The area including Parczew and Włodawa counties near Lublin in the General Government became one of the primary battlefields of the Jewish partisan movement. An area of forests and lakes with few passable roads, the Parczew forests were an ideal location for partisan activity. Notable partisan leaders included Ephraim (Frank) Bleichman, Harold Werner, and Shmuel (Mieczysław) Gruber. Werner and Gruber were second-in-command to Yechiel Grynszpan, who led Jewish forces in the Parczew forest, and Bleichman was one of Grynszpan's two platoon commanders.
The same forest constituted the main base of the non-Jewish Polish partisan movement as well. Such high concentration of resistance including Gwardia Ludowa (GL), Bataliony Chłopskie (BCh), and Armia Krajowa (AK) was possible only due to strong material support from the surrounding counties.[3]
History
The group fought along with the People's Guard (Polish: Gwardia Ludowa) in a number of intense engagements against German forces, making use of machine guns, explosives for mining railways, and other supplies air-dropped by Soviet forces, with food stuffs requisitioned from local farmers. They participated in the takeover of the city of Parczew on April 16, 1944.[1]
After Operation Barbarossa, the German military and Orpo aided by the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police battalions,[4] began mass deportations of Polish inhabitants of Zamojszczyzna south of Chełm in preparation for the Generalplan Ost resettlement ordered by Reichsführer-SSHeinrich Himmler.[5] Some Polish villages were simply razed and their inhabitants massacred.[6][7] During Heim ins Reich Ukraineraktion(pl),[8] pro-Nazi Ukrainians and German-Ukrainian Volksdeutsche were being resettled there along with ethnic Germans from the east.[8] They were given new latifundia built by Jewish prisoners of the Lublin Reservation who were sent to nearby Sobibór extermination camp afterwards.[9] The Polish underground retaliated by launching the Zamość uprising, considered to be among the largest actions of the Polish resistance during World War II.[10][11] Some Ukrainian sources refer to this operation as a massacre of Ukrainian villagers near Chelm and in the Podlasie area, and attribute thousands of those killed to the Polish underground.[12][13] Such claims are rejected by the Institute of National Remembrance,[14] and debunked by Ukrainian authors of the Historical Dictionary of Ukraine who point out that recent studies confirm a much lower figure.[15] According to Jewish sources, the Jewish partisans themselves used to execute Ukrainian villagers "who had gone to the woods to round up the Jews who had escaped" from the ghettos.[16] The killings in villages near the Parczew forest were motivated by revenge for the "anti-Jewish activities" of the Ukrainian peasants.[16][better source needed][17]
^ abHolocaust Encyclopedia. "Partisan Groups in the Parczew Forests". U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved 2007-08-15. Text from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum webpage has been released under the GFDL license (OTRS ticket no. 2007071910012533 confirmed). The Museum can offer no guarantee that the information is correct in each circumstance.
^Subtelny, Orest (10 November 2009). Ukraine: A History (4th ed.). University of Toronto Press. ISBN978-1-4426-9728-7. Retrieved 22 August 2016. Ukrainians claim that massacres of their people began earlier, in 1942, when Poles wiped out thousands of Ukrainian villagers in the predominantly Polish areas of Khom
^Grzegorz Motyka. "The Genocide on Poles Conducted by the OUN-B and UPA". Volhynia Massacre. Institute of National Remembrance. ...the "masses of Ukrainian refugees" from the Chełm region who had fled across the Bug River eastward as early as 1942/1943... inflamed the anti-Polish sentiments among Ukrainian peasants by telling them about the atrocities Poles had purportedly committed against Ukrainians in the Chełm region. All this is in line with the pro-Bandera propaganda put forward during the last stages of World War II and successfully promoted after the war by émigré Ukrainian nationalist historians associated with OUN-B.
^ abWerner, Harold (1992). Fighting Back: A Memoir of Jewish Resistance in World War II. New York: Columbia University Press. ASIN0231078838. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
^Chodakiewicz, Marek Jan (2012). Intermarium: The Land Between the Black and Baltic Seas. Transaction Publishers. p. 159. ISBN978-1-4128-4774-2 – via Google Books. However, the former villages, according to Jewish sources, were attacked by Jewish partisans in revenge for the villagers' anti-Jewish activities.