Karolina Panz

I remember very well the moment I started to discover the history of Polish Jews. At the time, I was a teenager accompanying a Jewish youth group from Toronto participating in the ‘March of the Living’. We went to Treblinka together. The local guide asked us to name victims of Holocaust we knew. I could only recall Anne Frank and David Rubinowicz. I knew them thanks to my parents who had suggested that I read their memoirs. Looking at the stones commemorating Treblinka victims, I realized how anonymous the story of millions of people is to me and how much I do not want it to be this way. Later on, for my MA thesis in sociology I chose to study Holocaust remembrance in Grójec – a former shtetl town near Warsaw. Although Jews accounted for half of the local population before World War II , there was no memorial for Shoah victims. 

I decided to change the subject of my research to reconstruct this repressed and forgotten history. I wanted to tell this history through the stories of its protagonists – bringing back faces and names to the ‘shtetl Gritze’ residents.
When I started this work, I did not predict that it would become one of the most important experiences of my life that would change me and stay within me determining my future life choices.
After getting married, I settled with my in Podhale region where I finished writing my thesis. It was there that our two sons were born. In this completely new place I immediately started looking for traces of the Jewish past. Initially, I was doing it only for myself, taking a day off , once a week, from being a young mum. Soon enough, reconstructing and describing the Jewish history in Nowy Targ – my new-found hometown – became a challenge I decided to take on.

I especially wanted to investigate the stories of individuals and families during Holocaust and to restore this forgotten (or repressed) past of the town, which today has only Polish residents.
This kind of work, involving bringing victims of the Holocaust out of the anonymous mass, is often a difficult experience for me. To me, the personal aspect of this drama is the most important and after over a dozen of years I know so much about those targeted by the Holocaust clockwork. What continuously gives me strength to continue is the possibility to meet the Survivors and to help them and descendants of Jews from Podhale region answer the questions what had happened to their relatives, through searching archival for traces of their life and death. 

I also try to assist and accompany them in commemorating their family members. Trust and warmth of these people are the most extraordinary “git” I have received through this not always easy work.
Apart from research conducted in archives, I give conference lectures and publish papers on the topic. It also gives me great joy to meet Nowy Targ residents, both adults and teenagers, and to introduce them to the Jewish past of their city. It was especially important for me to organize two open public meetings with a Holocaust Survivor Ms.Janet Singer Applefield in her hometown. I believe that we – residents of the former Polish-Jewish towns and cities – are obliged to recognize the complex and often complicated past of the places we live in, drawing as many conclusions as possible for our present.

Activism