Ebook: The First to be Destroyed: The Jewish Community of Kleczew and the Beginning of the Final Solution

Kleczew is a small locality in Eastern Greater Poland, in Greater Poland Province (Wielkopolska), Konin County. At present, it is known as the headquarters of Konin Lignite Mine S.A., the biggest indus¬trial enterprise in the province. Kleczew’s industrial history, however, is quite recent. For centuries, the town was a local administrative, trade, and service center for the surrounding agricultural region. Until World War II, it remained multi-religious and multi-ethnic. The Jewish community was one of the groups that considerably influenced Kleczew’s develop¬ment. The present current study elaborates on their role.

The literature on the Jews of Kleczew is relatively scanty, especially in regard to the old Polish period and the partitions era. The informa¬tion that can be found about its earliest history is provided by Zenon Guldon and Jacek Wijaczka. Information on the later period, often inexact, comes mainly from publications of an encyclopedic nature. Tomasz Kawski and Monika Opioła provide works based on twentieth-century sources.

Literature on Jewish communities elsewhere in Eastern Greater Poland is also relatively scarce in comparison with that on other regions. Separate monographs, in addition to community records and memorial books, were published about several Jewish communities such as those in Kalisz and Błaszki. Some localities, such as Izbica Kujawska, are described in several worthy but exiguous works. The authors of these works, much like those who wrote about Kleczew, concentrate mainly on the twentieth century. Dzieje Kleczewa proved to be a valuable source of information about Kleczew itself.

The information gaps were filled in by archival research. For the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, we examined: the Kleczew town books; the Konin county books; the Kalisz county books; and the records of the Royal Treasury, found in the Central Archive of Historical Records and the State Archive of Poznań. (An example of a draft register page from cities and towns in Greater Poland in 1579 is presented as Document 1 in Annex 1.) Information about the nineteenth and twentieth centu¬ries was harvested mainly from the Kleczew town books for 1807–1950, which are kept in the Konin Division of the State Archive in Poznań. The following archival sources were also consulted, although with fewer results: the Central Denomination Authorities of the Kingdom of Poland (Main Archive of Old Records in Warsaw); Records of the Emperor’s Civil Administration in Konin 1915–1918; and Registry Records of the Syna¬gogue District in Kleczew 1808–1905. For the interwar period (1918–1939), the most significant were documents produced by the county and town or state administration authorities and local administration authorities (Kleczew town records 1807–1950, County Local Adminis-tration Office in Słupca 1918–1933, County Local Administration Office in Konin 1918–1939, County Police Station in Słupca 1918-1932), found in the Konin Archive. The province administration records were also of some help. Chief among them were the documentations from the Provin¬cial Office in Łódź 1918-1939 and the Provincial Office in Poznań 1919-1939, deposited with the Łódź and Poznań branches of the State Archives. As for the World War II era, the main sources of information were found in the archive of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, especially the archival sources: the American [Jewish] Joint Distribution Committee; the so-called Ringelblum Archive and Reports; and the Yad Vashem Archives. The Main Archive of Old Records in Warsaw (AGAD) was a valuable source as well. For the post-1945 period, the Central Committee of Polish Jews submitted some interesting information.

The Martyrs’ Museum in Żabikowo, the National Digital Archive in Warsaw, the Federal Archives in Germany, and the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem provided valuable photographs. The last-mentioned was a partic¬ularly useful source in many aspects of the research, including as it does written testimonies of survivors and the video collection of the Spielberg Foundation.

The structure of this study is chronological and topical. The first section acquaints the reader with the development of the Jewish community in Kleczew from the old Polish period (fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries), through the partition and foreign occupation period in Poland (late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries) and the interwar period (1918–1939). The second describes the situation of Jews in occupied Kleczew and the Reichsgau Wartheland, often referred to as the Warthegau, during the first period of the occupation. Part three describes the beginning of organized mass extermination. It depicts a process that might be considered the “pilot program” for the orga¬nized mass extermination of Jews which took place in several sites in the Reichsgau Wartheland, including in the surroundings of Kleczew. It follows this depiction with a description of the establishment and opera¬tion of the first extermination camp in Chełmno on the Ner. This section of the book illustrates the tragic fate of Jewish Kleczew specifically, as well as the Jewish communities of other localities of the Warthegau in general, during World War II. Part four concludes the study, focusing on the postwar period. It includes, among other things, rare informa¬tion about the few Jews who showed up in Kleczew and its vicinity after World War II and the traces of the material culture that the original Jewish inhabitants left behind.

All of the chapters of this book set the data within a wider context than that of Kleczew itself, the context of Greater Poland in the pre-partition period and Eastern Greater Poland after 1815. The shaping of the latter region was influenced by the partitioning of Greater Poland between Prussia (Germany) and Russia in 1815, with the eastern part of the region falling under the sway of the Russian Empire. The results of this division remain visible.

Although the Holocaust period was very short in world history, its tragic consequences brought about the annihilation of the Jewish commu¬nity of Kleczew and most of its counterparts in the Poznań area, Poland at large, and all of central Eastern Europe. Therefore, the chapter dealing with the Holocaust is the largest in this book, copious enough to present many personal stories and an inside view of what happened to the Jews of Kleczew and its vicinity.

Although this book is the outcome of extensive historical research, it also gives special attention to the commemoration of the Jewish community of Kleczew. It includes copious data and extensive tables in the annexes in which names, occupations, and other details illustrate the everyday lives of the Jews of Kleczew and honor their memory. The names are spelled as they appear in each source. To be true to the sources, we did not try to correct or standardize spellings even when we knew that different sources were making varied references to the same person.

The destruction of Jewish Kleczew and other communities in the area (Golina, Słupca, Wilczyn, etc.) marked the beginning of the systematic mass murder of Jews on Polish soil, only a few months after it commenced in Soviet-annexed territory at the hands of special death squads (Einsatzgruppen). The executions of Jews deported from Kleczew to a collective village ghetto in Zagórów in the Kazimierz Biskupi forests in autumn 1941 also marked the beginning of a pilot mass-murder oper¬ation performed by Kommando Lange, the unit that had established and activated the death center in Chełmno only a few weeks later. Chełmno, as we know, served as an experimental center and a place where some death-camp commanders came to learn how to better and faster kill thousands of Jews every day. Thus, in a very early stage after the German invasion, the small and distant Jewish community of Kleczew found itself in the eye of the storm of hatred and destruction that would annihilate most of European Jewry. The tragic story of this community, as well as other communities in the area, may be considered the first milestone in what would evolve into the mass murder of Jews in the occupied Polish lands by Nazi Germany: a central part of the Final Solution.