Holocaust in occupied Poland. In April 1941, the Kielce Ghetto was formed, surrounded by high fences, barbed wire, and guards. The gentile Poles were ordered to vacate the area and the Jews were given one week to relocate. The ghetto was split in two, along Warszawska Street (Nowowarszawska) with the Silnica River (pl) running through it. The so-called large ghetto was set up between the streets of Orla, Piotrkowska, Pocieszka, and Warszawska to the east, and the smaller ghetto between Warszawska on the west, and the streets of Bodzentyńska, St. Wojciech, and the St. Wojciech square. The ghetto gates were closed on 5 April 1941; the Jewish Ghetto Police was formed with 85 members and ordered to guard it. Meanwhile, expulsions elsewhere and deportations to Kielce continued until August 1942 at which time there were 27,000 prisoners crammed in the ghetto. Trains with Jewish families arrived from the entire Kielce Voivodeship, and also from Vienna, Poznań, and Łódź. The severe overcrowding, rampant hunger, and outbreaks of epidemic typhus took the lives of 4,000 people before mid-1942. During this time, many of them were forced to work at a nearby German munition plant run by Hasag. In August 1942, the Kielce Ghetto was liquidated in the course of only five days. During roundups, all Jews unable to move were shot on the spot including the sick, the elderly, and the disabled; 20,000–21,000 Jews were led into waiting Holocaust trains, and murdered in the gas chambers of Treblinka. After the extermination action only 2,000 Jews were left in Kielce, lodged in the labour camp at Stolarska and Jasna Streets (pl) within the small ghetto. Those who survived were sent to other forced labour camps. On May 23, 1943, the Kielce cemetery massacre was perpetrated by the German police; 45 Jewish children who had survived the Kielce Ghetto liquidation, were murdered by Order Police battalions. On July 4, 1946, the local Jewish gathering of some 200 Holocaust survivors from the Planty 7 Street refugee centre of the Zionist Union became the target of the Kielce pogrom in which 37 (40) Jews (17–21 of whom remain unidentified) and 2 ethnic Poles were killed, including 11 fatally shot with military rifles and 11 more stabbed with bayonets, indicating direct involvement of Polish troops. During the Cold War, many Jewish historians theorized that the pogrom became the cause of outward Jewish emigration from Poland immediately following