Synagogue was burnt down by Germans on June 27, 1941, with an estimated number of 2,000 Jews inside. From the very beginning, the Nazis pursued a ruthless policy of pillage and removal of the non-German population. The Germans operated a Nazi prison in the city, and a forced labour camp for Jewish men. Since 1943, the Sicherheitspolizei carried out deportations of Poles including teenage boys from the local prison to the Stutthof concentration camp. The 56,000 Jewish residents of the town were confined in a ghetto. On August 15, 1943, the Białystok Ghetto Uprising began, and several hundred Polish Jews and members of the Anti-Fascist Military Organisation () started an armed struggle against the German troops who were carrying out the planned liquidation of the ghetto with deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp. The city fell under the control of the Red Army on 27 July 1944. The Soviets carried out mass arrests of Polish resistance members in the city and region, and imprisoned them in Białystok. On 20 September 1944 the city was transferred back to Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which stayed in power until the Fall of Communism in the 1980s, and the Soviet NKVD and SMERSH continued the persecution of the Polish resistance in the following months. From November 1944 to January 1945, the Russians deported nearly 5,000 Poles from the local prison to the Soviet Union. Later on, the Soviet-appointed communists held political prisoners and other members of the Polish resistance in the local prison, and until 1956, they also carried out burials of executed Polish resistance members there. After the war, the city became capital of the initial Białystok Voivodeship (1945–1975) of the People's Republic of Poland. After the 1975 administrative reorganization, the city was the capital of the smaller Białystok Voivodeship (1975–1998). Since 1999 it has been the capital of the Podlaskie Voivodeship, Republic of Poland. Geography Białystok is situated in the Białystok Uplands () of the Podlaskie Plain (), part of what is known collectively as the Green Lungs of Poland. It is situated by road northeast of Warsaw. It is the biggest Polish city close to Belarus and Lithuania. The Biała River, a left tributary of the Supraśl River, passes through the city. The landscape of the Białystok Upland is diverse, with high moraine hills and kame in excess of above sea level. Vast areas of outwash, a glacial