Tuchyn Before
World War II

In the 1930s, Tuchyn was a shtetl, a predominantly Jewish town, in Poland. About two-thirds of the people in Tuchyn were Jewish. They lived and worked alongside Ukrainians and Poles. Rich farmland surrounded the town and people came from the rural areas to the market there.

In 1933, thousands of miles away in Germany, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. They persecuted Jews and made them second-class citizens. In 1939, Germany launched World War II. When it invaded other countries, it imposed its antisemitic, or anti-Jewish, policies on the countries it occupied. The Germans did not come to Tuchyn initially. Instead, in 1939, the Soviets occupied this area of Poland.