The Germans needed four kilometers of road at Majdanek, so they sent Jewish prisoners into the Jewish cemeteries of Lublin to break up the gravestones.
A piece of that road is still there. It sits a few steps off the main path through the concentration camp beneath a protective glass covering, and it is easy to miss. Mixed in among ordinary rocks you can see chunks of headstones, some of them with Hebrew writing, some with images such as candlesticks.
I went on the North Carolina Teachers Holocaust Trip to Poland with about forty other teachers. I knew some things about what had happened, but I went because I wanted to understand how. We spent a lot of that week in Jewish cemeteries, learning how Jews bury and remember their dead and how thoroughly those customs were destroyed.
The Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street in Warsaw holds more than two hundred thousand graves. We followed Rabbi Guttman up a path into the oldest section, past trees that have grown up between the stones. That part of the cemetery looked ancient, moss over everything and stones leaning in every direction, some of them half sunk into the ground. He stopped us there and taught us how to read the carvings at the top of the stones. For example, a book means the person was a scholar, candlesticks usually mean a woman, and a crown means someone respected for their good character. Even without the Hebrew, the images told me something about who these people had been. We split into small groups to do grave rubbings, and I chose a stone with a hand dropping a coin into a box, a symbol for someone who gave to people in need.
When we finished we kept walking, deeper into the cemetery. You can see the boulders from a long way off. It is an enormous field of them, pale gray, and I couldn’t understand what they were doing in the middle of a crowded cemetery.
We walked over and stood next to them and the rabbi told us it was a mass grave.
Tens of thousands of people who died in the Warsaw ghetto are buried under those boulders. For decades after the war the mass grave was unmarked. The monument that stands there now was finished in 2022, two fields of broken stone laid over the exact footprint of the burial pits, whose boundaries had only been determined the year before.
Rabbi Guttman told us how Jewish traditions govern burials and how few of those ceremonies were possible in the ghetto, where people were dying faster than the living could bury them. Chaim Kaplan, a Hebrew school principal who kept a diary through the occupation, noted in October 1941 that the building where bodies were washed held more dead than it could take. Cloth shrouds had given way to paper ones because cloth cost too much, and even the paper had run short.
As we stood by the mass grave monument it started to rain. Rabbi Guttman and Cantor Clissold said Kaddish, the prayer Jews say for the dead.
There is a beautiful forest outside a town called Tykocin. Tall pines, soft ground that swallows your footsteps. You’d never know what happened there.
In August of 1941 the Germans called the Jews of Tykocin to the market square and told them they were being resettled. Over the next two days about two thousand people were brought to Łopuchowo Forest, to three pits that local boys had been forced to dig. All of them were shot.
The three graves are marked with green metal railings. Bolted along them are boxes of memorial candles with Hebrew lettering, and people have left small white stones on the top rail. Inside the enclosures the ground is rough and overgrown, with weeds and wildflowers waist-high. Rabbi Guttman spoke briefly and we had time to reflect alone in the forest.
When we walked back out to the road there were hard boiled eggs waiting at the bus. The rabbi explained that eggs are what Jews eat after a burial. An egg is a circle with no beginning and no end, the way life keeps going even after someone has died. We paired up and tore them in half with our fingers and stood there in the forest eating them.
As you walk through the sprawling concentration camp at Majdanek you come upon two concrete cylinders. The rollers are enormous, so big it’s hard to believe a person could move one. But prisoners pulled them to level the roads in the camp, among the most exhausting work there was.
The Germans built more than four kilometers of road through Majdanek using gravestones from the Jewish cemeteries of nearby Lublin, where over fifty thousand people were buried. The historian Krzysztof Bielawski writes that the breaking of headstones was done by Jewish prisoners of war. Brick and rubble from demolished houses in the Lublin ghetto went into the roads too.
I stood a while at the glass, looking at the remnants of lives still visible on those chunks of gravestones. I wondered whether a prisoner who was building that road ever looked down at a fragment and saw a name he knew.
Gniewoszów is a rural village of about seven hundred people and the subject of Among Neighbors, a 2024 documentary about its Jewish past. Our bus parked in the central square, and we walked a quarter mile or so, winding between fenced homes and then past a barn housing tractors and hay. A few people watched us from their yards, but nobody spoke to us. We came out on a wide grassy field with nothing in it that looks like a cemetery. That’s the Jewish cemetery.
Most of the people in Gniewoszów used to be Jewish. Almost all of them were deported to Treblinka in the fall of 1942 and killed in the gas chambers. Once they were gone, the townspeople broke up the cemetery’s gravestones and put them to use. Building with them. Grinding grain on them. Sharpening tools against them. Portions of gravestones are mortared into a low wall along one edge of the field. I found a broken chunk of one lying on the ground next to a pile of cow manure.
The building at 7 Planty Street in Kielce is where it happened. In the summer of 1946 it was home to about a hundred and fifty Jews who had nowhere else to go.
A boy went missing for two days and came home claiming Jews had held him captive. He had made the whole thing up. The police went to the building anyway to look for the kidnappers, and a crowd gathered outside while they searched. When soldiers and more police arrived they went in and opened fire on the people inside. Some were thrown off the balcony and killed by the crowd underneath. That day 42 people died, more than a year after the war ended. Every one of them had survived the Holocaust.
We sat in a room in that building with a man named Bogdan Białek, a Catholic Pole who moved to Kielce in 1970 and found that nobody would talk about any of it. He has spent more than thirty years pushing the city to acknowledge what local people had done to their Jewish neighbors, organizing annual events to remember the victims and working to ensure their names are known.
The 42 pogrom victims were buried in the Jewish cemetery on the edge of the city, initially with a small plain monument that did not name any of them. In 2010 Białek’s organization succeeded in erecting a second monument just past it, designed by Marek Cecuła, an artist born in Kielce. The new monument is a long slab of polished black granite, split in two, with a broken Star of David in the gap. For the first time, all 42 names appear at the grave, engraved in the concrete next to the slab.
Farther into the same cemetery is another grave. On May 23, 1943, German police brought 45 Jewish children into this cemetery and shot them. Aged fifteen months to fifteen years, they were the children left behind when the adults were sent to labor camps.
The children’s mass grave is covered in toys, many of them ceramic: blocks, a ladybug, a scooter, a teddy bear. Every year since 2009, Cecuła has worked with a group of local children to make the objects in his studio. When they are fired and glazed, the kids carry them to the cemetery and fix them permanently to the grave.
We stood around the grave and Cantor Clissold sang Oyfn Pripetshik, a Yiddish song about a teacher teaching small children their letters.
There are more toys on that grave than there were children. People have left hundreds of white stones too, to remember them. Almost every one has something written on it by hand.
I just returned from an intensive week in Poland traveling alongside a group of North Carolina educators to study Holocaust history firsthand, made possible through the generous sponsorship of the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching (NCCAT). I am deeply grateful to NCCAT for their support.
This post is part of an ongoing series exploring what we witnessed on the ground, paired with further independent research, as we carry these hard truths back to our classrooms and communities.Justin Parmenter
Charlotte, NC
This is part of an ongoing series. See more at Holocaust Education: Reflections from Poland.
