Somebody arrived from Tarnów after going there to bring several people to Warsaw. According to this person, ten days before the pogrom the Jews were forbidden to leave their flats. That order not only forbade them to leave their homes and go out onto the street, but even to step out of their corridors and enter their neighbours' flats. The Jews who did not have food supplies in their homes suffered from hunger.
After ten days of this house arrest, the gendarmes surrounded the buildings inhabited by Jews, while a detachment of Germans, who arrived especially for that purpose, began to ruthlessly murder the Jews, killing a few thousand people.
The Germans then threw eight thousand Jews out of their homes, gathered them all in a park and ordered them to kneel for 24 hours. After that time, some of them were packed onto lorries and transported in an unknown direction, while others were escorted to the Jewish cemetery. The Jews were ordered to strip naked there, after which all of them were executed with machine guns.
The first day the massacre took place in a totally chaotic way. It seems that later some of the Jews were released on the basis of appropriate employment certificates.
The person that arrived from Tarnów went there as an Aryan. That person did not manage to transport the said persons to Warsaw, for the Jewish tenements were locked and rounded up and there was no access to them. During the period when the Jews were detained in their homes, the prices in Tarnów went up so much that a kilogram of bread cost 40 złotys.
Video: Montage of clips from a restricted United States War Department Film Bulletin of the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. Courtesy Internet Archive
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