"School of Dialogue" Program School Visit- Sokolow Podlaski

Submitted by Dave Fulton

 It was a great day traveling to Sierpc and learning about the village's Jewish history from a group of students trained by Forum for Dialogue - a nonprofit aimed at promoting Jewish-polish dialogue.  After a two-hour bus ride due east from Warsaw, we met the school director, who is a priest, and approximately 25 students. They were a complete delight. With the facilitation of several Dialogue teachers, we engaged in several icebreaker activities in small groups.

We then began our tour of the village, set up by the students. The first stop was of a simple monument that the town had erected noting that there had been 4000 Jews in the village, but the student guide said that there were more like 6000 Jews, comprising 75% of the town's population.

The next stop was of a grassy area where over 100 Jews were shot by the Nazis. In the photo below, a student holds up a drawing of what the original building looked like next to the open field.

Then we stopped in a newly-built shopping center where a marker was embedded on the floor to note that a synagogue used to stand at this location.  The marker stated that the synagogue burned down in the war, but one of our guides said that their research showed that instead the Nazis forced the Jews to take apart their synagogue. This student is trying to get the wording changed on the marker.

The most chilling stop on the tour was the square where the Jews were rounded up from the ghetto (which included not only the Jews from the village but also those from nearby villages) and sent to their deaths in Triblinka.  In this short video clip, one of the guides reads from a first-hand account of a boy who remembers the day the Jews started getting deported; his mother made him stay home from school that day.

We were incredibly impressed with all of the students and with what they had learned about Jewish life in their village in a relatively short period of time.  They learned much from a local man who wrote a book about the fate of the Jews in the town. Some of the students indicated that they also spoke with their grandparents to gain information. Several expressed an interest in learning more, such as what daily life was like for Jews in their village.

Were it not for this project and their work with the Forum for Dialogue, these students may have had no idea that Jews were such an important part of the fabric of their community for so many years.  I hope that future students will build on the work of this group and continue to deepen this community's understanding of and appreciation for their robust Jewish past.


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