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This is just one of many monuments in the area commemorating the events of the summer of 1942, the deadliest phase of the Holocaust of Polish Jews. As part of the “Holocaust Mass Graves” project, through analysis of archival materials and available databases as well as site visits, we have identified as many as 18 such locations in the wartime counties of Jasło and Krosno alone.
From March 1942 to December 1943, Operation Reinhardt was carried out within the General Government, during which ghettos were liquidated and their inhabitants deported to the mass murder centers in Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Majdanek. It is estimated that approximately 1.8 million Jews and thousands of Roma were murdered during this period. However, a growing body of research indicates that as many as around one fifth of the Jewish victims never reached the extermination camps. Instead, they were killed near their places of residence—both during the ghetto liquidations and in their aftermath, while hiding in the surrounding areas. In mass executions, perpetrators killed entire communities or groups of people deemed unable to reach a death camp, including the sick, the elderly, and women with small children. These events are precisely what the terms “dispersed Holocaust” (Sendyka 2021) and the “Holocaust by bullets” (Desbois 2021) refer to. The scattered nature of these crimes is also reflected in both official and grassroots memory of these events, which extends beyond the major extermination camps and centers around hundreds of local mass graves.
The history of the mass grave at the Hałbów Pass illustrates this process well, and also reveals some of the less obvious aspects of Holocaust history. Let us briefly recount it. On the morning of July 7, 1942, Gestapo and Gendarmerie officers from Jasło, supported by German and Polish “Blue” Police from Nowy Żmigród, rounded up the local Jews in the square by the Wisłoka River. They were then loaded onto trucks and transported to the Hałbów Pass, where a mass grave dug by forced laborers from the Building Service (Baudienst) was already waiting. At the site, the victims were ordered to undress and were subsequently shot in the back of the head. Their bodies were then buried in the prepared pit. The execution claimed almost the entire Jewish community of the town (most likely around 1,200 people). Only about one hundred individuals were deemed fit for work and were deported to the Julag (Jewish labor camp) in Płaszów.
Today, the mass grave at Hałbów Pass is the most visible trace of the destruction of Żmigród’s Jews. Efforts to preserve the memory of the murdered began in the very first years after the end of the war. A key role in the permanent commemoration of the site was played by Pinkas Wohlmut, one of the town’s few residents of Jewish origin to survive (he was among those deported to the Płaszów camp) and return to Nowy Żmigród after the war. Thanks to his commitment and the financial support of Żmigród Jews living in Israel, Europe, and the United States, in the early 1950s the grave was tidied, covered with a concrete slab, and marked with matzevot honoring individual families. Currently, it is maintained by the Leon Karciński Christian Community in Nowy Żmigród. Compared to other sites we have examined, this one is remarkably well cared for.
The grave at Hałbów Pass is exceptional in many respects. The very date of the crime is unusual for the region, as it took place a month before the wave of liquidation operations carried out in neighboring towns. Perhaps the execution of the Jews from Nowy Żmigród served as a kind of trial run for the Jasło Gestapo and Gendarmerie officers before the organized wave of killings that followed in August. The choice of the execution site is also far from obvious—the Germans chose a clearing near the Lemko village of Hałbów, which no longer exists today, located about 12 kilometers from Nowy Żmigród. Meanwhile, Jasło, through which the railway line ran, was only six kilometers farther away than the pass. In this case, as with many other locations in the Podkarpackie region, the availability of rail infrastructure does not offer a straightforward explanation for the course of the Holocaust.
Hałbów Pass is only one of the locations analyzed as part of the “Holocaust Mass Graves” project, conducted by the German Historical Institute Warsaw. Initiated in 2023 by Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska, Anna Zalewska, and Łukasz Krzyżanowski, the project aims to demonstrate the scale and