The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945

Pre-1939: Piątnica (Yiddish: Piontnitza), village, Łomża powiat, Białystok województwo, Poland; 1939–1941: Piatnitsa, Lomzha raion, Belostok oblast’, Belorussian SSR; 1941–1944: Piatnitsa, Kreis Lomscha, Distrikt Bialystok; post-1998: Piątnica, Łomża powiat, województwo podlaskie, Poland

Piątnica lies across the Narew River from Łomża, about 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) northeast of the city. About 250 Jews resided there on the eve of World War II.¹

A Wehrmacht unit occupied Piątnica on June 28, 1941. The military commander invested local Poles with day-to-day authority over the village. Jan Wojewoda served as the village administrator (sołtys), and Czesław Darkowski, as the vice village administrator (podsołtys).

Christian-Jewish relations were tense. After the Germans had departed, Wojewoda and Darkowski organized a roundup of the Jews, drove them to the synagogue, and threatened to burn them alive. Gendarmes in Łomża, guarding the bridge over the Narew, heard the screams of the Jews as they were being herded into the synagogue. They rushed to Piątnica to issue orders forbidding the Poles to murder the Jews and to drive them away from the assembled Jews.²

At the beginning of July 1941, Wojewoda and Darkowski established a ghetto for the Piątnica Jews. Leon Malek (or Malko), appointed by the Germans as the civil administrator (wójt) of the larger Drozdowo gmina, to which Piątnica then belonged, also participated in the decision to concentrate the Piątnica Jews into a small residential neighborhood. The men allowed the Jews to bring to the ghetto only what they could carry in a small bundle and ordered them to leave the remainder of their property at their former residences. The role played by the Germans in the establishment of the ghetto is unknown, but they did not intercede to forestall its emergence. Whether prohibitions were placed on Jewish movement beyond the ghetto also is unknown. Poles living in the ghetto area were not made to move. Rather, they were expected to house the Jews from the other parts of Piątnica.

Wojewoda, Darkowski, and Malek likely established the Piątnica ghetto to claim the property they had forced the Jews to abandon. The sołtys and podsołtys took ownership over the homes, workshops, and tools of the Jews. Malek received their cows and horses. The men probably enforced the ghettoization orders by turning over protestors to the German authorities. Darkowski, also an auxiliary policeman for three months at the beginning of the occupation, handed at least four Jews, including Gołda Matys, over to German authorities. The Jews were not seen again. In the middle of August 1941, the Germans liquidated the Piątnica ghetto. They ordered the Jews deported to the Łomża ghetto. Wojewoda helped the Gendarmes, presumably sent from Łomża, to round up the Piątnica Jews.

Wojewoda and Darkowski decided to hold back 12 Jews from the expulsion. They held the Jews prisoner and compelled them for three months in the fall of 1941 to remodel their houses. The prisoners included Eliasz Czerwonka, Nachman Markiewicz, and Fajba Żołądź. Then one day, after the establishment of a Gendarmerie post in Piątnica, likely in the early fall of 1941, the Poles marched their Jewish captives to the gmina administrative offices and handed them over to the German authorities. The Germans shot the men in the Giełczyń Forest.³

After the war, Wojewoda, Darkowski, and Malek were tried for a number of crimes, including on charges related to anti-Jewish compulsion and violence in Piątnica. Malek was charged with stealing Jewish-owned livestock.⁴ Wojewoda and Darkowski were charged with organizing a ghetto for the Piątnica Jews and serving as accessories in the deaths of 24 Jews, including the 12 men they had held captive in their homes. Although witnesses presented much evidence during the investigation to suggest the men were guilty of establishing a ghetto in Piątnica, Wojewoda and Darkowski, in February 1951, were found not guilty.