooting that took place at night in the Płaszczatka forest in the pre-dug trenches. We could hear the screams and the gunfire." (Witness N°YIU617P, interviewed in Stawiski, on June 28, 2016)
Commune/village of Stawiski, Łomża powiat, Białystok voivodeship;
Questionnaire on mass executions and mass graves.
1. Date and place of the execution: 15.08.1941, the Stawiski forest;
2. Type of execution / shooting, hanging, or other types: shooting;
3. Data concerning the executed victims: Poles, Jews, foreigners: Jews; Number of people executed: approximately 600 people; Where the victims came from: local Jews; Name, age, profession, and address: people of all ages and professions whose names are unknown;
4. Is it known what the victims were accused of, or was the execution an order of retaliation or other: motives unknown;
5. Who carried out the execution? The gendarmerie, the Gestapo, the SS, the police, the Wehrmacht? The Gestapo.
6. Are the names of the perpetrators of the crimes known? Provide the names: unknown;
7. Were the bodies burned? Or destroyed in another manner? In what location? The bodies were buried in a mass grave in the forest near the village of Stawiski.
8. Where were the corpses buried? Exact location: 3 km down the Stawiski-Łomża road; right side of the road;
9. Description of the grave/graves / dimensions, probable number of victims per grave: 600 people in 1 mass grave;
10. Was an exhumation of the bodies carried out? Was an official report (protocol) made at the site of the grave? No.
11. Are there reasons to request a near-future exhumation? No.
[source: Court inquiries about executions and mass graves in districts, provinces, camps, and ghettos (Ankieta Sadów Grodzkich) RG-15.019M Reel#1 (p. 207-206 in the PDF); Testimony of Gromadzki Aleksander, 48 years old, living in the village of Kuczyły (Stawiski gmina), profession unknown, dated 25.09.1945. He bases his testimony on his own observations as well as those of the inhabitants of the commune.]
Stawiski is a town in northeastern Poland, situated within Kolno County, in Podlaskie Voivodeship, approximately 16 km (10 mi) east of Kolno and 74 km (46 mi) west of the regional capital Białystok.
The development of Jewish settlement in Stawiski began at the end of the 17th century, facilitated by the town’s advantageous location on the trade route connecting Poland with East Prussia. Initially, the local community fell under the jurisdiction of the Tykocin kahal (community), under whom the first synagogue was erected in 1739. Stawiski gained full independence and established its own community in 1808, numbering over 1,200 inhabitants at the time. Another milestone on the town’s religious map occurred in 1871, following the January Uprising, when the construction of a new synagogue was completed. By the late 19th century, the Jewish population had grown to approximately 2,500 people, with the textile industry and sheepskin coat manufacturing serving as the backbones of the local economy. Józef S., born in 1935, interviewed by Yahad - In Unum in 2016, recalls that on the eve of the war, he lived near the town center. He remembered that half of the people living on a certain street were farmers, including his parents, while the other half were Jewish. He recalled several Jewish names, specifically Abram, Nosek, Austerka, Caika, and Mufel, who was a carpenter. He also noted that the Jewish residents were merchants who sold their goods at the market and would rent wagons from the Polish inhabitants.
On the eve of the Second World War, the town’s population of 3,150 included 1,700 to 2,000 Jews.
During a brief occupation of Stawiski in September 1939, German forces looted Jewish businesses, committed sexual violence, killed several Jews, and burned part of the town, including a small synagogue, likely a Beit Midrash. Before transferring the town to Soviet control, the Germans deported able-bodied Jewish and Christian men to East Prussia for forced labor. Upon reoccupying Stawiski on June 27, 1941, they established a new administration led by a Feldgendarmerie unit assisted by local Polish auxiliary police. The return of the Germans to Stawiski was marked by isolated killings of Jewish residents. According to a local resident interviewed by Yahad, Józef S., born in 1935, a Jewish woman named Frauma and a Jewish man named Hasan were among the first victims shot by the Germans during that period.
The destruction of the Stawiski Jewish population was carried out in the summer of 1941, with mass shootings documented as beginning in July (or from August 17, according to other sources). These massacres were likely carried out by an SS unit from the Płock substation of the Zichenau Gestapo. Approximately 700 of the most vulnerable residents, primarily infants, the elderly, and individuals with disabilities, were shot in the Płaszczatka Forest near Stawiski. The remaining members of the community, consisting of approximately 900 able-bodied individuals, were murdered in anti-tank ditches near the village of Mściwuje, which also served as a shared killing site for the Jewish residents of of Mały Płock, Kolno, and Łomża.
To maintain essential services, 60 individuals were spared during the massacres to form a remnant ghetto, which was likely established in August 1941. Initially situated near the synagogue before being relocated to the northern edge of town, the ghetto spanned roughly 4,000 square meters along sections of Furmańska and Krzywe Koło Streets. Its population eventually grew to around 105 residents as surviving Jews from Grabowo and other neighboring villages were interned there. Ghetto residents were subjected to forced labor, primarily cutting wood or clearing rubble for the Stawiski Gendarmerie. While some craftsmen worked for Poles in outlying villages, including a number of Stawiski Jews who had managed to escape the mass shootings and go into hiding, they faced constant threats from local perpetrators, such as an individual named Wieczorek, who stoned three Jewish laborers to death in Skroda Mała.
On November 2, 1942, the Stawiski Ghetto was liquidated. Its residents were driven to the Bogusze transit camp near East Prussia. Serving as a regional collection point for mass deportations, Bogusze held between 5,000 and 9,000 Jews expelled from surrounding localities. From there, between 2,500 and 5,000 prisoners were deported to the Treblinka killing center on December 15, 1942, followed by the final 2,000 inmates deported to Auschwitz on January 3, 1943.
Out of the thousands deported to the killing centers, Rivka Jaffa is believed to be the sole survivor. While roughly 50 Stawiski Jews managed to evade the 1942 deportation, subsequent German searches and local denunciations proved fatal for almost all of them. Fugitives were shot in the streets, executed alongside their Polish rescuer Antoni Rydzewski after their hideout was betrayed, or burned alive when Gendarmes torched an abandoned school where they were sheltering. Even as late as 1944, at least 11 more hidden Jews were murdered by local Poles in the Mały Płock district. Ultimately, no more than seven of those who went into hiding survived the war, alongside Herzl Cheslok, a former Białystok ghetto inmate who is also counted among the town’s few survivors.
For more information about the killing of Stawiski Jews in Mściwuje please follow the corresponding profile.
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