Over the past two years a group of boys from the Roma community has worked to clean and restore the Jewish cemetery in the village of Vinodol, in southwest Slovakia. A ceremony this past week unveiled a Holocaust memorial there and formally marked the dedication of the project.
“It is amazing and very appropriate that this cemetery has been restored by such an active group of young Roma,” British Ambassador to Slovakia Nigel Baker said at the May 11 ceremony, which was also attended by the Austrian ambassador, Rabbi Misha Kapustin from Bratislava, and other dignitaries. “You have set an example for others with your dedication and community spirit, which I hope brings you joy and pride. I believe this is an example for others in society to follow. ”
Click here to see photos of the ceremony on Facebook
Led by Vladimir Špánik, a 75-year old member of the town council and leader of the Zoulus civic association, the boys, then aged 10 to 15, began work on the cemetery in April 2021.
They won Slovakia’s 2021 “Children’s Deed of the Year” award for their efforts, and in 2022, they were finalists in the “Roma Spirit” awards, an honor aimed at recognising and promoting individuals and projects within the Roma community and boosting the role and presence of Roma in society at large..
This video (in Slovak) was posted by the Roma Spirit Awards about the project:
When the boys started work, the cemetery had long been forgotten; abandoned since the Jewish community was killed in the Holocaust. Little was left to show that the place was a burial ground
.”In the beginning, the decision of the members of the Zoulus civic association in Vinodol was to restore the razed Jewish cemetery in Vinodol. The gravestones were hidden under a heaped layer of soil at a depth of 40 to 50 centimeters,” the original project description stated. “We decided to revitalize the forgotten, overgrown cemetery in such a way that it would once again become place of worship, and we partially atone for the inexcusable destruction of the cemetery of the Jewish residents of Vinodol.”
The project chronicled the work on the cemetery with a Facebook page, which posted updates, photos, and videos. Click here to see it.
In a letter in the summer on 2021 describing the project and nominating the boys for the Children’s Deed of the Year award, Spanik wrote how the boys’ involvement came about:
It is not customary for boys between the ages of ten and fifteen to offer themselves for work. Nevertheless, it happened. Six Roma boys saw me on my knees working in a public space in Vinodol and offered to help me. I started talking with them, among other things, about the Zoulus Civic Association project, whose members undertook [the cemetery’s] revitalization. Together we arrived at the area of the cemetery, overgrown with bushes, and I explained to the boys what we had set as our goal in the association. Remove bushes, find fallen and buried tombstones, repair broken ones, adjust the terrain and plant a hedge around the plot of the cemetery in the area, all out of respect for the Jewish residents of the villages of Horný and Dolný Síleš, but also Černík, from which Jews were buried in this cemetery. All agreed that they wanted to be there. They were not deterred even by the mention of work without financial reward. From April to the end of June, together with other volunteers, we completed nine Saturday brigades with the boys and found two dozen destroyed or fallen and buried tombstones. […] The boys help with the removal of trees […], independently look for hidden fallen tombstones, then carefully uncover them literally in an archaeological way; [in doing so they] can enjoy every discovery, even a small one, of local history. Of course, I also talk with them about symbolism, about the fate of the Roma and Jewish population during the Holocaust, about the war… Our conversations slowly reveal this sad part of history to them. In the village, we appreciate the work that they created with their voluntary participation, and they decided to persevere for the planned 24 months until the end of the renovation of the entire space.
Around 105,000 Slovak Jews were killed in the Holocaust; Europe’s Roma community also suffered widespread persecution and death at the hands of the Nazis and their local collaborators: during WW2, Slovakia was an independent Nazi puppet state.
The youths cleared the overgrown cemetery of vegetation, uncovered the headstones and fragments that lay toppled and buried, erected intact headstones, and built a wall-like lapidary where some of the matzevot and fragments were embedded.
The original project was expanded later to include the Holocaust memorial, which features an evocation of the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz, plus sculptures that evoke human figures and broken tree trunks.
The ceremony May 11 commemorated the 79th anniversary of the deportation of the Jews from Vinodol and the entire Šurany region on May 8-11, 1944, first to the ghetto in Šurany and later mainly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The entire project has largely been funded by crowd-funding campaigns.
“Despite the official opening of the memorial at the restored Jewish cemetery, we still have a lot to do to ensure that our entire work is constantly in good condition and that it is a permanently valuable memorial site,” the Zoulus Association said on its fund-rising page. “With your support, we will finance the connection to the already built-in irrigation system, the surface treatment of the tombstones, the restoration of the writing on them, and we would like to implement the planting of ornamental trusses around the cemetery and install one bench.”
See a Facebook video from August 2022 of the Lapidary wall, with embedded matzevot and fragments: