Jewish Historical Institute

"Among those who contact us, the majority are Jews from around the world who are interested in learning about the past, trying to fill in blank spots in their family stories about the country from which their close and distant relatives originated. They want to find traces of the presence of those relatives — — a grandfather, a great-grandfather."
http://www.jhi.pl/en/genealogy/genealogy_stories/6

Holocaust Education Center of Treblinka

TREBLINKA, Poland (JTA) – The Israeli daughter of a Jew who escaped Treblinka will design a Holocaust education center to be opened on the premises of the Nazi death camp.

The plan to have Orit Willenberg-Giladi, an architect from Tel Aviv and daughter of Samuel Willenberg, design the center was announced August 2 at a ceremony commemorating the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the uprising in Treblinka.

“We meet at one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in the world,” said Prof. Pawel Spiewak, director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, during the ceremony.

The Treblinka extermination camp was partly ruined during the uprising of prisoners which took place 70 years ago, on Aug. 2, 1943.

In total, approximately 870,000 people were murdered at Treblinka, according to the Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem. The first transports reached Treblinka on July 23, 1942 and included Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto.

“Our goal was to destroy the factory of death,” said Samuel Willenberg, who is the last known living survivor from the camp. “This whole revolt lasted maybe 20 or 30 minutes. We wanted this camp to stop working. In the forest I started to shout ‘hell is burnt’.” Willenberg fought and escaped during the uprising.

Shevah Weiss, a former Israeli ambassador to Poland, referred during the ceremony to the recent ban on ritual slaughter in Poland. “This is a bridge. I’m talking to Poles. Do not destroy this bridge today. There are not many Jews in Poland. Let them live peacefully and preserve their rituals,” he said.

During the ceremony, participants laid the foundation stone for the Holocaust Education Center of Treblinka, which is to be built over the next three to four years. The project’s total cost it still unknown.
http://www.jta.org/2013/08/04/news-opinion/world/daughter-of-treblinka-survivor-to-design-death-camps-new-holocaust-education-center

Chaya Kremer

This is the salvation story of Chaya Kremer from Sokolow Podlaski. Her parents were Batia-Basia Rozen and Moshe Aharon Perelshtein. They lived in Pierackiego St (Długa today)
http://hayakremer.blogspot.co.il/

Aharon Ze'ev

Aharon Ze'ev (Wientrab) was a famous poet who was born in Sokolow Podlaski in 1900. He wrote many books for adults as well as children, was an educator and served in IDF as a chief Education Officer. He signed his books with the name Ze'ev and on his behalf there's a famous award nowadays that is given to talented poets.

http://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%94%D7%A8%D7%9F_%D7%96%D7%90%D7%91

The ceremony

Let's meet in Sokolow on September 22 at the ceremony commemorating Jewish victims of German Nazi regime.

On September 22, 1942 Germans started liquidation of the ghetto. 6,000 Jews died there or in nearby Treblinka extermination camp.

Here are two letters written after the ceremony in 2011 and 2012.

2011 http://jewishsokolow.blogspot.com/2011/10/out-of-past.html

2012 http://jewishsokolow.blogspot.com/2012/10/a-few-days-in-sokolow.html

The Monument

Last week the monument standing at the site of a mass grave was finally fenced by the owner of the house. The stone monument was erected after the war, in 1945, by Sokolow survivors who lived at that time in Łódź.

"My dear brother, there are no Jews in Sokolow. There is no cemetery, everything is ruined, no sign is remained to the six hundred years of the existence of the Jewish community of Sokolow. In a garden near Nahum Lewin's place are buried in a mass grave hundreds of Jews, a big mass grave. The Germans had no time to exhume them and burn the remains." Shlomo Rotshtejn (Yizkor Book)

"They stayed together with us and through the cracks in the wooden walls looked on Piekna street, on the small empty and looted houses that bears no sign of human life. From here we also saw the still open mass grave where the gendarmes shot the Jews they found. (...) Immediately after the liquidation, after all the Jews were already gassed in the Treblinka gas chambers and shot in the mass graves in the ghetto, the commandant of Treblinka brought Nahum Lewin to a lime pit and shot him there". Simcha Polyakevitch (Yizkor Book)

(Yizkor Book)

1990s

2010

2010

2010

2013

2013

2013

Wilm Hosenfeld

Wilm Hosenfeld was a German Army officer who rose to the rank of Hauptmann by the end of the war. He helped to hide or rescue several Poles, including Jews, in Nazi-occupied Poland, and helped Polish-Jewish pianist and composer Władysław Szpilman (Szpilman is widely known as the protagonist of the 2002 Roman Polański film "The Pianist")to survive, hidden, in the ruins of Warsaw during the last months of 1944. Hosenfeld was stationed in Wegrów in December 1939, where he remained until his battalion was moved another 30 km away to Jadów at the end of May 1940. He visited Sokołów Podlaski several times. In his letters to his wife he mentions a railway station in Sokołów and refugees who came to the town.
In June 2009 he was posthumously recognized as a Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem.
The picture was taken during his stay in Węgrów.