In the Second Polish Republic Staszów belonged to Sandomierz County of Kielce Voivodeship, and during World War II, it was part of Radom District of the General Government.

First mention of the town comes from 1241, when, during first Mongol invasion of Poland, the village of Staszów was burned, together with its wooden parish church.

In 1345, new stone church of St. Bartholomew was built, and in the 1440s, the village of Staszów was mentioned in Jan Długosz’s Liber Beneficiorum Dioecesis Cracoviensis.

In the early 16th century, Staszów had a market square with a town hall, surrounded by tenement houses.

The first Jews settled in Staszów around the time it was awarded city status, in 1526, and a shortly after an organized Jewish community was established there.

[5] In 1709, a few years after an outbreak of black death, Staszów was captured and destroyed by the Swedes (see: Great Northern War).

On May 2, 1718, Staszów’s-then owner, Elżbieta Sieniawska, played an important role in the development of the Jewish community in Staszow, when she granted them a privilege that included a permit to build a synagogue and cemetery.

In World War II, Staszów was an important center of anti-German resistance, where the Jędrusie and the Home Army units were active.

In 1939, the Polish resistance organized a collection and shipping point for aid packages for Poles who had lost their homes and possessions in other regions, i.e. those arrested or expelled by the Germans and those fleeing Soviet-occupied eastern Poland.

In the evening of November 7, the town was surrounded by Germans, Ukrainian and Latvian auxiliaries, and Polish and Jewish police.

Obersturmfuehrer Schild ordered the Jewish policemen to instruct all the Jews in town to be present by 8 o'clock in the morning at the marketplace.

[10] By 8 o'clock in the morning about 5,000 Jews, young and old, children and grown-ups, had assembled at the market place in order to begin their march to death.

Many more Jews, who were retained for hard labor or who had hidden in bunkers, were subsequently killed or shipped to a concentration camp.

Staszów managed to keep its medieval shape, with a market square, a town hall in the middle, and perpendicular streets.

There are 18th and 19th century tenement houses in the market square, and the town hall was built in 1783, with major changes from 1861.

[citation needed] Over 175 years old, the Jewish Cemetery was not maintained, and at one point was even replaced without a trace by a playground.

The gravestones had been carted away by the Nazis for use as paving stones on muddy roads and sold to a construction company by municipal authorities after the war when no Jews returned to claim them.

An individual, Jack Goldfarb,[11] living in New York City paid to have the grounds spruced up, to have a 3 m (10-foot) Holocaust memorial constructed, to have some 155 Jewish gravestones he discovered in Staszow homes brought back to the cemetery, and to have a marker set up at a Holocaust-era mass grave.