Chełm's Unraveling: The Holocaust and Interethnic Violence in Nazi-Occupied Poland

Abstract

This article explores the myriad ways that Polish and Ukrainian residents engaged in violent and cruel behavior during World War II through a case study of the Chełm region. Under Nazi occupation, this formerly peaceful community exploded into a horrific scene of nationalist and popular violence. Jews were widely assaulted by their Polish and Ukrainian countrymen; Poles and Ukrainians engaged in mutual killings and ethnic cleansing; rural villagers were subjected to countless raids from area partisans; and escaped Soviet POWs were often denounced or otherwise attacked by area residents. Treating this outbreak as a whole, I argue that anti-Jewish violence was embedded in a vicious social transformation that engendered an array of crimes against multiple groups. By interweaving the fates of different ethnicities into a single study, my paper contextualizes Polish complicity during the Holocaust and highlights the sordid interactions between the German invaders, Jewish citizens, and local Christian society.

After breaking out of the Sobibor death camp during the October 1943 uprising, 37-year-old Kalmen Wewryk fled to his nearby hometown of Chełm, where he had lived with his family until they were deported to the killing center in May 1942. On the run from Nazi hunters, the former carpenter and merchant turned to Christian friends and acquaintances for help. For reasons that confounded the Sobibor escapee, however, ordinary people now acted cruelly to strangers and neighbors alike. Under the crucible of German occupation, otherwise unassuming people were turned “into egotistical and suspicious animals.”¹ Through months of knocking on doors, Wewryk was refused shelter on countless occasions but sometimes was lucky enough to receive a handful of food when not chased away with pitchforks or threatened with denunciation to the Gestapo. This was even done by people he had liked and trusted before the war. One peasant woman, whom Wewryk remembered for her warmth and generosity, suddenly became hysterical when he came begging for food, calling him the devil and shoving him out of her house. “I couldn't understand it,” Wewryk recalled. Rejected and betrayed by the rural population, his only hope for survival was to join a group of Jewish partisans.²

Wewryk's memoir, like the accounts of so many Jewish survivors, highlights the impact of local Christians on the fates of persecuted Jews in the Polish lands.³ Through widespread denunciations, refusal of assistance, and active participation in “Jew hunts,” Polish and Ukrainian villagers ensured that the annihilation of Chełm's Jewish population was effectively total. Recent works by scholars affiliated with the Polish Center for Holocaust Research, including a 2018 two-volume study of nine counties in the General Government, have demonstrated the pervasive nature of such activities in occupied Poland.⁴ While some 7,000 Polish citizens have been honored by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jews, it has become increasingly clear how exceptional these individuals were, particularly given the hostility some faced from their own community. Altogether, the non-Jewish population is believed to have played a significant role in the death of up to 200,000 Polish Jews who died on the run between 1942 and 1945.⁵

In the existing literature, the disturbing behavior of non-Jewish Poles during the war is largely viewed as an expression of deeply rooted anti-Jewish animosity, even as it overlapped with other motives.⁶ Certainly, one cannot explain Polish behavior towards Jewish fugitives without the influence of persistent antisemitism, which facilitated anti-Jewish violence by normalizing the social and cultural exclusion of Jews from Polish (Catholic) society.⁷ However, Wewryk's surprise at specific neighbors’ conduct underscores the wider breakdown of Chełm's multiethnic society. Prior experiences with prejudice did not prepare Wewryk and other Jews for the depravity of wartime events and the extent of local participation in the genocide. In this regard, the confusion many Holocaust survivors experienced calls for explication of the social processes and conditions whereby Chełm's residents turned to violence and cruelty.

This article explores the emergence of popular violence in Poland through a microhistory of the Chełm region. Localized studies alone cannot capture the full scale of genocide, but micro-perspectives can illuminate complexities on the ground often overlooked in macrohistories, particularly during episodes of “communal genocide,” as Omer Bartov has named the close, intimate killing between former neighbors.⁸ Such cases frequently belie the classic triad in Genocide Studies of “perpetrators, victims, and bystanders” as categories too rigid to convey the public and participatory nature of intercommunal slaughter.⁹ Indeed, whereas the scholarship on genocide is replete with political histories, studies of intercommunal conflict in eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Rwanda have demonstrated the importance of going beyond state actors and ideological motivations for explaining collective violence. These works have highlighted new dynamics, such as how individual behaviors and neighborly relations evolve during times of crisis, while chronologically mapping the spread of interethnic attacks underscores their emergent—rather than inevitable—character.¹⁰

The need for a close examination of Chełm is particularly acute because of the dizzying array of violence that occurred there during World War II. Under the Third Reich, Chełm was transformed into a center for Nazi extermination and population policies, standing at the junction of organized terror against Poles and Ukrainians, demographic engineering under General Plan East, the extermination of Jews within the Final Solution, and the mass murder of Soviet POWs. It was during this onslaught that Chełm devolved into a macabre scene of nationalist and popular violence. Jews were subjected to extensive betrayals; Poles and Ukrainians engaged in mutual killings; Red Army fugitives were often denounced or otherwise captured; and rural residents experienced a wave of robberies from armed partisans and bandit-type groups alike.

Treating this outbreak as a whole, I argue that anti-Jewish violence was embedded in a vicious transformation under Nazi occupation, a multifaceted process that also engendered an array of attacks against Poles, Ukrainians, and escaped Soviet POWs. Examining only one layer of this locally propelled violence can unduly privilege cultural or ideological explanations and neglect a greater inclination among the population to use violence more generally. Due to space constraints, not every type of violence can be explored equally in the present article, but by highlighting some of the shared mechanisms and underlying factors, I aim to situate local complicity during the Holocaust within the broader collapse of social relations during WWII.¹¹ My intention is not to compare or relativize the different crimes that took place, but to investigate their parallel emergence for a more holistic understanding of such events.

Interweaving the fates of multiple groups, this article stands out from the larger scholarship on occupied Poland, which tends to study different strands of violence apart (the subjugation of Poles, starvation of Soviet POWs, genocide of Jews). There are notable exceptions to this insular trend, including two “collective autobiographies” of borderland communities upended by twentieth-century violence,¹² but the broader historiography on wartime Poland remains rather restrictive.¹³ Such monochromatic approaches contrast greatly with the comparative perspectives that have emerged within the wider scholarship of mass violence, including the spatial turn in histories of the European “Bloodlands” and the growing push by genocide scholars to analyze multiple perpetrator and victim groups.¹⁴

For Chełm, a multilayered perspective is essential to reconstruct the wider arc of ethnic relations. On the eve of WWII, nearly 50,000 Jews lived alongside many Poles (50% of the population), Ukrainians (35%), and ethnic Germans (5%).¹⁵ These diverse groups had historically been able to coexist within the region's agrarian economy, but this framework was hardly idyllic and growing increasingly precarious with Poland's fascist turn in the 1920s and 1930s. The area's Jewish and Ukrainian minorities experienced widespread discrimination and alienation under the Second Republic, including the “revindication” of Orthodox Churches and state sponsored anti-Jewish boycotts.¹⁶ Political antisemitism also increased, especially among urban Poles (middle class and intelligentsia), while traditional anti-Judaism and economic antagonism remained prevalent in the countryside.¹⁷

Xenophobia was not as salient in Chełm or Lublin Province compared to other parts of interwar Poland, where violence and antisemitic agitation were more common.¹⁸ The region's most popular political parties (leftist peasant and socialist) were generally amenable to Chełm's multiethnic makeup, while one national activist described the degree of nationalism in 1936 as “lackluster.”¹⁹ Nevertheless, outside of some personal relationships, social integration remained limited between the groups. One Holocaust survivor remembered, “As a general rule, we lived separate lives—the Poles and the Jews,” while a recent study of Polish-Ukrainian relations similarly observed that the two communities “lived in one country, not together but side by side.”²⁰

War and Nazi Terror

WWII worsened the poor state of interethnic relations under the Polish state. Chełm originally sat on the demarcation line between the Nazi and Soviet invaders, and consequently was involved in territorial handovers before the occupation zones were fixed. Wehrmacht soldiers conquered the region in mid-September 1939, but soon abandoned it to the Red Army (September 25–October 7) before the area was ceded back to the Third Reich. Throughout these exchanges, the area was thrown into constant upheaval, with lawless interludes and ample opportunities for locals to commit violence. For our purposes, the actions of Chełm's inhabitants during this initial period can help measure the extent to which prewar grudges and nationalist sentiments accounted for wartime violence.

The first significant cases of violence emerged out of the Soviet occupation, whose mechanisms of governance relied on coopting discontented residents (ethnic minorities and lower-class Poles) into ruling agencies.²¹ Contemporary Polish accounts, which tend to ascribe wrongdoing to non-Polish ethnicities, alleged that Chełm's city offices and militia patrols were mostly staffed by Jewish and Ukrainian communists, together with newly released prisoners; this group performed a wave of arrests against Polish military officers, landlords, and government officials.²² In the countryside, poor Polish and Ukrainian peasants, who had pushed for land reform during the interwar period, organized themselves into “citizen's committees” and asserted material demands from wealthier neighbors. Denunciations against rich landowners offered rural militiamen the pretext to conduct home inspections and steal valuables, while several affluent property owners were killed during this time.²³ Even after the Red Army's withdrawal in October 1939, many villagers continued to steal from wealthier residents. One Polish resident observed how dilapidated peasant huts came to possess luxurious furniture and carpets, while traditionally barefooted children now walked around in fancy leather boots.²⁴

Mistreatment, tied to the loss of political and social dominance, fostered ethnic resentment among many Poles. One resident was surprised by the Jewish and Ukrainian militia members, as they never before had such power over his life.²⁵ Jews became the focal point of Polish enmity, building on the popular interwar stereotype of “Jewish-communism” (Żydokomuna). One Polish nationalist, after decrying the “communist Jew Czwiling,” who served as Chełm's commissioner, recalled with great exaggeration that “every Jew now assumed great power and courage.”²⁶ A returning Polish soldier also angrily expressed in his diary how “every other Jew parades around with a rifle, and if not a rifle then a red armband,” but directed considerably less aggravation towards poor Polish residents who also supported Soviet rule.²⁷

In the two-day interval between the Red Army's withdrawal and the arrival of German soldiers, a number of Jews in Chełm and Siedliszcze fell victim to robberies and other attacks. A meager “citizen's guard” under Chełm's former mayor was established to maintain order, but at least some of the guardians participated in the pillaging.²⁸ According to Joel Ponczek, the “bad element” of the Polish population exploited the chaos and “ran rampant on the Jewish shops and plundered them all.”²⁹ Regina Zielinski identified the actors as “hooligans,” mostly comprised of unemployed Poles and recently released prisoners, and observed how vacant houses of Jews who had fled to the USSR were easy targets for break-ins.³⁰ While the economic nature of such raids is apparent, there was significant physical abuse, too. Kalmen Wewryk recalled how some Jews were dragged from their homes and beaten, sometimes to death.³¹ Unfortunately, further details remain scant as many contemporary and postwar accounts fail to mention such attacks, when at least several Jews were killed.³²

These initial attacks speak to the early dangers faced by Jews. The hardships of Soviet rule and stereotypes about “Jewish communism” amplified existing anti-Jewish sentiments, particularly among the Polish intelligentsia and middle class, while the disorder presented opportunities to actualize these beliefs. Nevertheless, most villages and smaller towns remained peaceable, as traditional (Christian) antisemitic attitudes proved insufficient to ignite violence. The relative containment of initial outbursts indicates the region was not yet a hotbed of anti-Jewish violence. In Skryhiczyn, one contemporary source among the Jewish underground reported that “relations between the mixed farmer population—Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews—were neighborly and harmonious,” and noted that Jews were only victimized with the onset of Nazi occupation.³³

The German arrival fundamentally altered the Jews’ status, substantially increasing their vulnerability. Popular antisemitism was strengthened by Nazi propaganda, while non-Jewish residents now had the means to facilitate and benefit from the persecution of their Jewish countrymen.³⁴ In these dire circumstances, the breadth of local support and assistance for Jews is striking, particularly given the behavior and attitudes towards Jews in later years.

One of the worst atrocities carried out in the early stages of WWII involved the December 1939 death march of Jewish men from Chełm and Hrubieszów. Following a visit from General Governor Hans Frank, German police and civilian administrators demanded military-age Jewish males report to Chełm's town square before they were forcibly marched to the Bug River and expelled into Soviet-occupied territory. Jewish men in Hrubieszów were made to join them along the way. Following a hellish trek consisting of constant beatings and shootings, perhaps several hundred Jews from the starting group of a few thousand managed to reach the border, where they were left to die by Nazi police after being refused entry by Soviet guards. Most were too exhausted to return home, and many soon died from various wounds and illnesses. In response, peasants often helped rehabilitate the expellees by taking the Jews into their homes and nursing them back to health.³⁵ One survivor later testified that in the wake of the gruesome march, “many of us were helped by Christian inhabitants.”³⁶ Another victim remembered that rural villagers, who he called “zoological antisemites,” ignored their prejudices and “hasted to our aid and helped us; they gave us money and clothing, and they assisted some to re-cross the border.”³⁷

The care provided to survivors of the December 1939 march was exceptional for its life-saving importance and large scale, but many other charitable acts can be observed during the early stages of Nazi persecution. After the imposition of a heavy tax levy on Chełm's Jewish community, the town's Polish intelligentsia donated large amounts of food and money for relief.³⁸ Less generous, but no less important, were the Polish and Ukrainian fishermen who agreed to transport Jews across the Bug River. While some boatmen took advantage of the skewed circumstances and robbed their passengers, many Jews and their families were successfully smuggled to Soviet territory without incident.³⁹ Indeed, it was on account of such amiable interactions that the earliest contemporary report by the Jewish underground in the Chełm region, while scornfully noting the role of “Jewish criminals and Polish ‘plebs’” in property theft, observed “mutual relations between the Polish and Jewish populations are good.”⁴⁰

More insights into the initial tenor of Jewish-Christian relations can be found in the accounts of non-native Jews who fled to the area during the early years of German rule. The Lublin District broadly became a destination for Jewish refugees from other parts of occupied Poland because of the increased availability of food and laxer restrictions on movement, both of which enabled significant contacts with the non-Jewish population.⁴¹ Newly arrived Jews often worked on local farms and traded with peasant villagers, finding such encounters to be more tolerable and cooperative than from where they came.

Michael Temchin, a physician who fled to Grabowiec, played cards and spent evenings together with local Christians between 1941 and 1942. For Temchin, “there was not any type of Polish-Jewish problem in the village. They lived rather well together; they knew each other since they were children.”⁴² A Jewish woman reported that the Jewish community in Hrubieszów was able to maintain a key lifeline through economic trade with the surrounding population, including dealings with peasants on the black market.⁴³ “It was far from a paradise,” wrote David Mandelbaum, who escaped to Hrubieszów from Warsaw in the summer of 1941, but living conditions represented a considerable improvement over the former Polish capital and “social coexistence with the outnumbered Polish population was very good and loyal on their part.” Only some Ukrainian “hooligans” were deplored by Mandelbaum for their part in instigating Nazi repressions against Jews.⁴⁴

The first two years of WWII are crucial to understanding the history of interethnic relations and communal violence in the Chełm region. In many ways, this period can be seen as a litmus test for the region's prewar volatility. By any objective measure, Chełm's multicultural society failed to withstand the challenges and pressures after the downfall of the Polish state. Not only did a collective identity (Polish citizenship) fail to unite the population, but violence broke out, including a wave of anti-Jewish attacks in October 1939. By and large, however, these attacks remained isolated, as existing enmities and the larger potential for violence were not actualized.

This uneasy situation took a tragic turn after the spring of 1942, when interethnic encounters were recast within a setting of pervasive violence. As part of the Third Reich's genocidal efforts to remake eastern Europe, two camps of mass destruction were established in the Chełm region: Stalag 319 and the Sobibor death camp, where some 100,000 Soviet POWs and 200,000 Jews were killed. Although these sites represented the most extreme form of Nazi violence, the entire occupied population was subjected to protracted terror. One of the worst atrocities occurred already in January 1940, when some 400 patients in Chełm's psychiatric hospital were machine gunned by local Gestapo, but the breadth and intensity of Nazi violence continued to escalate against multiple groups. Local farmers were pushed to the brink of starvation in 1942, the first year when the General Government delivered massive amounts of foodstuffs to the Reich, while 24,000 Poles and Ukrainians from Chełm and Hrubieszów counties were taken to Germany for forced labor by June 1943.⁴⁵ Furthermore, once the area's Jewish population had been murdered, the Germans launched the Zamość action in late 1942, a campaign involving the expulsion of Polish residents and the settlement of ethnic Germans and Ukrainians into the Lublin District.

Nazi policies converged on the ground to create a new social reality, where every person experienced violence in some form.⁴⁶ Zygmunt Klukowski, whose wartime diary is one of the most revealing sources of Polish attitudes in the eastern Lublin District, captured the climate of fear that permeated occupied society. In August 1942, Klukowski wrote: “Everywhere terror is rising, and it is increasingly difficult to withstand. Everyone asks themselves whether they will last until the end of the war . In a very literal sense, we are living from day to day.”⁴⁷ In such a distressing environment, and without realistic pathways to circumvent the devastating impact of Nazi cruelty, the dominant motivation in most people's behavior became their own personal well-being. According to a late 1943 report by the Polish underground, “terror still casts a shadow over the General Government, keeping people in constant fear of their own life and the lives of their loved ones, and they forget about everything else.”⁴⁸

The crisis that overtook Polish society produced a wide range of responses, matching Pitirim Sorokin's sociological concept of “polarization” during calamities.⁴⁹ Many residents acclimated to their surroundings by growing callous to the suffering of others. After more than 20,000 Warthegau Poles were deported to the Chełm region in the late summer of 1940, Polish relief councils reached out to peasants for donations to support the displaced persons. While some locals provided food or shelter, particularly estate owners who offered shelter in exchange for field labor, there was a general shortage of charity in the countryside. Polish welfare workers explained this scarcity as the result of people being scared and impoverished.⁵⁰ Such self-absorption increased with the escalation in Nazi violence and economic exploitation. In October 1942, as the Germans were beginning the liquidation of Chełm's ghetto and sending thousands of Jews to Sobibor, the local Polish aid committee reported “the attitude of Polish society to issues of social care should be considered rather negative. The population is already so dejected, fatigued, and scared that it is indifferent to everything.”⁵¹

As empathy fell, there was a decline of benevolent behavior and a greater willingness to violate traditional norms. A courageous few stood out from this development, becoming ennobled to help others, whether for pride, religion, or otherwise. Overall, however, alcoholism, corruption, and other “social pathologies” permeated occupied society.⁵² Violence also became increasingly incentivized and normalized in this context, making ethnic animus more dangerous but not altogether necessary for brutalities to occur.

Local Complicity and Betrayal during the Holocaust

The destruction of the Jewish communities in the Chełm region represented part of the second and climactic stage of the Holocaust in Poland. Between March 1942 and November 1943, nearly two million Polish Jews were murdered as part of Operation Reinhard, mostly in the death camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. The genocide of Jews inside the General Government did not end with the liquidation of the ghettos, however, but continued with the “hunt” (Judenjagd) for the 250,000 remaining survivors. The German police force was inadequate, both in size and ability, to carry out the manhunt for fugitive Jews on its own. This meant that Jewish chances of survival hinged largely on the decisions and behavior of local Poles and Ukrainians.⁵³

For their part, German police and civil administrators actively sought to “involve the broad masses of Polish society” in the hunt for Jews.⁵⁴ This was partially achieved by offering incentives for denouncing Jews, including bounties of sugar or cash; indeed, German policemen deployed to the Chełm region later recalled cases of Poles seeking rewards for delivering Jews.⁵⁵ The threat of capital punishment also spurred compliance and complicity with Nazi measures. Already in October 1941, General Governor Hans Frank introduced the death penalty for anyone caught sheltering Jews outside of their demarcated ghettos or residential areas. Similar threats would be repeated by lower-level administrators, typically around the commencement of anti-Jewish deportations. For instance, on October 22, 1942, just before the liquidation of the Hrubieszów ghetto, the county Kreishauptmann ordered: “Every resident who encounters a Jew is obliged to immediately hand them over to the nearest police station. Whoever shelters, feeds, or anyway helps a Jew will be punished with death.”⁵⁶ While such orders were not uniformly applied, the gravity of such threats was evident based on other Nazi actions, including a May 1942 pacification operation that left hundreds dead and imprisoned across the eastern Lublin District.⁵⁷

Yad Vashem has recognized some thirty-seven individuals from across the Chełm region as Righteous Among the Nations for risking their lives to save Jews during the Nazi occupation. Outside of this courageous cohort, local Poles and Ukrainians largely reacted with indifference and aversion to the Jews’ plight. The Polizeireiterabteilung-III, a mounted police battalion deployed to the eastern Lublin District and responsible for waging war against hapless Jews, observed this. In January 1943, one of its squadrons reported: “The Jewish question should be considered as solved. Jews were only occasionally able to stay in the forests and, since they are not supported by the population, have largely been depleted. Their number is constantly decreasing.”⁵⁸ The unit followed up the next month: “Since the population acts negatively towards the Jews, their physical condition is exhausted.”⁵⁹

Beyond failing to support Jews in their time of need, many residents joined in the genocidal process. Polizeireiterabteilung-III recorded in early 1943 that “individual Jews are very often seized by the population and handed over to the police.”⁶⁰ In December 1942, a group of locals armed with hatches and clubs in Hrubieszów County, at the enticement of German administrators, led Nazi police to five hideouts where sixty-five “bandits”—likely Jews—were killed.⁶¹ Public hunts were sometimes initiated by village leaders, such as in Zamołodycze where twenty-six Jews were caught by the local population and delivered to the Germans, while Polish Blue Police played a pivotal role in the capture and murder of escaped Jews throughout Poland.⁶² According to the former “Gasmeister” of Sobibor, Erich Bauer, Polish policemen even delivered several Panje wagons of apprehended Jews directly to the death camp in late summer 1943.⁶³

Popular antisemitism presents an obvious explanation for the antipathy to Jewish fugitives, and this remains the conventional explanation in the literature on the Holocaust in Poland.⁶⁴ Certainly, the prevailing anti-Jewish sentiments created a climate in which the elimination of Jews from daily life could be supported, or at least tacitly accepted, by a significant share of the population. Passengers on a train from Hrubieszów to Warsaw commented approvingly on the deportation actions, while members of a Home Army unit in the Lublin District observed in spring 1943: “The opinion is often heard that it's a blessing for us that there are no more Jews.”⁶⁵ Such attitudes were not one-dimensional, though, and local antisemites did not always agree with Nazi methods. According to an underground informant, Poles witnessed the liquidation of Chełm's ghetto in late 1942 “sharply and directly,” and “even people who had always considered themselves antisemites were shaken to their core by the terrible, organized murder of the Jews.”⁶⁶ The rescue activity of Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, who held anti-Jewish prejudices throughout the war, highlights the complexity in judging wartime behavior as derived from preexisting beliefs.⁶⁷

To better understand local responses, it is useful to consider the behavior of Christian friends and acquaintances who were often the first people that Jews turned to in their time of need. Partly owing to prewar antisemitism and communal distance, social networks were not extensive between Jews and non-Jews before the occupation. Nevertheless, some of these bonds paid important dividends. Among the thirty-seven recognized rescuers in the region, more than half had relationships with their Jewish dependents before the war. More often, however, these connections failed to offer relief. According to Joel Ponczek, within days after he escaped the liquidation of Chełm's ghetto, “I used up all my (Christian) contacts and now I did not know where to go.”⁶⁸ The reluctance of Christian friends to help Jews played an integral part in the latter's downfall, as without allies and protection, their means of survival were extremely limited.

Even worse than refusal was the sudden betrayal by trusted acquaintances. In the early stages of the war, many Jews across the Chełm region—like elsewhere in Poland—placed valuables with non-Jews for safekeeping, lest they fall into Nazi hands. By 1942 and 1943, when surviving Jews returned in desperate need of their belongings, most of the appointed guardians betrayed them. For instance, Cypora Korn's father, Mordechai Frydman, the owner of a windmill and granary in Nowy Orzechów, stored his fortune with a Christian peasant. In the autumn of 1942, when Mordechai went to retrieve some of his money, “the peasant seized my father and delivered him to Oscimów (likely Uścimów), to the Germans, who killed him.”⁶⁹

Such treachery often arose from unexpected quarters. In the woods around Leszczany, sometime in 1943, the Orthodox Ukrainian Włodymyr Brzeczko and his neighbor Władysław Wolodiuk invited Rywka Segał and two other family members to stay in Brzeczko's barn, for a fee. The Jews had been farmers in the area and knew both Ukrainians from before the war. Even though they were staying with other Jews in the forest, Rywka's family accepted the invitation because “living in the woods was hard.” Although Segał's family was keeping up with their payments, within a week, Brzeczko and Wolodiuk began luring their guests out and murdering them with axes, divvying up their possessions amongst themselves. Segał was the only one to make it off the property alive.⁷⁰

Places of refuge could transform into sites of persecution for many reasons, including extreme terror. 15-year-old Yankiel Kuperblum escaped from the Warsaw ghetto earlier in the war and came to the village of Kulik, where he and his uncle found shelter with Helena Pejszak, later recognized as a Righteous Among the Nations. Sometime in the fall of 1942, Pejszak and other villagers were gathered in the nearby town of Siedliszcze to watch the public torture and execution of a resident caught hiding an escaped POW. Peszjak returned home that evening terrified. In the following days, not only did she demand her guests leave the property, but she tried to persuade Kuperblum to enter German captivity so as not to implicate her. Kuperblum recalled his disbelief during this encounter: “The same Mrs. Paizak who fed me, who bathed me once in a basin of warm water, who once even told me that she thought of me as her own son. This same woman wished to sacrifice me now.”⁷¹

Although antisemitism undoubtedly contributed to local complicity in the murder of Jews, the break in character from many Poles and Ukrainians was a powerful signifier of a vicious transformation under German occupation. From visiting the rural areas of the General Government, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka found that while rural attitudes were initially “humane, logical, and understandable” towards Jews, she concluded after the summer of 1942 that Nazi brutality had “dulled the moral sensibilities” and paved the way for peasants to take part in the extermination themselves.⁷² Zygmunt Klukowski observed a similarly “strange brutalization of peasants in relation to the Jews,” finding that “some kind of psychosis had engulfed the people” of Biłgoraj County as they actively hunted down Jewish fugitives.⁷³ More locally, Michael Temchin, a Jewish physician hiding near Grabowiec, remembered the initial benevolence of the local population but noted: “Gradually, however, there came a change for the worse . I felt that my Gentile friends were beginning to resent me.”⁷⁴

Beyond the conundrums they faced in their search for survival, Holocaust escapees were thus caught in an emergent process where social behavior trended in the worst possible way. Whereas many Christians provided support to Chełm's Jews during the early years of WWII, evidence indicates that cases of popular aid became increasingly rare by mid-1942 while the number of attacks and denunciations rose. Existent (prewar) antisemitism facilitated the speed and scale of this shift, but as the burden of Nazi occupation rose, even people with whom Jews had positive relationships now proved willing to abuse their former neighbors. As historian Jan Grabowski observed elsewhere in Poland, “Jewish life, which had steadily lost its value from the beginning of the occupation, became virtually worthless after the liquidation of the ghettos.”⁷⁵ Rather than limited to Jews, however, this development represented part of a broader devaluation of life in occupied society, a process that engendered other types of popular violence.

Social Violence against Non-Jews

Escaped POWs in Chełm's Countryside

Before Chełm's Jews fled en masse in the spring of 1942, another group had already started running for their lives across the region. Polish historians estimate that 30,000 of the 500,000 Soviet POWs imprisoned on Polish territory escaped Nazi captivity, including several thousand from the Stalag 319 complex based in the Chełm region.⁷⁶ With little knowledge of their surroundings, the lives of runaway POWs depended significantly on the responses of the occupied population. Certainly, some prisoners benefited from local generosity, but the extent of popular support has largely been overstated in communist-era scholarship. The narrative of Polish society allying itself with Soviet soldiers was obviously beneficial to the postwar People's Republic and persists among contemporary historians seeking to highlight Polish philanthropy towards non-Poles (particularly Soviet POWs and Jews).⁷⁷ It is not hard to find compelling reasons to be critical of this idealized depiction, however, as shown by a recent study of the Polish underground's suspicion and hostility towards “Bolshevik bandits.”⁷⁸

Fugitive POWs did not experience the same degree of cultural prejudice as did Jews, but situational factors still inhibited sympathetic people from offering sustained aid. Few of the prisoners escaped the internment camps with anything more than tattered clothes, meaning there was little compensation for local hosts to assume the costs of shelter. German authorities called on village heads and residents to report any Red Army runaways to the nearest police agency, threatening whole villages with collective punishment while anyone caught abetting escaped POWs could be executed.⁷⁹ Such measures frequently discouraged good-natured residents from helping needy Soviet POWs. The Jewish survivor Harold Werner recalled an illustrative incident during his stay with an Orthodox family outside Włodawa in the winter of 1941/42:

During a big snowstorm, we heard a knock on the door. Nobody answered the knock, and the village dogs attacked the Russians outside. We heard them pleading, “Let us in, in the name of God, we are freezing to death.” No one answered. The prisoners left, and I heard Stephan tell his wife that he was sorry for them. Stephan's mother-in-law crossed herself, unhappy to have turned the Russians away. She said that, after all, they were their Christian brothers in the eyes of the church, and uttered: “May God help them.”⁸⁰

Beyond simple coercion, German agencies sometimes offered bounties for seizing Soviet fugitives. Already in October 1941, months before Operation Reinhard was unleashed against Poland's Jews, 100 złotys were tendered in exchange for delivering escaped prisoners in Lublin, a figure that later rose to 10,000 złotys on the order of the General Government's Higher SS and Police Leader, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger.⁸¹ Moreover, the Kreishauptmann of Sokołów-Węgrów County (Warsaw District) offered a pair of boots for capturing one Soviet POW, new shoes and clothes for delivering two or three, a milk cow for five, and a whole farm to reward six or more.⁸²

Through this mixture of incentives and intimidation, many Soviet POWs fell victim to the same village security apparatus that targeted Jewish fugitives.⁸³ On July 6, 1942 in Malinówka, village guards captured three fugitive POWs. The guards were poor deportees from Poznań (Warthegau), and the local gendarmerie official requested they be rewarded with a complete suit of clothes.⁸⁴ Several weeks later, two Soviet POWs were seized near Hańsk by three Polish policemen, who guarded the captives for several hours until German gendarmes arrived and shot them.⁸⁵

Even ordinary residents could prove willing helpers in this rural dragnet. A villager in Kaplonosy captured and delivered a Red Army fugitive to a Ukrainian police post during the autumn of 1941, while another peasant near Siedliszcze apprehended two Soviet POWs and handed them over to Nazi police.⁸⁶ Denunciations also presented an ever-looming threat for prospective rescuers. On March 8, 1942, three Soviet POWs arrived at the homes of three different women in Rudka, begging for food and a place to sleep. Several Polish policemen from Ruda-Opalin arrived early the next morning upon learning of the fugitives’ presence. After catching and torturing one of the POWs for information about his past whereabouts, the police arrested the three women. While one of the hosts was penalized with a 100 złoty fine, the other two were handed over to the gendarmerie along with the three POWs. All five were shot.⁸⁷ Such cases indicate why, much like hiding Jews, aiding Soviet escapees was largely a private affair.⁸⁸

The Emergence of Partisans and “Bandits”

Spurned by rural society, many Jewish and Soviet escapees took refuge in the dense forests of the Lublin District. While these two groups had the most to run from, they were joined by a growing number of residents trying to escape Nazi oppression during the second half of 1942. Thousands of Polish evacuees from Zamość and Hrubieszów counties became forest dwellers as a result of the ongoing displacements in Zamojszczyzna. In addition, the number of people derelict in their labor assignments began to rise at this time, while many hungry farmers, who had been strapped by exorbitant contingents and whose scarce supplies dwindled with every passing week, increasingly turned to thievery for sustenance.⁸⁹

This mass of outlaws provided crucial manpower for nascent partisan organizations, which had only developed a meager presence through late 1942. Units of the Home Army, People's Army, Peasant Battalions, and other unaffiliated gangs soon proliferated throughout the region, but cooperation between the forces remained limited. The perils of surviving on the edge of society favored distrust of anyone seeking to join the armed groups, reinforcing discriminatory stereotypes: women were largely excluded while ethnic minorities were often deemed untrustworthy for their perceived disloyalty to the Second Republic. Moreover, Jews were frequently treated like they were radioactive because of the increased risk of Nazi patrols. Even Fiodor Kowalow, the local commander of the Communist People's Army and the most supportive partisan leader towards Jewish escapees in the region, considered expelling his group's Jews because of the added danger they posed.⁹⁰

Partisan and criminal groups lived largely at the expense of the rural population, but under the crushing weight of Nazi expropriations, few farmers willingly donated their goods. This forced all groups, irrespective of their ethnopolitical background, to confiscate materials from neighboring communities.⁹¹ The number of robberies in the Lublin District skyrocketed from ninety-six in January 1942 to more than 2,300 per month by the spring of 1943, while the Polish underground declared in June 1943: “banditry now presents one of the heaviest and most dangerous plagues in the Polish province.”⁹² Indeed, the crime wave made up the greatest share of illegal activity reported by German forces for most of the war.⁹³

Food was the primary objective of such incursions, but attackers often helped themselves to other things. Clothing, money, and jewelry were routinely plundered, as was livestock and alcohol.⁹⁴ Many house raids also occasioned wanton acts of violence. Beatings were frequent while killings were not uncommon. Seventeen civilian residents were killed in Chełm County alone between January and May 1943.⁹⁵ There remained a steady number of lethal attacks throughout the year; for example, two shepherd boys discovered a decapitated body near the village of Sobibór in September 1943, later determined to be a Polish farmer who had been abducted days earlier from nearby Wola Uhruska.⁹⁶ Sexual assaults also spiked. The Jewish partisan leader Yechiel Grynszpan recounted how Kowalow's partisans regularly “went after women,” while a physician in Biłgoraj County examined a growing number of female patients who became pregnant or contracted sexually transmitted diseases from rape.⁹⁷

This type of behavior alienated a growing segment of the population. The Germans would punish farmers for missing foodstuffs, but not providing anything to partisans could also lead to retribution. Even if they had little to eat, some fearful peasants kept a separate stockpile of goods just for partisans.⁹⁸ Chełm's Kreishauptmann Werner Ansel reported that individuals approached gendarmerie bases “again and again” asking for weapons to defend themselves from robbery.⁹⁹ Alongside any political opposition, enmity toward partisan requisitions likely played a key role behind a number of rural denunciations. As one resident in Pieszowola stated after the war, “the village has eyes and ears, and there were those who informed the Germans” about guerilla activities.¹⁰⁰

Polish-Ukrainian Violence

As a consequence of the rise in popular and resistant violence, Polish-Ukrainian relations grew increasingly acrimonious after the spring of 1942. Until that point, the Lublin branch of the Home Army reported that “moments of good relations were not uncommon.”¹⁰¹ Many ordinary Ukrainians remained disinterested in national exigencies, despite concerted efforts by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and Ukrainian relief committee to inculcate a nationalist spirit among the region's Orthodox and Greek Catholic population.¹⁰² Indeed, the OUN had historically received little support in this region, and once a large cohort of nationalist Ukrainian émigrés returned to Galicia in the wake of Operation Barbarossa, the cultural and social organizations they had devised during their stay around Chełm between 1939 and 1941 largely became defunct due to a shortage of local supporters.¹⁰³ One nationalist activist further confided in mid-1943 that “Ukrainians in the Lublin District are not a 100% conscious element.”¹⁰⁴

Nevertheless, the emergence of armed groups was framed by a simmering political conflict between Poles and Ukrainians.¹⁰⁵ Following the dictum of dīvide et imperā, German rulers dispensed favorable treatment to the Ukrainian population while relying on Ukrainian assistance to help rule over Poland. Almost all village leaders in Hrubieszów County were Ukrainian, as were two-thirds in Chełm county. According to Polizeireiterabteilung-III, this power disparity meant “all of the onus is placed on the shoulders of the Polish population.”¹⁰⁶ Furthermore, Ukrainian relief committees were given more freedom than their Polish or Jewish counterparts, including to organize the return of Orthodox and Greek Catholic churches which had been expropriated by the Polish state. The ultimate goal of the Ukrainian committees, as pursued by their central chairman Volodymyr Kubiyovych, was the creation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state that included the eastern Lublin District.¹⁰⁷

All nascent partisan forces in the region began assassinating individual Ukrainians suspected of collaborating with German authorities. This largely consisted of village administrators and relief committee officials, who presented easier targets than any German, and whose harm brought less repression on the surrounding population. According to a list compiled by the Ukrainian relief committee, nine of their officials were killed by “Polish bands” in Hrubieszów County in 1942; no fatalities were given for Chełm County.¹⁰⁸ These numbers do not include the losses of Ukrainian police, whom the committee alleged to have been attacked with greater ferocity than their Polish counterparts. Based on German records, however, Polish police in the Lublin District suffered thirty-seven killed and twenty-eight wounded in 1942 compared to five killed and one wounded among Ukrainian auxiliaries.¹⁰⁹ In any case, the number of political murders continued to rise. By the summer of 1943, a Peasant Battalion unit (“Rysia”) was openly targeting Ukrainians it accused of being “leaders of the campaign against Poland,” “known for their bloodthirsty attitude to Poland,” and “proven to have carried out murders against Polish citizens.”¹¹⁰

While the scale of “Polish terror” was growing, the Ukrainian committee chairman in Hrubieszów observed that such attacks “still did not have a mass character” by late 1942.¹¹¹ This changed due to the massive deportation action in Zamojszczyzna, which marked a tragic turning point in Polish-Ukrainian relations. Grzegorz Motyka echoed the consensus among Polish historians when he said “the (Zamość) displacement permanently destroyed the peace in the Lublin region.”¹¹² As tens of thousands of Polish residents were forcibly removed from their homes and replaced by Ukrainians and Volksdeutsche through the early months of 1943, there was great anxiety among Poles that they were destined for the same fate as Jews.

Desperately hoping to disrupt further displacements, expelled farmers and partisan groups lashed out in brutal fashion, as those who took over Polish residences were subjected to exceptional degrees of violence. Volksdeutsche settlers were the first to be attacked, including the killing of forty-five ethnic Germans in Cieszyn in late January 1943, but Ukrainian communities were soon targeted as well.¹¹³ A Peasant Battalion unit launched a coordinated raid against the villages of Strzelce and Tuchanie, murdering two dozen residents and setting one hundred farmhouses ablaze. All told, sixty Ukrainian villagers (including eleven women) were killed in the eastern Lublin province throughout the spring of 1943, while hundreds more were left homeless.¹¹⁴

After reaching a crescendo in May 1943, anti-Ukrainian violence declined significantly until late August/early September 1943 with the arrival of Polish refugees fleeing massacres by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Volhynia. This triggered popular outbursts of retaliation and precipitated a rapid escalation of violence by both communities. The Polish Home Army and Peasant Battalions engaged in a systemic effort to terrorize the Ukrainian population, while several Ukrainian groups (auxiliary police, village militias, and UPA partisans) “applied their own retaliatory measures against Poles.”¹¹⁵ The partisan Waldemar Lotnik summarized the incessant devastation: “Each time more people were killed, more houses burnt, more women raped.”¹¹⁶ In the village of Prehoryłe, where prewar interethnic relations had been amiable, an UPA unit with several local Ukrainians murdered eleven Poles on March 7–8, 1944.¹¹⁷ The spiral of revenge eventually culminated in the razing of Sahryń and other Ukrainian villages in mid-March 1944, one of the largest crimes perpetrated by the Polish underground in WWII. All told, nearly 2,000 Ukrainians (including 769 women and 348 children) were massacred during this brutal “cleansing action.”¹¹⁸

Offering a new picture of popular and interethnic violence in occupied Poland, this article has presented a holistic account of the multi-target, multi-perpetrator attacks that broke out across the Chełm region during WWII. All told, dozens of Soviet POWs, hundreds of Jews, and thousands of Poles and Ukrainians died by local hands in the region, largely between 1942 and 1944. The spatial and temporal proximity of these different strands of violence, along with comparable behaviors to different groups, points to the importance of wartime realities as a conditional factor to their occurrence. To a large degree, the perils of Nazi terror had an isolating and corrosive effect on social cohesion, leading people to prioritize their own welfare and survival to an extreme degree, while the pervasive violence from above helped normalize increasingly cruel behavior at the local level. These adverse dynamics, which emerged over time and in response to certain situations, played a foundational role behind the rash of crimes and cruelties within occupied society, and show how they all were related to the same process: the breakdown of neighborly relations and solidarity. As many studies of interethnic violence focus on intergroup factors and group dualities (Polish-Jewish relations, Polish-Ukrainian), this article enriches our understanding of “communal genocide” by highlighting the social context of a wider panorama of violence.

Of course, social and situational factors alone do not fully explain Chełm's unraveling; nationalism and xenophobia also played essential roles. The Home Army reported in September 1943 that many Poles in the Lublin District “stand completely with the politics of the SN (right-wing National Party) and for the complete elimination from public and private life of Jewish survivors and all other national minorities, particularly Ukrainians.”¹¹⁹ While building upon the widespread antisemitism and nationalism of the interwar period, given the meager support in the region for the nationalist platform before 1939, this attitude underscores the ideological radicalization of Polish society. Such ideas sharpened ethnic boundaries and promoted one's own ethnic interests over others’, thereby helping fuel nationalist violence during the war.

Group prejudices have a long history in Poland, going back several centuries, but such ideologies are also inflected by their social characteristics and contexts.¹²⁰ As existential threats are believed to heighten an individual's attachment to communal identities, this article sees the upsurge of Polish nationalism during WWII as partly rooted in the same hazardous experiences that likewise promoted social atomization and hyper-individualism.¹²¹ Marcin Zaremba has noted that Polish society was reduced to a kind of “social porridge” during the war, “a mass of family communities with a tribal nature.”¹²² Indeed, just as the Home Army observed the rise of Polish nationalism, the Wehrmacht found 4,000 volunteers in the eastern Lublin District to harvest the vacant fields of deported Polish farmers in exchange for two kilograms of sugar.¹²³

Alongside heightened egoism and ethnocentrism, sordid conditions inaugurated harsher mentalities among the occupied population, redrawing the costs of helping and benefits of harming another human being. As the most hunted and hounded group in the region, Jewish residents proved most vulnerable to this metamorphosis, whereby former friends and helpers could transform into persecutors. Such intimate betrayals, which ranged from robbery to denunciation and even murder, were not limited to the Chełm region but took place throughout Poland.¹²⁴ In his foundational essay on wartime Polish-Jewish relations, Emanuel Ringelblum wrote about the despoliation of Poland's Jews by former confidants: “The war had demoralized people who had been honest and decent all their lives; now they appropriated the Jews’ possessions unscrupulously.”¹²⁵

Growing antisemitism worsened the situation of Jews, but it was not the only cause of their betrayal. In the field of Genocide Studies, a broad consensus exists that one does not need to hate in order to harm someone, as ordinary people are capable of performing extreme violence in pressurized situations.¹²⁶ Indeed, recent histories of interethnic violence in Volhynia and the Krakow District have highlighted the varied motivations of Polish and Ukrainian peasants, determining that ethno-nationalism was overshadowed by more immediate responses to fear, opportunism, and coercion.¹²⁷ Other studies of the Balkans and Ukraine have shown how violence creates new social dynamics, representing what one scholar calls a “generative force” that can fuel additional killing.¹²⁸ Overall, the aforementioned works highlight the fluid and contingent nature of violence, whereby harmful acts seem dependent upon contextual factors more than individual dispositions. As the sociologist Randall Collins has argued, “It is the features of situations that determine what kinds of violence will or will not happen, and when and how.”¹²⁹

To be clear, violence is not inevitable, and recognizing the social causes of violence does not detract from the agency and moral responsibility of local actors. While the fate of Jews in occupied Poland was largely determined by forces outside their control, this was not the case for non-Jews, who had more latitude in their actions and choices. As Jan Gross observed, those who engaged in violence against Jews—and by extension, others—did so on their own free will.¹³⁰ Certainly, most of the region's population (200,000+) did not commit violence, while the noble few who risked their lives to rescue another person show that alternative pathways existed. But humans are social beings, and their actions are invariably shaped and conditioned by their surroundings, including those who engage in criminal behavior during times of genocide.¹³¹ For Chełm, while the brutalizing effects of Nazi occupation were not absolute, nor did they operate in a strictly linear fashion, they helped lower the threshold for violence, whether individuals were fervent nationalists or not.

Although some particularities set the Chełm region apart from other areas of Poland, this article ultimately reaffirms the importance of microhistory to the study of interethnic violence. Such a granular approach can overcome national stereotypes and categorizations by looking at individual actors and revealing analogous behaviors throughout occupied society.¹³² This is especially significant for Polish historiography and collective memory of the war, which has traditionally stressed the righteousness and unity of Polish society. Meanwhile, we still lack a comprehensive study of the black market in the General Government, when poor farmers around Chełm were able to receive “fantasy prices” from hungry city dwellers, while studies of wartime banditry remain taboo in contemporary Poland.¹³³

Considering the wide array of effects and human responses to Nazi occupation can provide a more nuanced and comprehensive picture of wartime realities while also working towards a more global understanding of communal violence. In the present article, this technique reveals a unified history of WWII, where the fates of Jews were interrelated to Nazi terror against Poles and Ukrainians. This whirlwind of violence certainly did not target or impact groups equally, but German policies created a shared reality on the ground where these policies were implemented, powerfully influencing the attitudes and behaviors of those caught within a space of mass atrocity.