Wikipedia
Bychawa is a town in Poland, in Lublin Voivodeship, in Lublin County, about 25 km south of Lublin. It has 5,327 inhabitants (2004), and belongs to historic Lesser Poland. The town was first mentioned in historical documents from the 14th century and first received its city charter in 1537. The charter was lost in 1869, causing the town to revert to village status, but the charter was regained in 1958. In 1956 - 1975 Bychawa was the seat of Bychawa County. The town has the area of 6,69 sq. kilometers, and lies in Lublin Upland.
The gord, located at the site of current Bychawa, existed as early as the 9th and 10th centuries. In 1537 King Zygmunt Stary granted Bychawa the Magdeburg rights. Until the Partitions of Poland, Bychawa belonged to Lesser Poland’s Lublin Voivodeship. Since 1815, it was part of the Russian-controlled Congress Poland, and following January Uprising, the Russians stripped it of its town rights in 1863. Bychawa remained a village until 1958.
In 1900 Bychawa had 2,800 inhabitants, including 2,294 Jews who constituted 81% of the total population of the town. In the second half of the 1930s, due to the worsening economic situation and intensifying anti-Semitic atmosphere, the situation of Jews in Bychawa was systematically declined, which led to the increase in emigration rate. On the eve of the outbreak of World War II, Jewry made up only a half of the entire population in Bychawa. The Germans created a ghetto in Bychawa in December 1940 during World War II and around 2,600 Jews lived in the ghetto in 1942. Jews from Bychawa were transported to the ghetto in Bełżyce and then to the concentration camp in Sobibór on the 11th of October 1942. Apart from regular mass exterminations in Bełżec, the Nazis also carried out individual executions around the town.