[1] The approximate number of Jews confined to the ghetto was about ten thousand,[2] including a group of expelees from the Czech Republic and Austria.

[3] Beginning in January 1942 the SS conducted mass shooting actions at the Jewish cemetery in Opatów where the bodies of the ghetto victims were also buried by the hundreds.

Several months later, on 20 October 1942 in the course of Operation Reinhard, the SS with the aid of Orpo police and Trawnikis rounded up 6,500 Jewish men, women and children in the centre of town at Targowica Square.

The ghetto inmates were loaded onto the Holocaust train in Jasice, with 120 people in each boxcar fitted only with a bucket latrine.

Those who managed to survive the transport to Treblinka extermination camp, died in its gas chambers shortly after arrival.

Samuel Willenberg, 19 years old at the time, was spared by the SS and assigned to the Jewish Sonderkommando unit at the Camp 2 Auffanglager for the next several months.

[2] Among the Jews rescued in Opatów was the fourteen-year-old Rina Szydłowska, hidden for almost two years by Maria Zaleska, the Polish Righteous among the Nations recognized by Yad Vashem in 1987;[10] as well as Israel and Franciszka Rubinek, rescued by Zofia Bania and her family, honoured posthumously in 2011.