Occupied Towns in Poland: Housing, Property and the Urban Space during the Shoah

Abstract

As elsewhere in Poland, the German occupation deeply disrupted the relations and social dynamics between the non-Jewish population and the Jews in Tarnów from the very first day. Investigating housing, property and the urban space in a society under occupation, in a Kräftefeld dominated by the German occupiers, offers new insights into this relationship. It traces the notions of an ethnically encoded urban space back into the interwar period. It shows, how ethnic Poles came to understand the urban landscape as a battlefield already before 1939, and links this discourse to their subsequent stance towards the German occupation. Since almost half of Tarnów's inhabitants was of Jewish origin, the rapid expropriation of Jewish businesses and real estate and the subsequent murder of their owners in 1942 offered opportunities to non-Jewish Poles to become trustees. While the German occupiers where the primary beneficiaries, local inhabitants took part in the pillage. Some resisted. After the liquidation of the ghetto, few traces of the city's Jewish history and heritage remained.