Send Gift Baskets to Pabianice, Poland

As part of early Piast-ruled Poland, Pabianice was established in the 10th or 11th century. A grant of town rights was granted by Wodyslaw I Okietek in 1297. Pabianice was a private church town in the Sieradz Voivodeship of the Polish Crown’s Greater Poland Province. As a result of Sigismund II Augustus’ privilege in 1555, craft guilds were established in Pabianice.

Pabianice had a substantial Jewish population before World War II, comprising about a quarter of all residents. The town had been home to Jews since the 1700s. In September 1939, the city came under German occupation following the joint German-Soviet invasion of Poland. 

As part of the Intelligenzaktion, in late 1939, the Germans made mass arrests of local Polish intelligentsia, initially imprisoned in a local transit camp and the nearby Radogoszcz concentration camp before being deported to other concentration camps or murdered in nearby forests. During November and December of 1939, the Germans massacred several Polish teachers and activists in the nearby Agiewniki forest (within the current city limits of Oód). Around 1,000 Poles were also expelled from the town by the Germans in December 1939. Nearly the entire Jewish population was murdered under German occupation. In this town, some were killed, several thousand were sent to an extermination camp and immediately gassed, and others were expelled to a forced labor camp in the surrounding areas. Pabianice was thought to have 9,000 Jews living there at the start of World War II, but only about 150 survived. See Megargee for more information on wartime experiences. 1945 marked the end of the German occupation.