What do pergolas in Forester’s Park (Park Leśnika) in Warsaw’s Praga district have in common with the Jewish cemetery in Bródno district? And what does the wall around the Catholic cemetery in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski share with a local Jewish cemetery? Why are there bones sticking out of the ground next to the local high school soccer pitch? What happened to the Jewish graves? What have we done with them?
There are around 1200 Jewish cemeteries in Poland today, 400 of them did not survive the war. Only 150 can boast more than one hundred headstones. Destroyed by Germans in the course of World War II, it was not uncommon for these cemeteries to be turned into sandboxes, school sports fields or municipal parks in later years. Forgotten, they would overgrow.

Headstones were used by Nazis to pave roads and courtyards or to stabilize riverbanks. Soon after the war, Poles would use them to make whetstones, build cowsheds, pavements, sandboxes and even outhouses. Even today, matzevot can be found in foundations, walls and workshops with the Hebrew inscriptions and names of persons whose graves they adorned still visible.

On January 24, 2013, Łukasz Baksik, author of the “Matzevot of Everyday Use” photo album and exhibition and Agnieszka Nieradko from the Rabbinical Commission on the Jewish Cemeteries in Poland discussed what we have done to the Jewish graves and why matzevot are still embedded in the infrastructure of our cities. The meeting was held in Państwomiasto club-café.

A film recording of the meeting is available in the following website 

In a center of a small town, right next to the church and police and fire stations, I find a farmhouse with a cowshed built from matzevot. I encounter Catholic tombstones with Hebrew inscriptions that someone forgot to remove. I talk to people who – aware of what you can find in their backyards – see nothing wrong in the situation.

Łukasz Baksik