World War I was especially hard on the Jewish community of Łomża , which was a major battle area against German military forces . In 1915 , the Jewish Aid Society estimated that 22,000 Jewish residents of Łomża were made homeless from the war . In February 1936 , the kosher slaughter of animals was banned in Posnan and there was a proposal to expand the ban to the rest of Poland . The Jewish people of Posnan decided to abstain from eating meat altogether because of the unavailability of kosher meat . Chaim Epstein , the president of the Hebrew community of Łomża , committed suicide over the possibility of the ban being enforced all over Poland . On October 29 , 1941 , German Nazi troops forced over 1,000 Jewish residents of Lomza to kneel in trenches , and they murdered them all with machine guns . The Nazi troops continued murdering entire families . On 12 August 1941 , a Łomża Ghetto was created in the vicinity of the Old Market Square ( Stary Rynek ) . The Nazi Einsatzkommando under SS-Obersturmführer Hermann Schaper committed mass killings of alleged Soviet collaborators a few days later . The number of Jews herded into the Łomża Ghetto from surrounding villages and towns including Jedwabne , Stawiski , Piątnica , Rotki , Wizna , Łomża , and others , ranged from 10,000 to 18,000 . Over two-thousand people were murdered in the Giełczyn Forest outside of town . Many Jews perished from malnutrition and diseases such as dysentery and typhus . The rest were shipped to Auschwitz . The Łomża synagogue was destroyed . The ghetto was liquidated in the final deportation action on 1 November 1942 . Only a small number of the Jews of Łomża survived the Holocaust ; some found refuge with Catholic Polish families . At the end of 1944 , the Russian military recaptured the territory . Following the Yalta Conference , the Russians ceded the city back to Poland , with its total population reduced to 12,500 inhabitants , none of whom were Jewish
Yalta Conference
Yalta Conference
Łomża