Ewa Koper

I have to admit that the fate of the Jewish nation has always been close to my heart.  For as long as I can remember, my knowledge about Poland’s Jewish community has been constantly growing. I found the first pieces of information about the Jewish Nation in the Bible, which my mom was always encouraging me to read. Apart from that, I also heard  stories told by elderly people from my community, who remembered Poland from before the war and who told me about their Jewish neighbors and friends. Later on, my knowledge expanded thanks to my teachers and university professors, who inspired me and my peers to participate in different activities connected with the history of Polish Jews and who encouraged us to seek further information from additional sources. I can safely say that throughout my life I have had the chance to meet very valuable people who showed me the importance of memory and dialogue; however, in order for these to exist, meeting other people is absolutely crucial.

I have a degree in history and I work in a museum, namely, in the Museum-Memorial Site in Bełżec, which is a branch of the State Museum at Majdanek.  In my job, I mainly focus on collecting information about the victims of the camp and on conducting educational activities. My scope of research interests is very wide and covers regions from which people would be deported to Bełżec, namely eastern and southern parts of Poland and Western Ukraine. Since 2015, I have been co-heading the PORTA MEMORIA foundation.  Our first success was erecting a monument dedicated to the memory of Jewish inhabitants of Tomaszów Lubelski murdered during the Second World War.

Since 2008 I have undertaken several initiatives connected with Polish-Jewish relations. My actions are directly connected with my professional work and are very diverse.  One example of the areas I work in is education, which includes, among others, museum lessons and historical workshops as well as promotional and scientific activities, such as giving lectures and delivering speeches during seminars and conferences. Apart from that, I engage in projects in cooperation with other museums and educational institutions both in Poland and abroad. In my job, I particularly value contacts with people who survived the Second World War. Events of the Second World War are usually well known. However, my interests reach beyond the basic minimum.

Working at a memorial site, I constantly face questions connected not only to the past, but also to the present. These questions concern the essence of humanity. In my attempts to reconstruct the events which took place in different regions, cities and villages, it is impossible to escape very dramatic choices and relationships between people, and, what follows, their implications. The fact that I am constantly coping with human-to-human atrocities does not allow me to remain passive and inactive. I hope that after hearing stories from the Bełżec camp, at least some of the visitors, especially young ones, will not only return equipped with the historical knowledge, but also with a conviction of the need to choose the right thing in their lives.

Activism