International Holocaust Remembrance Day in Mszana Dolna

The 27th of January, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Death Camp, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. In Mszana Dolna, the memory of the Victims was commemorated on Friday, 26.01.2024, at three mass execution sites, where a total of more than a thousand murdered people rest. Only a small group of Jews from Mszana Dolna died in the extermination camps in Auschwitz, Belzec, Treblinka, Plaszow, Tanow, Terezin. The vast majority were murdered on the spot. The largest mass execution took place on 19.08.1942 in the Pańskie gorge. Approximately 900 people were killed there. Earlier, in May 1942, the Germans had murdered 24 young people. The others were killed throughout the Second War, individually or with families, and buried in the Jewish cemetery.

There were about 1,100 of them in total, of which 370 were minors, including 170 children under the age of 10. Several did not even survive a year, they were:

The youngest, Izia Markus lived only 4 months and 3 days. Tobias Buchsbaum 5 months, Marcus Schieffeldrim 6 months and 3 days. Israel Schwitzer, Marcus Gutter, Stefania Glucksman, lived less than a year.

At Pańskie, the victims were commemorated by a joint memorial erected after the war by the son and brother of the murdered, which only states the number of those killed. On the 80th Anniversary of the Holocaust, in August 2023. Sztetl Mszana Dolna Foundation renovated the monument and a year later, on the 81th Anniversary, the Foundation erected a granite plaque there, on which the name and age of each of those murdered is inscribed, including those killed outside Mszana. For those buried in the cemetery in 2022. The Foundation has erected a common gravestone with the inscribed names of about half of those killed that have been identified. Every year on the anniversary of the crime and on Holocaust Remembrance Days, we organise ceremonies at the mass graves.