Dorota Berlińska

In 2013, I participated in School of Dialogue with my students. A group of active and creative students was quickly formed, the workshops were a great success. However, we then faced a great challenge – our town used to have a sizable Jewish community that had since been forgotten. There were no sites or material evidence of their presence that could help us work on restoring the memory of Błonie’s Jews. So our group focused on people.
We attended an extremely interesting meeting with Mr. Jerzy Oziemski, who recounted his childhood memories for us. Both he and his family had extensive contacts with Błonie’s Jewish residents. He also shared with us memoirs of a Jewish girl from Błonie, who survived the Holocaust, that had been translated from the English. He admitted that he might have even known her, since they were similar in age when the war broke out… The girl’s name was Chaja Łaja Szpajsendler and her story became our project’s leitmotif. We decided to walk through Błonie in her shoes, hence the title of our project.

Students would meet with different eyewitnesses, register their testimonies and reminiscences. Meetings with Ms. Alicja Kwiatkowska and Mr. Władysław Tyll were especially rewarding. A few people contacted us with invaluable information when they learned that some school students are seeking traces of Jews in Błonie. This was important to us, as it showed that we are not the only ones interested in reclaiming local memory of Błonie’s Jews.

The crowning achievement was the city game we organized in Błonie that presented the town’s Jewish past through life of Chaja-Łaja. We also organized a debrief about the project in the local Cultural Center, inviting game participants, local authorities, residents and individuals who assisted us. We were also joined by our two educators from Forum for Dialogue and our special guest Stas Wojciechowicz, who lit the Hanukkah candles (it was December).

We talked about our project, presented our materials – films and presentations about Jewish community in Błonie. Even though the meeting was a certain challenge for my middle school students, they managed just fine. Participants were moved and the School of Dialogue group proud of their accomplishments. At the time we thought that our adventure with School of Dialogue had come to an end, but we soon learned there were still more challenges in store for us.

During the School of Dialogue gala we learned that our project was evaluated as one of the top two in the country. One of our students Wiktor Zakościelny even performed a song he had written himself in the course of the ceremony, held in the National Theater in Warsaw. Our new challenges involved organizing a city game for a group of Polish friends of the Forum for Dialogue.