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What was the fate of Jews in Radom District, one of eventually five districts making up the General Government? Drawing on an impressive array of sources, Jacek Andrzej Młynarczyk has written a history of the Shoah in an area in which the Nazis ultimately murdered some 380,000 Jews. Młynarczyk argues that regional studies of the Holocaust have focused almost exclusively on the perpetrators and on their mechanisms of persecution and murder. He insists, however, that his work is different: it also addresses the perspectives of Jewish victims and Christian Poles (p. 14). While he exaggerates the uniqueness of his approach, Młynarczyk gives a rich description of the gamut of Jewish life and death in Radom. After a brief overview of the situation of Jews in the interwar period, Młynarczyk focuses on the imposition of Nazi rule in Radom District. He then documents the various steps in the persecution and eventual murder of the District's Jews: the imposition of forced labour; the stripping of civil and other rights; isolation through ghettoization; and the carrying out of ‘Aktion Reinhard’, the deportation of Jews to Treblinka in autumn 1942. In the final section of his book, Młynarczyk describes the miserable fate of the roughly 30,000 Jews who laboured in district work camps in the final years of the war. In the Skarzsko-Kamienna work camp, for example, some Jewish inmates were forced to make underwater mines that involved a lethal mixture of highly poisonous picric acid and saltpeter. They were given no special clothing or other protective gear and, as a result, generally died shortly after coming into contact with the chemicals.
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