Rava-Ruska is a city in Lviv Raion, Lviv Oblast, western Ukraine. It is a border town between Ukraine and Poland. The border checkpoint is situated 8 km (5 mi) west of the city, along the international autoroute Warsaw–Lviv. Rava-Ruska hosts the administration of Rava-Ruska urban hromada, one of the hromadas of Ukraine. Its population is approximately 8,494.
City hall
Early 20th-century view of the town
Stalag 325 prisoner-of-war camp during World War II
Belzec was a Nazi German extermination camp in occupied Poland. It was built by the SS for the purpose of implementing the secretive Operation Reinhard, the plan to murder all Polish Jews, a major part of the "Final Solution", the overall Nazi effort to complete the genocide of all European Jews. Before Germany's defeat put an end to this project more than six million Jews had been murdered in the Holocaust. The camp operated from 17 March 1942 to the end of June 1943. It was situated about 500 m (1,600 ft) south of the local railroad station of Bełżec, in the new Lublin District of the General Government territory of German-occupied Poland. The burning of exhumed corpses on five open-air grids and bone crushing continued until March 1943.
Deportation of Jews to Bełżec from Zamość, April 1942
Polish-language sign. Reads: "Attention! All belongings must be handed in at the counter except for money, documents and other valuables, which you must keep with you. Shoes should be tied together in pairs and placed in the area marked for shoes. Afterward, one must go completely naked to the showers."
Bełżec extermination camp SS staff, 1942. from right to left: Heinrich Barbl, Artur Dachsel, Lorenz Hackenholt, Ernst Zierke, Karl Gringers, (unknown), Reinhold Feiks, Karl Alfred Schluch, and Friedrich Tauscher (front left).