Łuck Ghetto

Łuck Ghetto
Great Synagogue in Łuck before its virtual destruction in World War II
Łuck location during the Holocaust in Poland
Location	Łuck, German-occupied Poland
Incident type	Imprisonment, forced labor, starvation, mass killings
Organizations	Schutzstaffel (SS), Einsatzgruppe C, Ukrainian Auxiliary Police, Wehrmacht
Executions	Górka Połonka (see map)
Victims	25,600 ghettoized Jews,

The Łuck Ghetto (Polish: getto w Łucku, German: Ghetto Luzk) was a Jewish World War II ghetto established in 1941 by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in the prewar Polish city of Łuck (now Lutsk, Ukraine) occupied by Germany after Operation Barbarossa, in the south-eastern region of Kresy. Łuck was the capital of the Wołyń Voivodeship (1921–39) in the Second Polish Republic before the joint Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland of 1939. The invading Soviets annexed the city to the Ukrainian SSR in 1939 along with the entire region, an renamed it as Луцьк (Lutsk).

Łuck was in the eastern part of prewar Poland throughout the interwar period. According to Polish census of 1931, Jews constituted 48.5% of the Łuck's diverse multicultural population of 35,550 people. Łuck had the largest Jewish community in the province. The secret Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact meant that it was occupied by the Red Army during the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. The region was Sovietized in an atmosphere of terror. Political, communal and cultural institutions were shut down, and Jewish community leaders were arrested by the NKVD. In June 1940 the Soviet secret police uncovered the Zionist "Godronia" organization and imprisoned its leaders. Polish-Jewish families who fled to Łuck from western Poland ahead of the Nazis were rounded up and deported to the Soviet interior, along with train-loads of dispossessed Christian Poles. Some 10,000 people were sent in cattle trains to Siberia in four waves of deportations from the Łuck county beginning in February, April and June 1940.