Mielec, Poland

On March 9, 1942, the Jewish community of Mielec, Poland, ceased to exist. The Nazis dismantled the entire town in a single day, executing the elderly, deporting the able-bodied for slave labor, and transporting the rest to the Lublin district, where they were later murdered in Sobibor and Belzec. The Germans had taken over a Polish aircraft factory on the outskirts of Mielec, where they manufactured Heinkel 111 bomber planes for the Nazi war machine. Following the March 9, 1942, deportation, the factory complex became part of the Mielec Nazi slave labor camp, later a concentration camp.Using rare photographs and records, Nazi documents, witness statements, survivor interviews, and war criminal trial transcripts, Rochelle G. Saidel tells the story of the flourishing Mielec Jewish community, the unusual way it was wiped out by the Nazis, the few survivors who managed to run and hide, and the almost unknown brutal Mielec slave labor camp that operated from March 1942 until July 1944. This illuminating study gives Mielec its due place in Holocaust history.

Dr. Rochelle G. Saidel is founder and executive director of the Remember the Women Institute, New York City, and a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Women and Gender, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. For this book, her sixth, she carried out research in Mielec, the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as spending a semester as a research fellow at the International Institute for Holocaust Research, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. Dr. Saidel received her PhD in political science from the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York. She currently divides her time among Jerusalem, New York City, and Sao Paulo.