[4] The secret annex to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact meant that during the Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939 Łuck was conquered and occupied by the Red Army.

[5][6] Political, communal and cultural institutions were shut down, and Jewish community leaders were arrested by the NKVD.

Polish-Jewish families who fled to Łuck from western Poland ahead of the Nazis were rounded up and deported to the Soviet interior,[7] along with train-loads of dispossessed Christian Poles.

[8] Some 10,000 people were sent in cattle trains to Siberia in four waves of deportations from Łuck county beginning in February, April and June 1940.

[13] In total, some 4,000 captives including Poles, Jews and Ukrainians were murdered by the Soviet secret police before their withdrawal.

A mobile killing squad, Einsatzgruppe C's Einsatzkommando 4a, assisted by an infantry platoon, massacred 1,160 Jews on July 2.

[18] The Łuck Ghetto was established by the German occupation authorities in December 1941,[7] and sealed from the outside with the provision of only starvation food rations.

[18] The newly formed Judenrat, a council of Jewish leaders for the ghetto, made every effort to feed the hungry and control epidemics.

[1] The fate of ghettoised Jews across occupied Poland was sealed at Wannsee in early 1942, when the Final Solution was set in motion.

[1] In the final extermination phase of Operation Reinhard, on December 12, 1942 the German and Ukrainian police entered the camp building of the former Jewish school to conduct the liquidation of the SS enterprise.

The rare eyewitness, Shmuel Shilo who found refuge with the insurgents, survived again, this time by hiding beneath a work bench; he jumped out the window under the cover of night.

She did not sell any of the jewellery given by Jews in hiding to buy food for them, and gave it back with a sense of pride during a visit in 1963.