The Polish town of Nowy Sącz has installed a new monument listing the names of 12,000 of its Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.
On Sunday, an unveiling ceremony took place in the presence of almost 100 descendants of Nowy Sącz Jews from around the world, as well as municipal officials, clergy of various denominations, Israeli, US and German diplomats, and local residents.
The event took place on the 80th anniversary of the last transport of Jews from the town’s ghetto to the Nazi German death camp of Bełżec. “Nobody survived this journey,” said Łukasz Połomski from Sądecki Sztetl, a group that commemorates the area’s Jewish history.
It was Połomski and a team of 20 volunteers in Poland and abroad who researched the names of the 12,000 Holocaust victims that are now inscribed around the walls of the memorial, all of which were read out during Sunday’s ceremony, reports the Polish Press Agency (PAP).
The guest of honour was Sara Melzer, a Holocaust survivor. “Here where I stand, I am not alone,” she said. “I stand [with] 12,000 of my brothers and sisters, among them dozens of people from my family, whose blood screams but their voices will not be heard.”
She noted that among the names is “my beloved aunt Hinda Goldberg, who lived around the corner” from where the ceremony was taking place. Melzer thanked Nowy Sącz for “writing a beautiful chapter in the Jewish history of Central and Eastern Europe and being an example for others”.
The town’s mayor, Ludomir Handzel, declared that Sunday’s event showed that “the evil which appeared on our soil 80 years ago has not won”.
He recalled how, before the war, both Poland and Nowy Sącz were “multinational, multi-religious and diverse”. Today “we remember that they were our brothers, today we show that memory and good prevails”.
Last week, a march of remembrance was also held in the town to commemorate its lost Jews. The area on which the new memorial is located has been named Square of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust.
A driving force behind the memorial was the “People, not numbers” project run by a Polish Olympic athlete, Dariusz Popiela, which seeks to search for and commemorate Holocaust victims in the southern Małopolska province in which Nowy Sącz is located.
“Each of us deserves a dignified memory,” Popiela told PAP. “Which is why it is so important for us to list each victim individually by name.” His organisation raised 23,400 zloty (€4,950) in a crowdfunding campaign to help pay for the monument.
Research into the names of Nowy Sącz’s victims was carried out at institutions including Israel’s Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as the archives of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance and Jewish Historical Institute.
Jews probably first appeared in Nowy Sącz in the 15th century, though there was no settled presence until the 17th century, according to Jewish history website Virtual Shtetl. However, at that time they also met with resistance from some local residents, who feared economic competition.
By the interwar period, Nowy Sącz had a thriving Jewish community, which made up around one third of the town’s population. It had also become renowned as a centre of Hasidism.
That was brought to a sudden and tragic end by the Nazi German occupation, during which Jews from Nowy Sącz and surrounding areas were first forced into a ghetto and then deported in their thousands to the gas chambers of Bełżec.
Very few of the town’s Jews survived the Holocaust, and only a handful returned after the war. The last members of Nowy Sącz’s Jewish community emigrated in 1968-69, at a time when thousands of Jews left Poland amid an “anti-Zionist” campaign led by the communist authorities.
Main image credit: Adam Musiał
Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.
