WOJSLAWICE, Poland (ESS) – Polish witnesses to the German crime in Wojslawice have lived for decades with the memories of their Jewish neighbors executed in 1942: they recalled a meadow full of blood, a child screaming water and a pile of bodies, arms and legs still moving days after the execution.
In the years that followed, those who had noticed the crime shared their wisdom with their children, warning them to stay away from the position of the Orthodox Church where some sixty Jews, numbering 20 children, were killed that October day.
“When I was little, I used to run in those meadows, but the elders used to say, ‘Please don’t run there because there are people buried, Jews buried,'” said Marian Lackowski, a retired police officer whose defeated mother witnessed the execution in the small eastern Polish town.
Born after the war, Lackowski spent years making sure the sick won a dignified burial, a project he fulfilled Thursday when he brought together Jewish and Christian clergy, the mayor, schoolchildren and other members of the city.
Starting with the town hall, the organization solemnly descended a hill to the place of execution, its silence had been damaged only by the roosters and the barking of the dogs, after its arrival, the bells of the Catholic church of the city sounded and a trumpet sounded. at noon. Jewish and Christian prayers were recited and mourners lit candles and placed stones over Jewish culture in a new monument erected over the bones.
Tragically, the site of the Wojslawice mass grave is not unique. During Poland’s German profession in World War II, the Germans imprisoned Jews in ghettos and murdered them in death camps, adding Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor, but also cut them off in the camps. and forests close to their homes, leaving mass graves in Poland, many of which have only been discovered in recent years.
Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the act that sparked war and began some five years of brutal occupation. Ethnic Poles were considered racially inferior through the Germans and sent to hard labor and concentration camps and executed on the street. for general destruction, a purpose that the Third Reich almost achieved.
In the midst of the occupation, ethnic Poles were rarely holocaust bystanders, rarely the saviors of the Jews, and rarely the assistants of the executioners. It is a traumatic story that was repressed during decades of communist rule, but has been the subject of introspection. since.
The Polish nationalist seeks to highlight Polish heroism and downplay Polish crimes, to the point of being accused through Israel of an old cover-up.
However, in Poland, many other ordinary people are engaged in the local place in the preservation of Jewish cemeteries or make other paintings to maintain the reminiscence of the nation’s lost Jews.
Agnieszka Nieradko, co-founder of a Warsaw-based base committed to locating the unnamed graves and their safety, said the scale of the unnamed graves began to become transparent about a decade ago. The user he attributes to his discovery is Zbigniew Nizinski, a young Protestant whose devout ideals led him to pay homage to the Polish Jews who helped make Poland a multicultural land centuries before the Holocaust.
Nizinski, traveling by bicycle, went to small communities and asked the local population where the Jewish cemetery was. The answer was: Was he referring to the old pre-war cemetery, or the nameless tomb of the war?Nizinski then reported his findings to the Rabbinical Commission. for Jewish cemeteries in Poland and created a base to help dedicate the sites.
Eventually, the task was too heavy for Nizinski, and Nieradko and Aleksander Schwarz co-founded a base in 2014 under the auspices of the rabbinical commission to locate and maintain as many Holocaust graves as possible, a career opposite to time, as eyewitnesses age and die.
The base is called Zapomniane, which means “forgotten”, however, Nieradko has since learned that oblivion does not capture the total fact about nameless graves.
“They work somewhere on the margins of local history, but they have never been forgotten. When we go to those places, we don’t notice anything new for those people,” he said. “Everyone knows the Jews buried in the forest or the Jews. “buried somewhere in the meadow. It is an oral history that is passed down from generation to generation.
Nieradko and Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the country’s U. S. -born leading rabbi, stop by communities for ceremonies dedicated to the new monuments at the sites. Nieradko says more than 50 mass graves have been commemorated, 70 have been secured with wooden markers and he believes there is more desire to do so. be found.
Schudrich said ceremonies like Thursday’s in Wojslawice give Holocaust victims their well-deserved graves and offer a sense of closure to other local people who witnessed the killings.
Some Jewish survivors and descendants also, despite everything, have a tomb to visit. Schudrich recalled how a survivor in Israel returned to Poland for the determination of a monument where her mother and siblings were killed after being separated from them at the beginning of the war. .
“She just gave up and squeezed the matzevah (tombstone) because she never saw her mother again,” he recalls.
The base uses ground-penetrating radar, a surveying method called soft detection and telemetry, or LIDAR, and wartime aerial photographs taken via German army spy planes to delineate, as they should be, the barriers of the tombs. But nothing is more vital than a human being. memory.
“If you don’t have to take yourself to the grave, all that complicated equipment is useless,” he said.
Nieradko said the tomb sites were discovered largely thanks to eyewitness testimony. Their memories are preserved through their children and grandchildren.
Exhumations are never done because Judaism teaches that human remains are sacred and should not be touched.
After the funeral ceremony, mourners headed to the renovated synagogue in Wojslawice, where the mayor paid tribute to the multi-ethnic nature of the city from before the war, where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews lived.
A boy from the outskirts of the town of Chelm, whose mother is Jewish, took the opportunity to congratulate the tolerance of local leaders, lamenting that this is not the case everywhere.
Lackowski, who had worked for many years to commemorate the burial site, expressed satisfaction that the victims, despite everything, had a suitable monument.
He said that in his work he collected testimonies from 8 witnesses “who tell terrible stories that blood flowed from the meadow, that a boy screamed to drink from this pile (of corpses), that even after being buried for a few days, there were arms and legs that stuck out of this pile that still moved. It’s a terrible thing.
The few remaining witnesses were usually too weak to attend the ceremony. Only Boleslaw Sitarz, 94, joined the city’s commemorations at the synagogue. He was 15 years old when he saw the Jews undercover and they took away the Orthodox Church. “, lamenting didn’t help,” he said. After being shot, he said, the dogs came here at night and scattered the bodies.
He said he was glad that, despite everything, a rite had been held in his honor. “They were our neighbors,” he said.
Nieradko says she and her base restrict their paintings where they are sought. He also learned of massacres in which the local population became involved in the killings, and there is less willingness to cooperate and commemorate the place.
“We have places where there is hope to put up a monument,” he said. “We leave the tricks for longer times. “
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