Tykocin – Where the Simple Baroque Synagogue of 1642 is the Lone Survivor of Centuries of Jewish Life

Meet the town of Tykocin in northeast Poland, a shtetl if there ever was one.

Tykocin is pretty much as it was in August 1941, when German Einsatzgruppen obliterated its entire Jewish population of about 2,000 people by shooting them into massive pits dug out in the adjacent forest of Lupochowo. They murdered them after inflicting all kinds of cruel humiliations on them. Hearing about those does me in.

This erstwhile Jewish market stall is now a bistro in Tykocin, Poland. (Google photo)

In the ...