Zdrody Nowe | Podlaskie Voivodeship

Zdrody Nowe is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Poświętne, within Białystok County, Podlaskie Voivodeship, in north-eastern Poland. According to the testimony of a witness interviewed by the Yahad-In Unum team, no Jewish families resided in the village itself. However, a thriving Jewish community existed in the nearby town of Sokoły, located approximately 8 km northwest of Zdrody Nowe.

The first Jews likely appeared in Sokoły in the 16th century. Data from the years 1816–1817 confirm the existence of an independent community. At that time, Jews constituted approximately 7% of the inhabitants and possessed a wooden synagogue, a bathhouse, and a cemetery. In the following years, the Jewish community grew dynamically, eventually becoming the dominant population group in the town and a key center of craft and trade for the entire surrounding microregion, including the residents of Zdrody Nowe. The population expanded rapidly over the next decades, peaking in 1906 when 3,474 Jewish residents made up nearly 90% of the town's total population. However, economic hardships and migration, particularly to Palestine, caused these numbers to decline prior to World War I. During the interwar period, the community faced rising hardships as the nationalist National Democracy (Endecja) movement fueled anti-Semitic sentiment, leading to organized boycotts of Jewish businesses and outbreaks of violent pogroms.

Following the outbreak of World War II, Soviet troops occupied Sokoły and the surrounding areas, including Zdrody Nowe, in September 1939, before the region fell under German occupation in June 1941. By August 1941, the Germans established a ghetto in Sokoły, which operated until its liquidation on November 1, 1942. The inhabitants were deported to Białystok and subsequently sent to the gas chambers of the Treblinka killing center. During the liquidation of the ghetto, German forces killed between 14 and 20 mentally ill Jewish residents at the local Jewish cemetery.

Although the village of Zdrody Nowe did not have its own Jewish community before the war, during the German occupation it became the final resting place for approximately 70 Jewish individuals from Sokoły, Białystok, and the surrounding areas. The village lies directly on the primary Warsaw to Białystok rail corridor, historically known as the Warsaw to Saint Petersburg Railway. In November 1942, during the liquidation of regional ghettos, transport trains carrying deportees passed through Zdrody Nowe toward the Małkinia railway junction and the Treblinka killing center. Numerous deportees attempted to save themselves by leaping from the moving cars. German soldiers guarding the transports immediately shot the escapees along the tracks, and the occupying forces subsequently compelled local villagers to bury the bodies in pits dug directly beside the railroad. During field research conducted in 2016, Roman N., born in 1932, helped the Yahad-In Unum team identify three such pits, containing approximately 30, 20 to 30, and 4 victims respectively. At present, none of these sites are commemorated.

Apart from the railway transport casualties, many Jewish individuals tried to flee the surrounding towns to avoid ghettoization and deportation by seeking refuge in nearby rural areas and forests. This was the case for a group of 17 people, including men, women, and children, who were likely fugitives from the Sokoły Ghetto. Roman recalled how they hid in an underground bunker in the forest of Zdrody Nowe, and how he would secretly bring them food prepared by his parents. The dugout was roughly two meters deep and highly camouflaged; the occupants used juniper branches to conceal the entrance whenever someone entered or left. This refuge lasted for at least a month until a local woman informed the German authorities of the bunker's location. When German forces raided the site, some of the hidden individuals attempted to escape into the forest, while others ran into the open fields. The Germans opened fire with submachine guns. Roman, who witnessed the shooting, saw a Jewish woman with a child fall before a German soldier killed the infant. While the exact number of survivors remains unknown due to the chaos of the gunfire, five or six of the victims killed during the operation were subsequently buried in a pit at the edge of the forest which remains uncommemorated to this day.

Directly after the war, a small handful of Holocaust survivors returned to Sokoły to rebuild their lives. In February 1945, seven of them, including Szamaj Litwak, Szyjke Litwak, Tolka Żytawer, Dawid Żółty, Basia Wajnsztajn, Dawid Kaszczewski, and Szajna Olszak, were murdered by a local armed underground unit. The youngest victim was just four years old. Following this attack, the remaining Jewish survivors abandoned their home shtetl forever.