With vanishing of Jews in Poland, memories also fade

Every April and October, Polish high school history teacher Marek Kolcon, 56, makes sure his students honor the memory of the murdered Jewish population of Zamosc.

In April, he takes his students to the site of the former ghetto that the Germans created after invading Poland in 1939. On April 11 in 1942, the Germans began to liquidate this ghetto and force the Jews to the railroad station from where they were shipped to nearby Nazi death camps.

In October, he takes his students to that railroad station. On Oct. 16, 1942, the last of the Jews left the ghetto to climb the ramp to the trains that took 10,000 Jewish residents of Zamosc to their deaths that year.

Before the Holocaust, Zamosc, a 16th Century Renaissance city in southeastern Poland, near to the Ukrainian border, had a population of 25,000. Almost half of these residents, 12,000, were Jews.

Today there are no Jews in Zamosc.

Before the Holocaust, there were than 3 million Jews in Poland, by far the largest Jewish community in Europe. Today the Jewish population of the entire country is estimated to be somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000, out of Poland’s population of more than 37 million.

And with this Jewish disappearance, the memory of a Jewish presence also disappeared.

Every Polish town and village had its own Holocaust, Zuzanna Radzik told me when I interviewed her for an article I wrote for The Forward in January 2012. At the time Radzik supervised the School of Dialogue, a program intended to recapture the lost history of the Jewish presence in Poland. This is a program of the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, a nonprofit organization that fights antisemitism and works toward better relations between Poles and Jews.

“We bring history to children in towns and villages who have never met a Jew or seen a synagogue,” Radzik said in our 2012 interview. “When we show them where the ghetto was in their town and that Jews were killed there, it all becomes real.”

The Jewish population in some of these towns and villages may have been as high as 70 percent.

Kolcon said in a recent telephone interview with a translator that a history of Zamosc without the history of its 350-year-old Jewish community is a false history.

“It’s only half the history,” he said, lamenting that his fellow Poles have forgotten the Holocaust and the Jewish history of their towns. “No one taught them about it, and they don’t learn about it in school.”

In Poland’s communist years (1945-1989) textbooks emphasized the enormous Polish losses during World War II, but did not separately teach about the murder of 6 million Jews.

To the extent that they are aware of the Holocaust, many Poles fear that relatives of the murdered Jews will return to reclaim what had been Jewish property. Poland ranks higher than most European countries on the ADL global index of antisemitism.

As a history teacher, Kolcon says he had a general knowledge of the Jewish history of Zamosc, but his passion for bringing this history to life through his teaching was ignited when he received a phone call from Andrej Forwarczny, the head of the Forum for Dialogue Among Nations. Forwarczny asked Kolcon to delve into the city’s archives to find information for a Jewish family from Irvington, N.Y., with deep roots in Zamosc. The information was for Eva Wisnik, whose father Abraham Szlak, was born in Zamosc. Her son, Jacob, had decided to have his bar mitzvah in the Zamosc Synagogue where there had not been a Jewish service since before the Holocaust.

“I’m continuing the tradition of my grandfather and great grandfather,” Jacob said in the speech he gave at his bar mitzvah on July 3, 2014, which I attended with my wife. “People tried to destroy the Jews for thousands of years, as the Nazis tried during the Holocaust” Jacob said. “My bar mitzvah in Zamosc is proof they haven’t succeeded.”

Most of those attending the bar mitzvah were not Jewish. Many had never attended a Jewish religious service. Some had never met a Jew.

In his effort to awaken the citizens of Zamosc to their city’s Jewish past, Kolcon has been successful in lobbying for the installation of five bronze memorial stones for Zamosc victims of the Holocaust. Polish authorities have discouraged the placement of these memorials, called stolperstein, anywhere in Poland because these authorities don’t want any implication that Poland was in any way responsible for the Holocaust. There are less than 20 of these memorials in Poland, while as of 2018, there were 70,000 stolperstein in 21 countries in Europe.

As we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Jan. 27, the seventy-eighth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we realize the importance of the work Kolcon is doing as well as the work of the Forum. Soon, when there will be no one left with a living memory, we will need the historical memory more than ever to ensure that history does not repeat itself.