Study visit by educators from the USA as part of the Yahad In unum project

On July 21, as part of a wider visit to Poland, American educators, accompanied by guides from the organizer, Yahad-In Unum, visited Mszana Dolna to join us in retracing the lives and deaths of Mszana’s Jews.

The aim of the visit was not only to learn about the history of the local Jewish community but also to meet with activists working to preserve the memory, in order to understand the challenges and prospects of such work.

We spent five hours together, starting at the Market Square, which had been home to many Jewish families, the site of shops, bakeries and service establishments, as well as the location of the open ghetto during the occupation. It was also from there that the majority of the town’s Jewish community—including those who had been resettled there—set off on their final journey on that tragic day, August 19, 1942.

Also at the Market Square is the only remaining trace of one of the mezuzahs, which were affixed to the doorframes of Jewish homes—though, paradoxically, this specific one is found on the doorframe of a house where Jews reportedly never lived. We told our guests about several Jewish families who lived in the Mszana Market Square and their tragic fates.

Also in the former town center, we commemorated Mszana’s Righteous Among the Nations, Stefania and Józef Wacławik, and so shared both the story of our heroes and our efforts to ensure they are given a fitting place within the town and in the consciousness of its residents.

At the plaque commemorating the Mszana synagogue, participants learned about the history of the rabbinical family of Mszana Dolna and the contribution of local Jewish community to the town’s cultural development.

The next step was a visit the Jewish cemetery, which serves as both a final resting place for pre-war residents and an important historical site— bearing witness to the murders and burials of dozens of Holocaust victims, whom we have commemorated together with the Zapomniane Foundation, with which Yahad-In Unum also collaborates — first with a wooden matzeva, and later with a permanent granite one.

We were also able to show off the results of the renovation of the cemetery fence’ and the restoration of historic tombstones; when a group from Yahad-In Unum last visited us 15 years ago, the cemetery looked completely different.

In 2011, the monument at the site of the mass execution of Jews in Pańskie had not yet been restored, and there had been no plaque restoring the names of the victims who had lain there anonymously for over 80 years, the demarcation of the actual graves, or the photographs of over 50 of those murdered there. This made a truly profound impression on the visitors.

We also visited a third site commemorating the martyrdom of the Jews of Mszana: the mass grave on Ogrodowa Street, where more than twenty people murdered at the turn of April and May 1942 are buried. At all these sites, we recounted several individual stories of the victims. For it is precisely these that matter most – the fates of individual people and families who are ‘lost’ amongst the thousands of those murdered.

The participants in the meeting impressed us with their discipline, reliability, and genuine interest. They took meticulous notes and asked lots of questions. We were delighted to present them with our booklet “Tales of the Tombstone Lion” by Jakub—and since it is also available in English, it can serve not only as a souvenir but also as a valuable resource for American teachers.

The group’s guides were Ms. Renata Masna and Ms. Ewa Schaller

Yahad–In Unum is a French organization founded to locate mass graves of Jewish victims of Nazi mobile killing units, particularly the Einsatzgruppen, in Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, and Moldova. The organization’s founder is Father Patrick Desbois, a French Roman Catholic priest, former chairman of the Commission for Relations with Judaism of the French Bishops’ Conference, and a Vatican consultant.

This is already the second project group associated with Yahad–In Unum that we have had the pleasure of hosting. Previously, in 2011, we were visited by a group of French young people accompanied by their supervisors.