Haapalah

In the sixteenth century, Międzyrzec Podlaski had a large Jewish population.

In 1795, Międzyrzec Podlaski was occupied by Austria.
From 1809 to 1815, Międzyrzec Podlaski belonged to the Duchy of Warsaw , when it became a member of the Congress Poland.
In 1867, the city became a stop on the Polish railway.

At the end of the 1930s, approximately 12,000 people, or ¾ of the population, were Jewish.
At the end of September 1939, the Red Army occupied the city, but at the beginning of October, the Soviet Union surrendered the city to Germany as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
Following the surrender, approximately 2,000 of the city’s Jews left the city for the Soviet-occupied zone.
The Germans erected a transfer ghetto in the city that was occupied by up to 20,000 prisoners.
On the seventeenth of July 1943, that ghetto was liquidated, and the last 160-200 residents were shot, and the city was officially declared free of Jews.
Fewer than 1% of the Jewish population of the city survived the German occupation.