Poland: POLIN awards 2024, presented by the POLIN Museum in Warsaw – Mazel tov to winners Ewa Teleżyńska-Sawicka and Paweł Sawicki, and to the Honorable Mentions and Special Awards grantees.

Mazel tov to Ewa Teleżyńska-Sawicka and Paweł Sawicki, who have won the 2024 POLIN award, granted annually by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw to people “actively working to protect the memory of the history of Polish Jews.”  Mazel tov also to the Honorable Mentions and Special Awards grantees.

The awards were announced at a gala event Monday night (October 28).

Teleżyńska-Sawicka and Sawicki are board members of The Memory of Treblinka Foundation.

The Awards announcement states:

For years, they have been commemorating the people murdered at the Treblinka death camp. Among other things, they are compiling the Book of Names—an online database of victims, which already contains nearly 109,000 names, with another 20,000 waiting to be documented. On the last Saturday of each month, at the site of the former camp, they read out the names of Jews along with the stories about them they have managed to uncover. They are also building a database of escapees, a transport database, and a multilingual educational path incorporating new technologies.

The main POLIN Award is a competition, with other special awards sometimes granted.

This year’s Special Award went to the Borussia Foundation, which since 2006, the announcement states, “has been restoring the memory of the multicultural history of Warmia and Mazury region [in northern Poland] and supporting grassroots activities in the areas of culture, education, and social integration. For more than a decade, the Foundation has also been developing collaboration, engaging in dialogue with neighbors, and sharing experiences related to Poland’s path to democracy.”

In addition, for the first time since the Awards were established a decade ago, the POLIN Museum Director, Zygmunt Stępiński, granted a Special Award for Culture and Media. This went to a Roman Catholic priest, Father Adam Boniecki.

Stępiński said:

For decades, Father Boniecki has been fostering understanding and promoting values that are often forgotten in today’s world, but which are universal and timeless. He has an extraordinary gift for building respect for others and their views. He possesses the ability to see beneath all the layers, to touch the most delicate emotional chords, and to compel us all to reflect and reconsider our own judgments. For years, he has taught us openness and empathy. He is a figure of authority with a capital ‘A’.

Honorable Mentions went to:

Karolina Panz from Nowy Targ, who for two decades “has combined her role as a researcher of the history of Podhale Jews with efforts to restore their memory. She searches for source materials in both state and foreign archives, she meets with the Holocaust survivors and descendants of Jews from the Podhale region. She organizes meetings with the surviving residents of Nowy Targ and commemorates the Jews of Podhale on the anniversaries of their annihilation during the Holocaust.

Dariusz Sobczyk. a “guardian of the memory of the Jews of Opatów,” who for years “has worked to ensure that today’s residents of Opatów do not forget their community’s legacy. On the 80th anniversary of the destruction of Opatów Jewry, he co-organized a gathering of descendants of the town’s Jewish community. He was also the prime mover behind the first exhibition of Mayer Kirshenblatt’s paintings in Opatów” and a key figure in the organization of the current temporary  (Post) Jewish exhibition at POLIN.

Click to read the Awards Announcement in English on the POLIN web site

Click to read full Awards Announcement, with links, in Polish