Anita Rucioch-Gołek

In October 2008, as the supervisor of my high school’s film club I participated with the club members in the celebrations of Open Arms Day commemorating the banished Jewish population from Germany and their sheltering by Zbąszyń townspeople in 1938. It was my first time to get involved in an action of this type. Garczyński high school students made a film (video-art style) entitled “REM” which was an artistic impression on the experience of Jews who had been resettled to Zbąszyń. We used the little archival footage we found and a lot of information we gathered from Jerzy Tomaszewski’s book “Preludium Zagłady” (Overture to the Holocaust). Our work on the film stemmed from the project I prepared along with the students – apart from searching for sources, the program included walks through sites connected with Jewish population in Zbąszyń and their history, talks on Jewish culture and conversations with local residents who remember Jews living in our town. Part of the 76^th anniversary celebrations of providing shelter to the Jews deported from the Third Reich was a walking tour through Jewish Zbąszyń and a concert performance  of assembled words and music for the occasion.

We thus joined the local anniversary celebrations and then initiated the next edition, organizing with the help of Zbąszyń’s Cultural Center another walk in search of Jewish Zbąszyń and a cultural event in Kazamaty (art space of the ZCC). On that day, we also participated in an urban game organized by the local middle school called “Following the Prelude of the Holocaust”. As part of cooperation between our two schools, middle school students participated in our event later that day.

The action aims to broaden Zbąszyń students’ and residents’ knowledge on Jewish presence in Poland and their input into social, cultural and economic development of our “Small Homeland” and to highlight the importance of Jewish history for shaping the present-day identity of our region.