Łapsze Niżne

From the start, school students participating in the project insisted that their walking tour be held in Niedzica, where some of them live and thus know inside out. As a result, students were able to correctly identify sites they learned about from – among others – senior citizens of Spisz, yet another town in the area. This manifests itself in their film documents a student-led interview with a female Spisz resident, which was conducted in the regional dialect. Subtitles prepared by the film crew make it possible to follow the conversation.

The film and the search for information about the Jewish community opened the way for what was the ultimate goal of the project – an urban game prepared for a group of 5th graders in Nidzica. From the outset, school students organizing the game ensured that it is more than a recapitulation of what they had learned in the course of the workshops and aimed for arousing curiosity and engaging its participants. Completing each task of the game rendered a clue regarding the next stop and the task to come.

This way, game participants located a former school, Fray’s shop, an inn, a timber mill and the site of the former synagogue. Apart from the puzzles to be solved and stories to be told, the game offered participants a chance to taste matzoh, to name just one example.

School students from Łapsze Niżne also took care of their local Jewish cemetery, conducting cleanup works and preparing plaques pointing the way to its forest location.

Photos: K. Czubińska, J. Sarnecka

Project cofinanced thanks to the generosity of Friends of the Forum and individual donors and institutions from Poland and abroad supporting Forum for Dialogue.