The Mińsk Mazowiecki Ghetto was located in the town of Mińsk Mazowiecki, in Germany-occupied Poland, just south of Treblinka. Located east of Warsaw, the ghetto was established on October 25, 1940, and came to hold some 7,000 Jewish prisoners from neighboring Polish regions. Exploited and oppressed, these Jews were forced to live in crowded conditions and acquired starvation rations from SS officers in exchange for unfair amounts of money. Some were helped by non-Jewish Poles outside the ghetto’s walls who trafficked in food as well as kennkartes (a German identity document recognized by the Third Reich) made possible by the underground resistance. Mińsk’s Jewish underground was established in the middle of 1941. Donations were conducted to purchase weapons and by the summer of 1942, fundraising efforts were underway. These underground efforts were complicated by the Nazis' liquidation efforts which began on August 2, 1942. On August 22, led by SS-Untersturmführer Schmidt, Mińsk’s Gestapo chief, roughly 5,000 Jews were deported to Treblinka. The vast majority of the 1000 to 1,300 Jews that avoided deportation were shot in the streets along with all Judenrat members. A few hundred Jews made up the resistance forces within the ghetto and began their revolt on January 10, 1943. As the SS prepared to liquidate the prisoners locked themselves within the ghetto walls, resisting deportation. In response SS officers set a building ablaze, killing 250 Jews. On June 5, 1943, the Ghetto eventually dissolved following the extraction of 100 Jews, all of whom were promptly executed. With the ghetto dissolved, remaining resistance forces, as well as the Polish Home Army shortly thereafter, put up a final fight against German officials, killing Gestapo Chief Schmidt on July 22, 1943. It is understood that 250 Jews survived the ghetto execution. Mińsk’s Jewish community, established in 1768, was wiped out almost entirely by the Nazis and their collaborators. It has never returned to the heights it once was.