In our new Have Your Say essay, Maciek Zabierowski describes the latest commemorative project of the Auschwitz Jewish Center in Oświęcim, Poland — the town outside which the Auschwitz death camp was built. It was known in Yiddish as Oshpitzin.
Zabierowski is Director of Education and Special Projects at the AJC, which educates about Jewish life in the town that became a symbol of Holocaust death. It is located in a complex that includes a Jewish museum and study center, and the only synagogue that survived in a town that before the Holocaust had a majority Jewish population.
The new project is to create a commemorative Memorial Park at the site of the town’s Great Synagogue, to be dedicated this fall, 80 years after its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.
This is a way, he writes, to honor those who died by remembering how they lived.
We firmly believe that the Jews of Oshpitzin deserve to be remembered not because of Auschwitz but precisely despite it. To let them be forgotten would be to admit posthumous victory to the Nazis and their collaborators.
Click here to read the full essay