After 64 Years, Jewish Cemetery is
Restored and Fragments from a Life are Returned
By Shirley
Hackel
On May 18, 2006 on a Thursday
at midday, under clear blue skies, an estimated 500 people
gathered outside the newly erected stone walls surrounding the
restored Jewish cemetery in the village of Wachock in the
center of Poland. Hundreds of local townspeople and school
children came together to witness the cemetery’s rededication,
joining clergy, Polish government officials, international
ambassadors and the media along with 3 returning Holocaust
survivors and a dozen first and second generation descendants
of survivors.
I was among this awesome
gathering. My father was born in Wachock in 1923, the youngest
of five children. He was 16 when the Germans invaded Poland in
September 1939. In 1942, he, his brother and about 50 other
Jewish teens and young men were selected by the Nazis to work
in the munitions factory in nearby Starachowice. The rest of
my father’s family—his parents, 2 sisters, another brother, a
brother-in law, a sister-in law, and their two infants—were
deported and ultimately murdered in Treblinka. My father and
my Uncle David survived the Shoah by escaping from the labor
camp and by hiding in underground bunkers in the woods for the
last six months of the war. My father died in New York four
years ago. All the while during the rededication service, I
wondered how my father would have felt had he returned to the
place of his birth. Would my father have encouraged me to make
this journey? If he were well, would he have come too?
Certainly, there were a host of reasons to harbor animosity.
Seventy years ago, Poland was
home to the world’s largest Jewish community numbering more
than 3.3 million. Its cities, especially Warsaw, flourished as
centers of Jewish learning and commerce. Its small villages,
shtetls like Wachock, were home to ordinary people who lived
simple lives. Today, Poland is a graveyard of Jewish ashes,
yet there are signs that Jewish life is re-emerging. Even a
Museum of the History of Polish Jews is expected to break
ground before the end of this year in Warsaw across from the
monument commemorating the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
I’m told that about 2,500
people live in Wachock today, but none are Jews. In 1939, 500
Jews lived among approximately 1,900 Poles in Wachock. Only 24
survived the Holocaust. Even before the German occupation, an
undertone of anti-Semitism prevailed in the shtetl. My
father’s earliest memory was as a child of five when he was
afraid to begin school. In his memoir, he writes: “Fear was
with me always.” When he walked to chayder in the afternoons,
after morning secular classes, the bullies hurled religious
slurs, throwing snowballs at him in the winter and pelting him
with stones in the spring.
During the war, there were more
examples of Polish indifference—or even worse, Poles who aided
the Germans—than there were instances of acts of kindness.
After the war, my father told me that Wachock remained a
dangerous place. When he returned to his home in 1945, he was
not welcomed back. His landlady was astonished at his return,
and marveled, “So many Jews survived?” My father was not
invited into his old apartment, and there was nothing left of
his family’s possessions which had been left in the landlady’s
presumable safekeeping.
After the war, two other
returning Jews to Wachock were murdered by members of the
Polish Army Krayova: Yosel Grit and Yosel Malkes. They were
buried by my father, my Uncle David and their friend Froyn
Wainstain in an unmarked grave in the Jewish cemetery that we
had come to rededicate more than 60 years later.
The Jewish Cemetery of Wachock
was restored through the efforts of Rafael Feferman, one of
the shtetl’s 24 surviving Jews, and it is dedicated to the
memory of the six million, among them Mr. Feferman’s parents
and siblings who were deported to Treblinka in 1942. In the
center of the cemetery stands a newly erected eight foot wide
granite monument that reads in part:
We honor the sacred memory of
the Jewish victims of Wachock and surrounding communities who
died in the Holocaust. We vow never to forget the Jewish men,
women and children whose lives were cut short. We weep for
what was lost. We shall never forget.
A two and a half hour
interfaith rededication ceremony, devoted to remembrance and
reconciliation, began with a welcome from Mayor Bozena
Markiewicz and ended with the recitation of Kaddish, the
Jewish prayer for the dead. Speaker after speaker echoed hope
for the future, including a letter from Prime Minister
Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and speeches from U.S. and Israeli
embassy officials.
Mr. Feferman, who now lives in
New York, addressed the crowd in their native Polish. He spoke
of Pope John Paul II’s exemplary role and presented a special
plaque to the cemetery project’s contractor for his
outstanding work and personal commitment. Bishop Zygmunt
Zimowski of the Radom Diocese urged reconciliation between
Jews and Poles, and Poland’s Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich
emphasized the need to do good, which he said is often
difficult. Executive Director, Dr. Norman Weinberg of the
Polish Jewish Cemetery Restoration Project, the pivotal
organization that helped to oversee the cemetery’s repair,
spoke of the pressing need to recover a lost Jewish heritage
by preserving Poland’s more than 1,200 devastated Jewish
cemeteries.
Louis Rubenstein of California,
who attended with his brother Norman from New Jersey,
described how their parents managed to leave Wachock before
the outbreak of war. They expressed wonder at finding the
monument still standing for the grave of their maternal great
grandmother. Rabbi Alan Phillips from Israel, who was present
with his father Oscar from Florida, another of the shtetl’s 24
Jewish survivors, spoke of the earnest simplicity and richness
of the spiritual lives of Jews in prewar Wachock. In my
address, I reminded the assembly of the anti-Semitic bias
before the war and of the Polish massacres after the war. I
announced the Rafael Feferman-PJCRP Annual Scholarship Award
in memory of the six million, an essay competition intended to
encourage Holocaust education and the teaching of tolerance.
“Today,” I appealed, “we have an opportunity to seize a
moment—to acknowledge the past, to move forward with
understanding and to begin new friendships….The past and
present show us that apathy and indifference have catastrophic
consequences….For the sake of the future, we hope that the
rededication of the Jewish cemetery of Wachock inspires a
willingness to learn and to teach and to speak out against
injustice.”
The recurring theme of the day
was the need to remember, to honor the past and to educate
future generations. That evening, I learned from Andrzej
Omasta, the Polish Coordinator of the PJCRP whose help was
invaluable in organizing the details of the cemetery
restoration, that after the visitors to Wachock left, the
Parish Priest held an unscheduled service with parishioners
just outside the cemetery walls, and they prayed for the
deceased and murdered and asked for forgiveness.
In fact, our return to Wachock
had made a difference in the lives of all who attended the
rededication. In addition, our group came away with an
unexpected gift. During the dedication, a woman who wished to
remain anonymous handed Dr. Weinberg a worn 4”×6” leather
packet containing 6 photographs and 6 folded papers, each
yellowed and stained with age. She explained that in 1942, it
had been given to her mother who was now dead by someone who
was being deported to Treblinka, who said: “When the Jews
return to Wachock, please give this to a Jew.”
From the packet’s enclosures
which contained an identify card and other legal documents
with official seals and stamps, and from the memories of Oscar
Phillips and Rafael Feferman, the two survivors who were with
us, we have been able to put together some details of a life:
· The packet belonged to
Pinkwas Abram Lewi who was married to the daughter of Meyer
Schuch.
· Pinkwas was born in 1904. His mother was Slata Lewi and his
father was Mordka Lewi who was a glazier.
· Pinkwas was of average height, had a long face and blond
hair.
· He had a wife and three children. Two sons and a daughter
are shown with their mother in a photograph dated 17 August
1931. The children alone are shown in another photograph
several years later, probably in 1938. Pinkwas’ daughter
appears in a secular school class photograph dated 17 June
1938.
· The family lived on Scharzisko Street close to the market.
· Pinkwas is in a group photograph of 20 men in front of a
house in Wachock. Half of the men have been identified. The
photograph was probably taken in 1935.
· A lease agreement between Pinkwas Avram Lewi and another
person refers to a dwelling in Wierzbnik, a neighboring town.
In an effort to preserve a
piece of forgotten history, I’ve sent enlarged copies of the
photos to three other surviving Jews from Wachock who are
still alive. I will have the packet’s documents translated,
and I will attempt to reconstruct from fragments the story of
a family that perished. Ultimately, we will donate the
materials to a recognized Jewish institution.
Perhaps it
is because I have no photographs of my own grandparents, and
no prewar images of my parents, that I am mesmerized by this
treasure that has been held secretly since 1942. The photos
and documents of the Lewi family affirm that they did at one
time live, though they have no graves and no one to remember
them. They were among the hundreds of Jews from Wachock who
were murdered in Treblinka. I think my father would share my
awe that this historical packet had been returned to Jews. We
would wonder together how many other Poles were handed
valuables by those who knew they would not be coming back. My
father would have been gratified if he had lived to see whole
classes of school children with their teachers and families
attend the rededication of his shtetl’s cemetery. Despite the
warmth of the spring day, he would have shivered as old
memories surfaced from his horrific past. But he would have
been hopeful—the spirit that permitted him to rebuild his life
in America, would have given him courage to pray that new
generations of Poles will never forget. |
