Nowy Sacz, Poland: Forced labor municipal workshops - 1942

Introduction

This database is an index of 1,345 Jews forced to report for work in the Städtische Werkstätten (Municipal Workshops) in Nowy Sacz in 1942.

German forces occupied Nowy Sacz in September 1939. The Judenrat was set up in the spring of 1940, and the first mass executions took place around the same time. The ghetto was closed off in June 1941 and at one time held some 18,000 Jews from the town and surrounding region. In late August 1942, the ghetto was liquidated and some 15,000 Jews deported to the Belzec extermination camp.

There were various forced labor camps in the region. One of these, on Lwowska and Kochanowskiego streets, was located inside the ghetto. This was the Städtische Werkstätten (Municipal Workshops), where Jewish men and women were obliged to come during working hours and where they were assigned to various sections, according to craft or professional occupation. These occupations included, among others, tailors, leather workers and furriers, who made fur coats for German soldiers on the Eastern Front during World War II.

Source

The database is an index of a file with loose papers relating to the Municipal Workshops, compiled by the town authorities. The book is held in the Nowy Sacz state archive in Fond 15, which contains municipal records from 1919 to 1945.

The records are taken from Fond 15, Sygnatura (file number) 511. The file, in German, contains about 140 pages with lists of forced workers, as well as some other correspondence. Some 1,345 names have been extracted from these lists, many of them occurring more than once on different pages.

There are no Jewish names recorded after August 1942.

The fields in the database are:

• Fond/file number [15/511]
• Page numbers on which the person’s name appears (often on several pages)
• Year of records [1942]
• Given name(s)
• Surname
• Date of birth
• Marital status
• Occupation or work section. There are four columns here, as a person could be listed on different pages under different work sections.
• Street address. There are three columns here, as a person could be listed on different pages at different addresses.
• Additional information
• Note: Not all the fields are necessarily present in any given entry.

Acknowledgments

With the assistance of a grant from JewishGen.org, Gesher Galicia worked during 2018 on obtaining copies of the records, and indexing and checking them. The indexes were inserted into an Excel spreadsheet.

Michal Majewski, Board Member of Gesher Galicia, coordinated this project, and the following people partcicipated in photographing records, indexing, and checking the spreadsheets: Klaus Dünser, Piotr Gumola, Tony Kahane, Katarzyna Marczuk, Maria Molenda, Maciej Walasek, Maciej Wzorek, and Róza Zabojszcz.

Special thanks to Avraham Groll, and Warren Blatt for their continued contributions to Jewish genealogy.  Particular thanks to Nolan Altman, Vice President of Data Acquisition and Coordinator of JewishGen’s Holocaust Database files.

Nolan Altman
Coordinator - JewishGen's Holocaust Database
April 2019

Searching the Database

This database is searchable via JewishGen's Holocaust Database and JewishGen's All Poland Database.