Batami Engel was a
small girl when her mother was invovled in the consturction of a
monument of Jews from her native town murdered during World War II.
Those who had survived and emigrated to Israel
would meet by the monument at the Holon cemetery every year.
Year by year, their ranks shrank until there was
no one on Yom HaShoah who could come to the large stone with “Sokolow
Podlaski” inscribed on it. Several
decades later Batami returned to the cemetery with her grandson.
She and forty other people whose roots can be
traced to this small town in the eastern Poland decided to resume
their meetings as their parents and grandparents did. And
although not all of them had ever visited Poland, it is something
important for them, and what they do inspires others to engage in
similar actions.
The Batami
family had lived in Sokołów for generations. When
I inquire about the details, instead of Batami her teenage grandson,
who knows the story very well, responds. His
great grandmother had decided to emigrate to Palestine even before
the war. She believed that through hard
work she would be able to build a new country and that it was the
right place for her. Her parents, wealthy
and influential town dwellers would not consent. They
could not imagine living outside Poland, particularly in such a
remote and unfriendly place Palestine seemed to them at that time.
However, their daughter was determined to go.
When she left home with her luggage, her parents
informed the police that she had stolen their money and jewelry.
That is how they tried to keep her in Poland.
But she had put one male clothes and a cap slipped
by policemen who patrolled the railway station. When
the train started rolling, she changed her disguise and waved goodbye
to her parents standing on the platform. That
was the last time they had seen each other.
The survivors were
mainly those who had managed to emigrate to Palestine or America and
those who were in Russia during the war. Some
of them returned to their home towns in search of any of their
relatives. But hardly ever did they find
anyone. “You won’t find anything here
any more. Leave this place”, was the
advice the Jewish Holocaust survivors heard. And
so they did. They would leave, first to
Łódź, and later to Palestine or the United States. Behind
they left their home towns, because no one waited for them any more.
They abandoned their former life and started a new
one in a different place. But they could
not forget about their families, their neighbors, the people they had
seen every day in the street, and whom they would have no chance of
seeing again. That is why monuments of
Jews from individual towns who had been murdered by the Germans were
erected. At he Holon cemetery in Israel,
Batami's mother was involved in such a project.
For years the
survivors would meet by this monument, but from year to year there
were fewer of them. Finally nobody would
come. No one would light a candle, no one
prayed, no one read out the names of their relatives. The
monument stood there on its own, and life went on at its own pace.
This began to change a few years ago.
Shoshi Shatit, whose father had been born in
Sokołów, decided to find out more about her roots and the town
where her family had lived for many years. Initially,
her inquiries arose astonishment among her relatives, as they took up
a lot of her time and there was no way of knowing the result, and her
first trip to Poland turned out to be disappointing. “There
was nothing there. Nothing at all”,
Shoshi recalls.
Shoshi was not the
only person to look for information about her father’s home town.
It turned out that there many more such people.
They are bound by the common past of their
ancestors who had been their neighbors. Today,
even though they live in different countries they try to rebuild this
community that bound their parents and grandparents. They
meet, exchange information, revive memories of a world that will
never come back. When they look at it,
Shoshi’s friends themselves are taking interest in their family
history. And they start their inquiries.
Batami was a small
girl when she visited the Holon cemetery for the last time.
On 8 April 2013, on Yom HaShoah, she came here for
the first time after many years. She
brought her grandson, who knows the family history very well.
Apart form them another forty people came, whose
family history can be traced to Sokołów Podlaski. They
came here because memory is a very important part of their identity.
They brought their children and grandchildren so
that they could also cherish this memory.
“Today is the day
when we want to say that we remember the 6 million of Holocaust
victims, particularly the six thousand from Sokołów Podlaski”,
said one of those who came to the cemetery. “We
remember their death in the ghettos, camps or on the streets of
Polish towns. But this cannot be the only
thing one can say about a person - that they died. Because
life is most important. What you do shows
how much you want to find out more about the life of your ancestors,
not only about their death. And this is
something we’ll never forget.”
At the Holon
cemetery, on Yom HaShoah, they gather by symbolic tombstones
dedicated to people from a given locality.
There are still many monuments there which nobody
visits...
Katarzyna Markusz
