On 19 Feburary 1941 a deportation transport left Vienna Aspang Station with 1004 Jewish men, women and children on board, bound for Kielce, a town north of Cracow. A considerable proportion of the population of Kielce was Jewish, and it had risen since the beginning of the war, as people were forced to move there from other parts of Poland. The deported Viennese Jews were at first billetted on Jewish families. On 31 March the ghetto was set up in Kielce. It was fenced in with barbed wire, and no one was allowed to leave on pain of death. At the end of 1941 about 27,000 Jews were living here. Men capable of work were deployed as forced laborers in quarries. In the ghetto itself cobblers, tailors and other tradesmen could carry on their trade.

Between April 1941 and April 1942 about 6000 persons died of typhoid; many were shot, hanged, or starved to death.

Within a few days (20 to 24 August 1942) the ghetto was liquidated, and about 21,000 Jews were deported to the extermination camp at Treblinka and murdered. The 2000 still remaining in the ghetto were then sent to the neighbouring labor camps at Pionki, Blizyn, and Skarzysko Kamienna. The last deportation from Kielce in August 1944 brought the few remaining Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

Of the 1004 deported Viennese Jews 18 survived.