The Jewish Community of Ulucz
Ulucz
A village in the administrative district of Gmina Dydnia, within Brzozow county, Subcarpathian Volvoldeship, Poland/
The village was first documented in the year 1373. Starting in the 15th century the village and its environs were part of the king's lands. It was known for its salt-mines.
After the first division of Poland in 1772, Ulucz was included in the region of Galicia as part of the Austrian empire. In the 1870 census, 1,342 Ukrainians, 98 Poles and 181 Jews were counted as residents. In 1921, there were 210 Jews living there.
The Jews dealt primarily in small business and handicrafts. Fourteen Jewish families worked in agriculture and owned farms.
The Holocaust
On the 1st of September, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Ulucz was captured by the Germans on the 9th of September. On the 17th, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and conquered eastern Poland. A number of young Jews escaped the Germans and reached Soviet occupied territory. The Germans concentrated the Jews from the small villages, including Ulucz, into ghettos in the cities of Rzeszów and Rymanów.
The fate of the Jews of Ulucz was the same as that of the Jews of Rzeszów and Rymanów. In the fall of 1942, the ghettos were liquidated and the Jews were sent either to the death camp in Belzec or Płaszów or they were murdered in local death pits.
After the Holocaust
Few of those who had escaped to the Soviet Union in 1939 were saved. A few survived with the help of local villagers. The survivors couldn't return to their former residences due to the hostility of the Ukrainian and Polish populations.
The Mark family of 4 souls, originally from Ulucz, but living in the village of Humniska, was saved with the help of a Christian family who hid and took care of them for two years until the village was liberated by the Soviet Army in June 1944. For this noble act Yad Vashem recognized Michalina Kędra with the title Righteous Among the Nations in 1982 and her daughter Helena Bocon (née Kędra) in 1988 . At the beginning of the 21st century, the Mark family lived in the United States.