Piaski - History

History

The first documentary mention of the village Pogorzały Staw located near the site of the current town comes from the year 1401. The first specific mention of Piaski occurs in the chronicle of Jan Długosz from 1470 which calls the town "Pyassek alias Gyelczew" (alias here meaning formerly), where Giełczew is the name of another local village. Based on this evidence, it is thought that the town Piaski came into existence some time in the first half of the 15th century on lands formerly belonging to those two villages. In the 16th and 17th centuries a significant part of the town's population was Protestant, hence it became known as Piaski Luterskie (Lutheran).

Later the town's Jewish community grew to eventually constitute two thirds of the total inhabitants, making it a shtetl. in 1795, in the course of the Third Partition of Poland, the town became part of Habsburg Austria. In 1809 it briefly passed to the Duchy of Warsaw, before becoming part of Congress Poland under Russian rule from 1815 onward. In 1869 Piaski lost its municipal rights. Since 1918 it has belonged to reconstituted Poland.

In 1921 Piaski had 2,674 Jews among its 3,974 inhabitants. During the German occupation in the course of World War II it was part of the General Government. At the beginning of this period, 4,165 Jews lived in Piaski. In 1940 the Nazi German occupiers established a ghetto, to imprison not only its Jewish inhabitants, but also several thousand Jews transported from the Lublin Ghetto as well as from the German Reich. In 1942 the ghetto was liquidated and its inmates perished in the Belzec extermination camp.

In 1993 Piaski recovered its municipal rights, officially becoming a town again after a break of over a hundred years.