Łukasz Parus

In 2011, I read Theo Richmond’s book “Konin. A Quest” which opened a lot of gateways in my head of which I was previously unaware of. I had always known that Jewish culture is fascinating, but Richmond opened up my eyes – I felt like a child taken for the first time to an amusement park. I thought to myself that since the socio-cultural and religious life of Konin’s Jews was so captivating, perhaps the same thing could be said about the life of Jews in Zagórów. The only person I could ask about this was Mr.Leon Jedwab, one of the few Holocaust survivors from Zagórów, who now lives in Melbourne, Australia. I wrote him a letter, formulated 80 questions and asked my brother to translate everything to English. After a week, I received a phone call from  Mr. Jedwab, who graciously accepted my request and said he would be happy to answer my questions. Over the course of the next few months he would call me up and – with my list of questions and copies of photographs he had also sent to me in front of his eyes – take me on walks through the no-longer-existing world of Zagórów’s Jews. I would hear kantor’s singing, smell the challah bread from Prost’s bakery, watch boys playing soccer with a ball made from a pig’s bladder, see leeches sold in jars at the marketplace and a girl called Riva (Mr. Jedwab’s sister) watch over her younger brothers: Moishe, Leon, Max and Abraham…

I would sit at the Shabbat table, partake in a Jewish wedding reception, but also see Germans enter Zagórów on motorcycles, beat Jews and then take them away in Gaswagen cars… Horrifying cries could be heard over the lime-filled pits… In moments when Mr. Jedwab talked about the Holocaust I would listen intently to the silence in my phone’s receiver… All in all, our phone conversations lasted over a dozen hours. I recorded them, perhaps one day I will transcribe them all. It turned out that the life of Zagórów’s Jews was not unlike that in Konin. Since then, the once-Jewish homes that I pass when walking through Zagórów feed my imagination. All of them once had residents who loved, were born and then died, were happy and unhappy, fought for a better world and then… were savagely murdered in the forests around Kazimierz Biskupi, not far from Kleczew. Why one of the most inhuman emotions dominates on this subject matter? And it is not hate I mean, but INDIFFERENCE. Why? I have been asking this question ever since and unfortunately I still have not come up with a clear answer. But I continue looking for it. This constant quest of mine echoes that from the title of Richmond’s book.

I am a Polish language teacher and cultural activist. For over 12 years, I worked in the Kostanecki Brothers Secondary School Complex in Zagórów; since February 2015, I have been heading the Municipal Community Center in Zagórów as its director. I am also one of the co-founders of the socio-cultural Zagórów Area Appreciation Society (est. 2011). I am an advocate for culture in all its manifestations as well as for social integration. My interests include literature, ornithology and amateur road cycling.

So far, I had the opportunity to participate in To Bring Memory Back and School of Dialogue educational programs. I have organized conferences and lectures on Jewish-related topics and Jewish culture, hosted walking tours of Jewish Zagórów, cooperated with the Jewish Community in Poznań, worked on oral history (recording and transcriptions with Zagórów’s senior citizens who remember the town’s Jewish residents), I published articles about local Jews in the local press and conducted a multi-hour conversation with Mr.Leon Jedwab, a Holocaust survivor from Zagórów.

My activism stems from my wish to educate others. I believe that the vast majority of people know very little about Jews and the Holocaust and have stereotypical perceptions of Polish-Jewish relations. It is my – perhaps naïve – belief that through education and culture the world can become a better place. I hope that my activism, even if only to an infinitesimal degree, allowed local youth and residents to gain new knowledge about Jews, especially those from Zagórów, and Polish-Jewish relations, as well as fostered self-reflection and raised questions – even those most difficult and inconvenient. I find it imperative to preserve the memory of a community that had been excluded from social life, devoid of dignity, property, normal life, family and then murdered in the name of sick political ideologies. I often ask myself how all of this could have happened, especially in the time of technological progress and cultural boom of the 20^th century.

Activism