Partisans in the Brody Ghetto

Liquidation of the ghetto of Brody, Poland (now Ukraine) was completed on this date in 1943. Some 3,000 Jews of a pre-war population of 9,000 (nearly 70 percent of the town’s total population) were deported to their deaths in Madjanek. In the preceding months, a resistance group of young people led by Samuel Weiler had made contact with the Polish People’s Army, “from which they obtained several guns,” according to the Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team. “The Jews wanted to organize resistance in the event of the liquidation of the ghetto, [but] some of the members of the group decided to escape to the forest prior to the liquidation. . . . In the Pianica forest a so-called ‘family camp’ had been established, where 80-200 Jews from Brody sought refuge.” During the ghetto’s liquidation, members of this Jewish underground shot dead several Ukrainian policemen. Weiler survived the war in a partisan unit. From the entire pre-war Jewish population in Brody, only 88 people lived to see liberation.

Brody “was one of the important Jewish communities in Galicia . . . on the one hand it was a renowned khasidic center, yet at the same time at the beginning of the 19^th century Brody also became one of the first locations of the Haskala (Jewish Enlightenment) in the province. . . . From September 1939 until 1 July 1941 the town was under Soviet occupation. . . On 1 July 1941, the Germans occupied the town and lost no time in issuing anti-Jewish decrees. On 15 July 1941, a group of 250 intellectuals were summoned to the local Gestapo, where they were subjected to two days of torture and then murdered in ditches adjoining the Jewish cemetery.” --Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team