Emotional mission to restore Jewish cemetery

- 20 December 2007

FAMILY TIES: Warren with his father’s Polish defence medal

ON A heart-wrenching visit to his father's Polish home town, Warren Grynberg found desecrated Jewish headstones littering a former German police headquarters.

The stones, removed from the cemetery at Losice, had been used by the Nazis as building materials following the German occupation of the town in World War Two.

Mr Grynberg, 59, of Gants Hill, said: "It was absolutely amazing, and unbelievably disturbing."

Since his devastating discovery in 2001, Mr Grynberg has been involved in the Poland Jewish Restoration Project (PJCRP) to collect the stolen gravestones and build them into a memorial wall surrounding the cemetery.

Mr Grynberg said 3,000 Jews from the town were exterminated in the Treblinka death camp, which claimed the lives of nearly one million Jews between 1942 and 1943.

His father, Harry Grynberg, 92, was one of just 16 Losice Jews who survived the war.

He escaped the town and fled to Russia on the day of the Nazi occupation in 1939, which was the last day he saw his family.

Mr Grynberg said as well as destroying the Jewish cemetery, the Nazis had destroyed the synagogue.

The cemetery had become a public park, while the synagogue site had been covered with flats in the intervening years.

The PJCRP negotiated with civic leaders to give up the rights to the synagogue land in return for the cemetery land, to allow the restoration to take place.

Construction has begun thanks to a mammoth fundraising effort, particularly in the United States.

There is now a wall around the cemetery site, a central stairway with walkways on either side leading up to the front entrance gate and the gravestones or matzevot have been returned to the site from where they were removed by the Nazis in 1942.

In addition, the wording to the memorial is being discussed.

Mr Grynberg said: "It's been exciting, and it's also been very heart-rending, and I've sort of been tearing at my own soul really.

"Everybody wants to know where they come from, and it's far easier for people who were born over here, or in western Europe to track their genealogy.

"But if you go back to eastern Europe, especially at this time during the Holocaust, when so many millions and millions of people were destroyed, killed and murdered, it's incredibly difficult."

Mr Grynberg's father does not know what happened to his parents and sisters, and can only assume they were transported to Treblinka with more than 6,000 others from Losice in 1942.

He said more money was still needed to complete the Losice cemetery restoration.

Anyone who is interested in contributing, can contact him at losicers@aol.com.

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