WARSAW, Poland — The son of a Holocaust survivor fulfilled a yearslong personal mission Wednesday with the unveiling of memorials in a Polish forest that honor hundreds of Jews murdered by German forces during World War II, among them dozens of members of his father’s family.
Michael Pomeranc, an American, was joined by relatives as well as the families of other Holocaust survivors to commemorate all those who were killed at the site of the former German labor camp of Adampol.
In a speech, Pomeranc spoke of growing up as a child in the United States with no graves of his murdered ancestors to visit.
“We never had the opportunity to lay a flower for any of our beloved ones who died here,” Pomeranc said at the ceremony. “But we will mourn them today. Their souls in heaven will always be with us.”
The ceremony took place at the site of a Nazi labor camp where Jews were forced to work in fields before they were murdered in 1943. During World War II the area was under the occupation of Nazi Germany, which used Jews as slave labor and carried out mass executions in death camps like Auschwitz but also at many other places which — like Adampol — have received very little attention.
Jewish and Catholic prayers accompanied the event, which was attended by local school children and watched by the descendants of Holocaust survivors far beyond Poland on a livestream.
The Israeli ambassador spoke, while a letter was read from the U.S. ambassador. There are two living survivors of Adampol, but they do not live in Poland and were not able to make the trip.
Pomeranc, a prominent New York City hotelier, recalled visiting the site 25 years ago with his father, Jack Pomeranc, who managed to escape the camp and joined Jewish partisans in blowing up train tracks and buildings the Nazis occupied, seeking to sabotage their war effort.
While Jack, known then as Jankiel, survived along with a brother and two sisters, the Nazis killed his parents, two little sisters aged 3 and 4, aunts, uncles and cousins.
“He had tremendous anxiety and regrets and fear,” he recalled of his father, who died last year. On that visit 25 years ago, he was “crying and apologizing to his family that he wish he saved them, and he could have but he didn’t and should have.”
“And at that time, I understood very well that this was something I needed to put closure to for him, since he was traumatized all his life from it,” Pomeranc told The Associated Press on the eve of the commemorations.
At the ceremony he said: “Today we bring closure to this chapter in our lives.”
The commemoration included the unveiling of a memorial with the names of 73 of over 600 victims, those who could be identified so far.
The aim is to retore the identities of as many of the victims as possible — and preserve the memory of them all.
The commemoration is also part of a larger effort by the Jewish community in Poland to commemorate the sites of mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust that have been neglected and remain unmarked decades after World War II.
Most of the 3.3 million Jews who lived in Poland before the German invasion of 1939 were murdered in the Holocaust. Only in recent years has the office of Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and a group called Zapomniane (Forgotten) been able to systematically locate the sites of mass burials and mark them for future generations.
They are aided by noninvasive technologies, which allow researchers not to touch or remove the human remains, thus respecting the dictates of Jewish law.
The technologies, used together with the witness testimony of Jack Pomeranc and local people, helped researchers to identified more than 20 possible mass grave sites in Adampol, according to Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist who has carried out years of research at the site.