Some of the Lost History of the Jews Is Hiding in Plain Sight in Poland

When Tomasz Kowal, a past champion of Poland’s Strongest Man competition, traveled to the Polish countryside earlier this month with a fellow strength athlete to lift an enormously heavy Jewish tombstone, it turned into the hot topic of the day in the local media. Why were the tattooed musclemen with shaved heads who normally pull trucks and toss kegs now yanking a Hebrew-engraved tombstone off the ground and moving it into the trunk of a car?

That answer lies in an unusual project currently underway in the Eastern European country to rescue lost tombstones of the once vibrant but now decimated Jewish community.

Strength athlete Tomasz Kowal, lifts a tombstone as a volunteer for From the Depths. (Photo courtesy: From the Depths)

Walking through towns and cities in Poland, one might stumble across a very unusual sight: playgrounds, walking paths, gazebos, and even parts of the lions’ enclosure at the Warsaw Zoo built with stones with Hebrew writing.

Digging deeper, however, it appears these are no mere stones. They are remnants of tombstones plundered from Jewish cemeteries during and after World War II, hundreds of thousands of grave markers with names and tributes -- some intricately decorated. The last physical reminder of a community that was mostly wiped out.

“The only thing we leave in this world is a good name, and it’s our name,” says Jonny Daniels, executive director of the non-profit From the Depths who is on a mission to find those gravestones and provide them reverence more fitting than serving as street décor.

Three Hebrew letters can be seen in a stone walkway in Poland. (Photo courtesy: From the Depths)

Daniels -- a 28-year-old London-born Orthodox Jew who has lived in Israel for a decade -- decided last year to relocate to Poland where he has charged himself with scouring the cities and countryside with the help of hundreds of Polish citizens who volunteer information and their time to find the plundered tombstones, which in Hebrew is known as a “matzeva.”

How the ‘Strongest Man’ in Poland lent his weight to the mission

TheBlaze spoke to Daniels by phone from his office in the Polish capital Warsaw where From the Depths set up a hotline, appealing to the public to call in Jewish tombstone sightings.

They recently got a call from a man who said he had a strange-looking stone on his property in the shape of a tree stump. He dug some dirt out from under it and saw there was Hebrew writing on it.

Daniels set out to visit the man and saw that indeed it was a unique Jewish tombstone.

“An old Polish Jewish tradition was that when a child died, the tombstone was made in the shape of a tree trunk. It was symbolic of a life being cut down early,” Daniels explained.

He proceeded to try to move the stone but it wouldn’t budge.

“The base weighed about 660 pounds and I literally couldn’t even shift it,” he recalled. He concluded they needed to get machinery to lift the stone, but the lay of the land made that plan almost impossible.

Daniels returned to his office to try to figure out a solution. A few days later, he was reviewing the latest email tips and saw in his inbox a note from Kowal, the Strongest Man champion, who asked how he could pitch in to the effort to find lost tombstones.

“I called him up and said, ‘How strong are you?’ and he laughed. ‘How is 660 pounds for you?’ and he laughed and said he might need to bring some help,” Daniels told TheBlaze.

So Daniels, Kowal (a strength athlete teammate of Kowal’s) and filmmaker Adam Fox (a childhood friend of Daniels’) headed to the cemetery to see if the Jewish child’s tombstone could be budged.

When Kowal and his friend unearthed the two-piece tombstone – which by their clenched jaws looked like a strain even for them – their undertaking elicited much interest in Poland, where they were seen as shattering the stereotype of the bulky bodied athletes, focused only on developing their exteriors. Now they were seen as seeking spiritual fulfillment and contributing to righting some of the wrongs of generations past.

Tombstones posing as street art

Daniels recounted his first major discovery of tombstones doubling as urban art when he was contacted by a Polish journalist who asked him to come visit his neighborhood park.

“I was shocked to see the park, including a pergola, was made almost entirely from matzevas, Jewish tombstones,” Daniels said.

Jonny Daniels, executive director of From the Depths points out Jewish tombstone fragments used to build a wall. (Photo courtesy: From the Depths)

“There was an epidemic before and after the war where Germans and Poles destroyed 90% of Poland’s 1,400 prewar Jewish cemeteries,” he explained.

Nine out of every ten Polish Jews were killed during the Holocaust, more than 3 million Jews slain, in addition to 3 million non-Jewish Poles who were killed.

Of the survivors, “Most did not stay in Poland so Jewish cemeteries were a free for all,” Daniels said. “Unfortunately, people went and stole tombstones and used them in a large array of uses.”

From the Depths successfully appealed to the Warsaw municipality to take all the tombstone fragments out of one park and later transport nearly 5,000 stone fragments back to the Brudno Jewish cemetery in Warsaw. Daniels noted that before the Holocaust there were 400,000 tombstones in Brudno. Today, 3,000 remain intact.

Some of Daniels’ relatives were murdered during the Holocaust, so salvaging the country’s Jewish history is personal for him as well.

“I never wanted to go to Poland,” Daniels said, adding that books and movies about the Holocaust were enough for him.

But in 2011, he ended up traveling with Glenn Beck on a visit to Auschwitz as part of a documentary project.

“As a result of being there with Glenn I understood how important it is and how much needed to be done in terms of Holocaust memory,” Daniels said.

Daniels says his current quest to locate missing tombstones aims to memorialize the community that is no more.

Jewish-Christian cooperation

To dedicate one’s time to this kind of endeavor means daily doses of pain and tragedy. That describes part of Daniels’ experience. At the same time, he has been heartened and inspired by the outpouring of goodwill from Poland’s Christian community, something he didn’t expect when he set out on his project.

His “matzeva” hotline has now gotten more than 2,000 emails and phone messages. Tombstones have been found in the most unlikely places: in a metal shop to sharpen knives, in the wall of a cowshed and in homes, even in bathroom walls.

“The list was truly endless. What we’ve seen is this remarkable outpouring of Poles helping,” Daniels said. “The incredible thing is that Poland is a very Christian country, and we have to date hundreds of volunteers all the way from Poland’s strongest man to firemen, to nuns and priests.”

Tombstones were converted into all sorts of uses, including as a sharpening tool. (Photo courtesy: From the Depths)

One of those volunteers brought Daniels to tears. He told TheBlaze:

One of the volunteers came up to me with tears in his eyes and said, “My great-grandfather was a Pole who received money from the Nazis to hunt Jews. After the war when my grandmother found out she never spoke to him again.”

He said, “This is who I am, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I completely understand if you don’t want to work with me.” At that point I had tears in my eyes and I stood up and gave him a big hug. I said, “This makes me want to work with you even more.” He’s become one of our strongest volunteers.

“People are people and what happened happened a long time ago, and people need to be given the opportunity to move forward,” Daniels said.

How volunteers helped discover a previously unknown atrocity

Daniels calls his tombstone project an “ice-breaker” to open the conversation with Poles about their country’s traumatic past.

“There is a level of guilt. Needless to say the Holocaust wasn’t their fault, but way more acted in a negative way more than a positive way,” Daniels said. “We have to be very honest with that. … This tombstone project allows us to start a process of talking.”

Polish volunteers for From the Depths go from town to town to investigate where they might find tombstones. As they speak with the elderly generation, they have also discovered mass unmarked graves.

“Millions of Jews in the Holocaust weren’t killed in concentration camps but killed in the cities and forests near them and dug their own graves,” Daniels said.

His volunteers have met Poles who were recruited by the Germans as forced laborers to dig pits or to bury Jews.

Just this week, they met an elderly woman in a town where they were removing two pieces of tombstone from the pavement. She approached them and when she learned what they were doing told them that Jews in that town had been rounded up and taken to a field and kept there for three days before being moved to a Nazi concentration camp. She said that many died in that spot which is today a cornfield before they could be transported.

Elsewhere in northern Poland, volunteers discovered a Jewish mass grave under a picnic area with a volleyball court.

Daniels said that in places where the group heard reports of mass graves, they brought ground-penetrating radar (GPR) equipment. It is against Jewish religious law to exhume bodies, but based on the data collected, he believes there are people buried in those locations.

From the Depths plans to mark the site of the cornfield as a place where Jews are believed to be buried and set up a memorial stone for them there.

Not just signs of death but also signs of life found

In another northern Polish town, volunteers going door to door asking about the location of possible tombstones met an old man who said while he had no information on tombstones, he did have something else that might interest them.

He pulled a Torah scroll out from under his couch and said that it came to him, because his next-door neighbor when he was a child was the village rabbi.

Minutes before the Jewish population was forcibly moved out, ultimately to land in the Treblinka death camp, the rabbi told the man’s father, “Please hide this for me. I’ll be back. If not give it to a Jew who will know what to do with it,” Daniels recounted the story the man told him.

The father put it under the sofa but when the family fell on hard financial times, they used it as paper for everyday use. Thus, only about 20 percent of the original scroll remains intact.

Daniels now has a special idea for the Torah scroll which he described as “the symbol of Judaism and Jewish life” and gave the example of Jews being killed as they ran into synagogues on Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in 1938, to try to save scripture scrolls.

Daniels receives the damaged Torah scroll from a man whose father promised the local rabbi he would hold onto it. (Photo courtesy: From the Depths)

“To have this scroll sit in a museum would be almost a continuation of this tragedy. In 2015, we will take this Torah scroll on a road show. Literally, around the world with a scribe, and the scroll will be completed by survivors of the Holocaust,” Daniels said. “They will write the letters in the Torah scroll. It came from Poland and will travel all around the world to survivors and will end up in in the synagogue in the Knesset [Israel’s parliament] and will be used a couple of times a week.”

“The symbolism of this – this was literally the last wish of this rabbi on the way to his death that this Torah scroll be saved and this is precisely what we’re doing. We’re bringing this Torah scroll back to life,” Daniels told TheBlaze.

But for that ambitious undertaking his group needs support which “enables us to uncover and reinstate this Jewish heritage and history and bring back the memory of the people that were lost,” Daniels said.

Daniels said that when he launched the non-profit, the group intended to raise only private funding, and thus not be bound by possible restrictions tied to government funding. “All of our support comes from grassroots,” including contribution from Glenn Beck’s charity Mercury One, Daniels said.

The effort to save the memory of Poland’s Jews was in the news this week when a town in the center of the country faced an outcry after developing a construction plan that would have converted a Jewish cemetery into a residential housing complex. The plan is now on hold.

For more information on the work to salvage the memory of the Polish Jewish community, visit From the Depths website at this link.