Our visit to Zambrow included sites near Zambrow that related to the history–actually the end of the the history–of Zambrow’s Jews. I had done a lot of research before leaving for Poland about how the last Jews of Zambrow died. I was aided by my work as editor of the English translation of Sefer Zambrow–the Zambrow Yizkor book, a history of Jewish Zambrow from its beginnings to its end. Before we left home, I emailed our guide about what I had discovered from the book about two mass murder sites, and requested that he arrange for us to visit them.

The information is a bit unclear, but this is what the book reports. A chapter in the book is entitled “The Four Graves” and was written by Joseph Savetsky, identified as an important officer of the Zembrover Landsmanschaft organization, and the the son-in-law of Chaycheh Koziol the Baker. (It’s possible, then, that Savetsky was not from Zambrow but had married into a Zambrow family.) It is unclear what the source of Savetsky’s information about the “four graves” was, and so, as with all historical sources, this must be kept in mind.

The first grave, Savetsky writes, was at the long military trenches in Szumowo. On August 19, 1941, “the Germans selected 1500 men, the best among the Jews, along with the Rabbi and the Yeshiva Headmaster, and drove them all off to Szumowo, into a church building, or a church school, divided them up into groups, in accordance with their crafts, by age, and until 10 o’clock at night, the trench in the Glebocz Forest became filled with the dead, and the living dead…”

Another contributor to the Yizkor book, Yitzchak Golda, writes that these men “were driven into the synagogue building, and from there, by truck, fifty people at a time, they were taken to the execution place in the Glebocz Forest. At ten o’clock that night – all of them were already dead.” In the Yizkor book, this day, August 19, 1941, is referred to as “Black Tuesday.”

The Second Mass Grave, according to Savetsky, is in the Kosaki Forest. There, on September 4, 1941, an additional 1500 Jews, 900 from Zambrow and about 600 from a neighboring town called Rutki, were all “thrown alive into a mass grave. The earth at that location heaved for hours on end, like fermenting dough – until those who were buried this way eventually asphyxiated and died, and no longer twitched in their grave. Wild grass grows there today, dogs howl on dark nights. The ‘God-fearing gentiles’ cross themselves, when they travel past this place…”

A third grave, according to the Yizkor book was at the military barracks in Zambrow, where, on December 27, 1942, the Nazis poisoned about 200 elderly and sick Jews. And the fourth and final grave, Savetsky writes, were “somewhere in the gas ovens of Auschwitz…”

My great grandmother Sheindl, my great aunts Puah and Hinda, and Puah’s son David, apparently met their end in Auschwitz Berkenau (or, possibly, in Treblinka; see zambrow.blogspot.com/2015/02/auschwitz-or-treblinka.html.) However, I wanted to pay my respects to the dead of Zambrow by visiting these other grave sites.

After we left Lomza on our way to Zambrow, we visited the mass grave in the Kosaki Forest. The previous day, we had gone to the mass murder site of Kazamierz Biskupi, my first introduction to mass graves in forests. The site in the Kosaki Forest was about 15-20 minutes away from Lomza, not too far from the road. I spotted the now becoming familiar sign indicating that we were at an official extermination site in Poland (of which, there are many).

“Pomnik” refers to a monument; “Zaglady” means “extermination.” The swords and flame indicate a Polish official historical site.

As at the earlier mass murder site at Kazamierz Biskupi, there were two memorials, one from the Communist Era that did not refer directly to Jewish victims (see photo on right) and a later post-communist memorial that was specifically Jewish in nature (photo on left).

The date of the murder is 1942, and the fact that the stone only mentions Jews from Lomza, raises the possibility that it was not the exact same site referred to in the Yizkor book. This points out the difficulties in matching up actual facts on the ground with information transmitted to Jews who survived the Holocaust and then, a decade or two later, written down by them or others in Yizkor books.

Once again, I was confronted by the contradiction between the pastoral scene I was witnessing and the horror of the events I was commemorating. When is a forest not a forest? When it lies on top of the bodies and souls of thousands mercilessly killed.

Forest and memorial between Lomza and Zambrow

We left this site to visit Zambrow. While in Zambrow, we sat at a cafe where we steeled ourselves for our next destination: the killing site near Szumowo in the Glebocz Forest.

Our fearless guide, Jakub Lysiak, had been to many mass murder site in Poland and Ukraine, but he had never been to the one we set out to find. As we left Zambrow, the landscape turned to fields and woods. The paved roads gradually ended and we found ourselves driving on dirt roads. On either side were fields. The details on Jakub’s GPS faded and now showed only open land. We encountered no other cars. I figured we were lost. I didn’t know if Jakub knew where he was going and I was not about to ask him. My wife was becoming more and more nervous. I was trying to keep my cool and trust in Jakub’s judgment. I don’t recall now if I said anything to Jakub such as “it’s okay if we don’t find it,” but Jakub was not about to give up. I wanted to find the resting place of 1500 Zambrow Jews in the Glebocz Forest for personal reasons, but as we drove deeper and deeper into the Polish fields, I began to realize that Jakub, as a man whose mission it is to document Jewish life in Poland, wanted to find the site as much as I did.

We encountered an occasional farmer. Jakub stopped his vehicle, rolled down his window and asked, most politely, “Pardon me, can you tell me the way to the mass grave?” I thought perhaps that people would think he was crazy or would respond with something along the lines of “what are you talking about?” But that never happened. Everyone we asked knew about the existence of the mass murder site. And everyone gestured and tried to explain the route to get there.

Eventually we saw a tractor coming toward us. Jakub stopped and asked, in Polish words that were becoming familiar to me, “Pardon me, can you tell me the way to the mass grave?” The farmer gave him directions, which could not have been very specific given the landscape. This was the scene as I snapped this photo from inside Jakub’s vehicle:

Apparently this farmer’s directions were no more specific than the previous ones Jakub received, for about five minutes later, we encountered another farmer, this one driving a large tractor. Once again Jakub asked where the mass murder site was, and once again the man explained in words and gestures.

Apparently, everyone around this area knew what happened during World War II. Not one person responded, “mass murder site, what are you talking about?” I don’t think it would be a stretch to infer from this that, in the fall of 1941, everyone in this area knew what happened to the Jews of Zambrow in the forests near their homes.

By this time, my wife was really besides herself. Jakub was calm and determined, but my wife and I were both anxious. I held my wife’s hand. Never had we felt so alone, so removed from anything identifying the world we know. Our defenses were beginning to break down. A taste perhaps–a very small one–of the terror experienced by our 1500 brethren on a journey to an unknown destination in August, 1941.

It took another 10-15 minutes of driving before we saw a sign and Jakub announced we had found the place. The badly bent sign marked and spot and read: “National Memory Site.”

We found ourselves in a wooded area. On the other side of the road from the sign was a marker. On the marker were some extinguished candles. We had found the place. The site where, on August 19, 1941, some 1500 Jews from Zambrow where killed. Perhaps some of my relatives were among them.

Forest and memorial for the 1500 Zambrow Jews killed on August 19, 1941 in the Aktion known as “Black Tuesday”

I had come, 74 years later, to pay tribute to them. I said the mourner’s kaddish. I walked around, silently. I love to be in nature, and had I not known the terrible history of this place, I could have felt at peace in the pastoral silence. Instead, I looked at the ground, the trees, the stones, and could think only of the humans that lay buried beneath.

The Nazis were no dummies–they had chosen this place precisely because of its remoteness, so that their crimes would not be remembered.

As I walked around silently, I noticed a large stone on the ground.

I approached, and, lo and behold, it was a matzeva, a Jewish burial marker. What was it doing here? There was no explanation. Someone must have taken the stone from a cemetery and brought it to this site. Maybe the person found or had this stone and decided to dump it at this site of Jewish death. Or maybe someone decided that putting the stone here, of all places, would be to honor the victims. A lonely grave stone at a very lonely place.

It was not easy to find this place. Now that we had, and I’d taken in what I could, I felt reduced to a sense of shattering numbness. We climbed back in Jakub’s vehicle for our last destination of the day: Treblinka.