Zdzięcioł Ghetto

Zdzięcioł Ghetto
The Synagogue of Zdzięcioł (Zhetel) at the onset of World War II
Zdzięcioł Zdzięcioł location during the Holocaust in Poland
Location	Zdzięcioł, German-occupied Poland
Incident type	Imprisonment, forced labor, starvation, mass killings
Organizations	Schutzstaffel (SS), Einsatzgruppe C, Belarusian Auxiliary Police, Wehrmacht
Executions	Kurpiasz (Kurpyash) Forest
Victims	Over 4,500 ghettoized Polish Jews.

The Zdzięcioł Ghetto, Dzyatlava Ghetto or Zhetel Ghetto (in Yiddish) was a Jewish ghetto established by Nazi Germany in the town of Zdzięcioł in the occupied eastern part of the Republic of Poland (now Dziatłava, Belarus) during Holocaust in World War II. The Soviet forces invaded eastern Poland on 17 September 1939 and stationed in the Voivodeship area until the outbreak of their own war with Germany in June 1941. After the Soviet rapid retreat, and several months of Nazi ad-hoc persecution, on 22 February 1942 the new German authorities officially created a ghetto for all local Jews.

The first Jews settled in Zdzięcioł in 1580. The town was the birthplace of preachers Jacob of Dubno and Yisrael Meir Kagan. In 1897, three-quarters of the city's total population of 3,979 were Jewish. In 1926, in the reborn Polish Republic, there were 3,450 Jews out of 4,600 people in Zdzięcioł (also 75 percent). During the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland Zdzięcioł was taken over by the Red Army and renamed Dzyatlava. In 1939–1941 many Jewish refugees arrived in the town from western and central Poland which was attacked by Germany in the beginning of World War II.

Soviet tanks rolled into Zdzięcioł in the evening of 18 September 1939. Police station was already abandoned by the Poles, with only papers scattered on the floor. Next morning, Mayor Henryk Poszwiński was arrested by the NKVD along with school principals, sołectwo council, gmina clerks and one priest, and taken to prison in Nowogródek never to be heard from again. In June 1941 Nazi Germany attacked its own former ally the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. The Jewish population of Zdzięcioł (Dziatłava) had increased to more than 4,500 due to influx of refugees.