The Jews who lived in Izbica were kept separate from the new arrivals. They were housed on the other side of the railroad tracks. Also, the Jews shipped in from Germany and Austria were differentiated from Polish Jews by the color of the obligatory star of David signs, yellow for German, and blue for the Polish Jews. In order to make space for the incoming transports, 2,200 local Jews were sent to the Belzec death camp on March 24, 1942. Between March and May 1942, approximately 12,000 to 15,000 new Jews were transported to Izbica from across Europe as part of secretive Operation Reinhard; among them engineers, doctors, economists, army generals and professors from Vienna, Hague, Heidelberg and Breslau, including the vice-president of Prague. They were housed in a few wooden barracks which could accommodate about half of the prisoners, pressed against each other like sardines. The rest were forced to subsist outdoors. Jews stayed in the barracks usually for no more than four days, with almost nothing to eat. Many victims succumbed to typhus due to poor sanitary conditions in the ghetto. The foreigners, many of whom were proficient in German, had an easier time identifying with their Nazi oppressors than the Polish Jews from inside the ghetto. Denunciations were commonplace.
Mass killings
In the early stage of the ghetto existence, the Nazis destroyed the local Jewish cemetery. The tombstones were desecrated and used to build walls of a new prison. The entire ghetto in Izbica was liquidated beginning November 2, 1942, which led to a week of horrific killings at the cemetery. Several thousand Jews were massacred by the Sonderdienst battalion of Ukrainian Trawnikis in an assembly-line-style, and dumped into hastily dug mass graves. The murders were committed by trained killers who drank heavily, but the soldiers of German Reserve Police Battalion 101 who rounded up the condemned prisoners drank also, especially at night. A second, smaller ghetto was set up in its place for about 1,000 local Jews. It was dismantled on April 28, 1943 with all remaining inmates sent to Sobibordeath camp. Of all the Jewish citizens of Izbica, only 14 survived the Holocaust. The Jewish cemetery in Izbica is being reconstructed by the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland.
