Every year, Anna Brzyska, a Leader of Dialogue from Brzesko and head of the Association Memory and Dialogue. Common History works with the local cultural center and Mayor’s Office to organize a competition for high school students, called “We Know Your Names.” The aim of this competition is to inspire young people from Brzesko to rediscover the history of Jewish families which used to live in their town and neighboring villages before the war. Since the 4th edition of the competition is on its way, most students have already submitted their projects. Now it’s the jurors who have a task in front of them: choosing the winners. Each entry testifies to the effort put into researching the local Jewish heritage and tracking the individual fates of Jewish families living in the region by each competitor. This hard work is motivated not just by an attempt to win the prize, but by a sense that these efforts help to keep the memory of the Brzesko Jewish community alive.
On her Facebook page devoted to commemorating the Jews of Brzesko, Anna Brzyska shares her impressions about the competition: “Brzesko is a small town … before the war, Jews comprised over 60% of its inhabitants, now not a single one remained. And, as it usually happens in former shtetls, the memory of Jewish Brzesko started to vanish. For the town’s young inhabitants, Jews became something alien and exotic, distant from their everyday experience. So it moves me when I read the submitted projects, when I realize how much work the students did, how many sources they found to rediscover the history of Brzesko’s Jews, to learn about Jewish culture and traditions … that’s exactly why we are organizing this event.”
The official ceremony announcing the winners was planned for April, but due to the pandemic the organizers decided to postpone it till fall. Congratulations for everyone involved in rediscovering the Jewish history of Brzesko!
