The Shoah (1939–1945)
Žilina Assembly Camp
1942·Žilina
The toll is reproduced exactly as the source states it — never rounded, never added to another. Tolls overlap from one event to the next.
Town in the Váh valley, Žilina houses one of the camps where the Slovak State concentrates Jews rounded up throughout the country before handing them over: families sometimes wait weeks there, searched and stripped, before being loaded into convoys.
Žilina, in the upper Váh valley, held the railway hub of northwestern Slovakia. Its community, born in the mid-nineteenth century with the opening of the rail lines, had built its synagogue and schools there, and lived from trade in timber, textiles, and transport. The concentration camp opened by the Slovak State on the outskirts of the city became the transit hub for the spring convoys: Jews from the surrounding districts were gathered there before being handed over at the border of the Generalgouvernement. The year's convoys left Žilina bound for the extermination centers; the community never recovered.
- Period :
- The Shoah (1939–1945)
- Type :
- Shoah
- Region :
- Central and Eastern Europe
- Country :
- Slovaquie
Ladislav Lipscher, Die Juden im slowakischen Staat ; Yad Vashem, base des communautés.