The coat of arms of the town shows St. George (Prince Krak was believed to have slain the Wawel Dragon).

In the 13th century there already was a fortified town lying on a major highway leading from the commercial crossings on the Vistula river near present-day Kazimierz Dolny, via Rzeczyca, Wąwolnica to Lublin.

The parish chronicle has preserved a written record of mediaeval local history: "Haunted was the year 1278 for the Polish.

Lublin was devastated as most of the others were, then, in rushed legions on barbaric raids, set-up their main camp, and kept bringing in fresh blood dripping booty.

King Sigismund II Augustus ordered the Lublin voivode Jan Firlej to rebuild it, and so the town was moved to its new (present) location.

Since the 17th century the town declined severely, then was subsequently destroyed by the armies of Russia, Sweden, and Saxony.

In 1870, the Tsarist authorities deprived Wąwolnica of civic rights as an act of reprisal for assisting the January Uprising.

In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland beginning World War II, and occupied Wąwolnica.

Later that month, the rest of the Jewish community was deported to Opole Lubelskie from where they were taken to the Bełżec death camp a few days later and murdered there.

[3] After German occupation, Wąwolnica was restored to Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which stayed in power until the 1980s.

There are remnants of a pre-war Jewish cemetery with a few tombstone fragments and a monument commemorating the victims of the German-perpetrated massacre from March 1942.

The Polish inscription is a dedication to the eternal memory of the victims and to one of the men who raised from the bodies around him, pleaded to spare his life and in return was shot dead.

The inscription in Hebrew is a dedication to the victims of the Tregerman family, whom she carried and buried in the cemetery: Her father David and her brothers Abraham Hirsch, Refael Mordechai and Pesach Noah.