In Poland and in the Czech Republic, two significant Holocaust memorials have been unveiled in recent days.
NOWY SĄCZ, POLAND, August 28
The powerful new memorial lists the names of around 12,000 Jews from Nowy Sącz and its surroundings deported by the Germans to their deaths during the Holocaust. The dedication ceremony took place on the 80th anniversary of the last deportation of Jews to the death camp at Bełżec and was the culmination of a week of memorial events.
The ceremony was attended by local officials, diplomats from Israel, the U.S., and Germany, Jewish and other clergy, and local residents, as well as nearly 100 descendants of Nowy Sącz Jews from around the world.
During the ceremony, the names of the 12,000 victims were read out aloud — Jews who were enclosed in the WW2 Nowy Sacz ghetto and who came from Nowy Sącz, as well as from Stary Sącz, Łabowa, Piwniczna Zdrój, Krynica Zdrój, Grybów, Limanowa, Łącko, Tarnów, Krakow Łódź, Leipzig (Germany), Sieradz and other places.
See an excerpt here:
The Nowy Sącz memorial — a sunken area on whose walls the names are inscribed in long columns — was the fifth, and most ambitious, project spearheaded by “People, not numbers” a project headed by the Polish Olympic athlete Dariusz Popiela that seeks to restore Jewish cemeteries and to create memorials that list by one the names of victims of the Holocaust.
Popiela, who competed in the Beijing Olympics in kayaking, is an activist in Sądecki Sztetl, a Jewish heritage education association in Nowy Sącz, another key partner of the project. (See the group’s Facebook page, for updates.)
The new memorial represents a “symbolic burial for victims who were deprived of humanity [and who] were also deprived of the right to a dignified burial,” People not Numbers said on Facebook. “From now on, their names are etched in stone and have a place where they can be mentioned. We believe that this way we do the right thing and stop the monstrous spiral of evil that triumphs with every passing day of oblivion.”
PRAGUE: RETURNED (COBBLE)STONES MEMORIAL, September 7
The memorial constructed from hundreds of cobblestones that were cut from uprooted Jewish gravestones and used for paving in downtown Prague has been dedicated at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague’s Žižkov district. (Not the famous Old Jewish Cemetery in the former ghetto area.)
The Return of the Stones monument, designed the sculptor Jaroslav Róna and his wife Lucie, is centred on a low, circular mound made of 200 of the cobblestones showing remnants of Hebrew and Czech inscriptions, highlighted in gold. Low walls of unequal height, also made from the cobbles, branch out from this “like rays of the sun.”
As we wrote in January 2019, the cobbles had been used to construct the pedestrian promenade along Na Příkopě street, at one end of Wenceslas Square, in the 1980s.
The fact that matzevot were used for the cobblestones became known after the fall of the communist regime in 1989. It did not spark much public outcry, however, despite several articles written about the situation, particularly in the past decade.
A memorandum signed between the city and the Jewish community mandated that the cobbles be removed and taken to the Zizkov cemetery.
The cost of the monument, estimated at 750,000 Czech crowns (around €30,300), was funded by private donors and also through a crowd-funding campaign.
The Žižkov cemetery was founded as a plague cemetery in the 17th century and used until 1890. It was largely destroyed in the communist era — in the 1980s the city’s TV tower was built there.
Click here to see photos and videos from the dedication ceremony
Read our earlier posts about the cobblestones HERE and HERE and HERE