Study trip to Silesia

At the end of April, the education department took a study trip to Silesia to learn about the Jewish history of Sosnowiec and Będzin.

We started our day in Sosnowiec (a town, approximately 80 km north-west of Krakow), where we were kindly given a walking tour through the town walking by the places of Jewish history, though often some imagination plus pictures by our tour guide were needed to grasp the realities of the past. We went to the place of the synagogue, where in between shops a plague can be found. We were also told about the story of how two children of a well-known musician in the town were sneaked out of the ghetto and saved by befriended Poles. Before going to Będzin we took a look at the Jewish cemetery, which was downhill and mostly overgrown by plants.

In Będzin we were kindly given a city tour by a member of The Cukerman’s Gate Foundation. We were given some context about the general (Jewish) history of the town and were explained how the Nazis set the Jewish quarters on fire and how some Jews managed to flee and find rescue in the church. On the way to the church cemetery, we passed the old Jewish cemetery on a slope with many trombones overgrown by nature, but we still managed to detect some tombstones with lions or at least with what people believed lions to look like without having ever seen one. 

We finished our study trip in the old prayer room of the Cukerman family that was built in the interwar period and was used as a warehouse during the war. Miraculously most of the decorating of the walls was not destroyed and is now a place for education and the preservation of the Jewish heritage.

By Meret Troll