WJU Students and Classrooms without Borders: Starachowice

Following our visit to Lublin, we again boarded buses and began our drive to Krakow, the last stop on our trip. Before we reached the city, however, we visited Starachowice, a small Polish city that was once home to a thriving Jewish community. The fate of the region's Jews has been detailed in Christopher Browning's outstanding study of the camps established by the Germans, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave Labor Camp. The book is based on the stories of survivors of the camps and, fortunately for those on the trip, we were accompanied by one of those survivors, the previously mentioned Howard Chandler.

Press Conference in Starachowice

The first stop in Starachowice was at city hall. Here, Howard and his family continued a years-long effort to have the round-up and murder of the community's Jewish population commemorated by the city. We witnessed a press-conference in which the mayor, Howard, and other members of the city council took part. During the meeting, the establishment of a memorial dedicated to the Starachowice's Jews was finally announced.

This struggle to commemorate the city's Jews highlights the difficulty that Polish state and society has had in coming to grips with the Holocaust. While it was the Germans and not the Poles who murdered Jews, and numerous Polish Catholics risked their lives to save Jews, it is also clear that pre-war Polish society was an increasingly anti-Semitic place and that for many Poles, Jews simply no longer had a place in a Polish nation state. The imposition of Communism after the war ensured that the fate of Polish Jew's during the Holocaust never received the attention and thought that it deserved. It is only during the Polish state's independent existence since the early 1990s that such issues have bubbled to the surface.

This indifference and even hostility to the past was evident when we accompanied Howard on a tour of the old Jewish quarter of Starachowice; the municipal administration assigned two police officers to accompany our group and as we moved walked through the city, the curious stares and hostile glares stares of the city's inhabitants were ever present.

The Old Jewish Market Square

Howard took us to the old Jewish market square, now refurbished into an inviting and comfortable public space that was quite similar to others found throughout Europe. After pointing out the house he grew up in -- and then lost during the war -- Howard discussed pre-war Jewish life in Starachowice before turning to life under German occupation, including the fate of his family. It was in this square that the round-up and selection of the ghetto's Jews took place.


Our final stop in Starachowice was at the old Jewish cemetery. It lay untended for years and houses continually pushed up to and even into its grounds as the city grew in the post-war era, but a volunteer group in the region has now taken it upon itself to care for the cemetery in an attempt to rescue the Jewish heritage of the community.

This stop was one of the most powerful of the trip; not only did we witness how Polish society is still coming to terms with the past, but we also heard the words of a survivor. He described a world that simply no longer exists, except in the memories of those who witnessed it. His survival was (and is) not merely the triumph of an individual over the Nazis machinery of death, but it is also one of the few remaining links to a civilization destroyed by the rise of nationalism, Stalinism, and, most violently, Nazism.