Agata Radkowska-Parka

I was born in Tomaszów Lubelski, a small town where half of the population before the war was Jewish. Tomaszów is located only a few kilometers away from Bełżec, a place of extermination of almost half a million Jews. Nevertheless, I learned about the former inhabitants of my hometown and their fate quite late, as this subject was not present at school or at home. It was only during my history studies that I started to deepen my knowledge, read memoirs, testimonies and research studies, trying to understand the scale of this tragedy. When the State Museum at Majdanek was looking for candidates to train as guides, I had no doubt I needed to apply. I learned a lot there. But it was only my friendship with an outstanding historian, Robert Kuwałek, an expert on issues related to Jewish Lublin, which instilled in me passion to study the history and culture of Jews. Thanks to him, I understood that statistics and numbers, all aspects of the Holocaust and its process or names of the perpetrators are not everything. All this is of course important, but the most important are individual people and their stories. And the memory about the Jewish neighbors who vanished. Robert inspired me and a group of friends to establish the Well of Memory Association in Lublin in 2008, which remains active today.

Robert is no longer with us, but his influence on us and the way he shaped us is invaluable. I graduated history at the Catholic University of Lublin. I worked as a guide in the State Museum at Majdanek, the Museum-Memorial Site in Bełżec, I organized and guided study trip and tours around Poland and Ukraine, I cooperated with the Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre Centre and this relation continues. In 2015 I opened my own travel agency ROOTKA, which organizes trips related to the Jewish heritage of Eastern Poland, Western Ukraine and Belarus. These are study and educational trips for groups, as well as memory trips in search for family and individual roots. This allows me to combine work and passion, which gives a lot of satisfaction. I enjoy living in Lublin, which has been my home for over 15 years. I love travelling. I have a weakness for Ukraine, where I worked as a volunteer for a year within the EVS project and where I keep coming back and every time I discover something new.

Since 2008 I have been active in the Well of Memory Association in Lublin. As a non-profit organization we try to bring back the memory of Lublin Jews by organizing educational projects, workshops, exhibitions, thematic walks, conferences, study trips, cleaning up of Jewish cemeteries, festivals. Every year I try to initiate or engage in new activities. Sometimes I go back to my hometown of Tomaszów Lubelski. Together with my friend, Ewa Koper, we managed to put a memorial in the place of the non-existent Tomaszów synagogue, commemorating the local Jewish community. My activism gives me a lot of satisfaction. For me personally these actions are important, because I feel that I am doing something valuable and necessary.

I can really feel it during meetings with the descendants of Lublin Jews. One of the most beautiful moments connected with my activism was the Lubliner Reunion – a convention of Lublin Jews held in July 2017 on the initiative of the Grodzka Gate Centre, NN Theatre. I had the opportunity to work at the convention and thanks to it I met over 200 people who came to Lublin from all over the world to pay tribute to their loved ones and ancestors, to get to know the city, to meet each other and to finally meet us, today’s residents of Lublin. The level of emotions, joy and pain that we all experienced during these warm July days is indescribable.

Activism