Thursday, June 11, 2015

Holocaust victims, Pages of Testimony and persons buried at this cemetery

Holocaust victims most likely had relatives who had died before the second World War
In the effort to find out more about those buried at this cemetery, I use Pages of Testimony and  other Holocaust related documents.
F.ex. if a person born around 1880 became a Holocaust victim, it is possible that his/her parents, siblings, spouses or children died before the Holocaust and are buried at the cemetery. 

Identification
Sometimes information from Pages of Testimony about parents, siblings etc. may help identify the family names of some of those buried in Lubaczow.

Pages of Testimony

Relatives who submitted Pages of Testimony to Yad Vashem believed their relatives were murdered in the Holocaust. Given the circumstances of a war starting in Sept 1939, with a period of Soviet occupation from Oct 1939 to the end of June 1941, the relatives living far away may not have known all the details of when exactly their relatives died or if they, in a few cases, died of natural causes or if they, in most cases, were murdered. What they knew was that at the end of the Second World War, their relatives were no longer alive.

Lubaczow Yizkor List
Relatives made a Lubaczow Yizkor list in the 1950's in Tel Aviv. In the beginning I thought this was a list of Holocaust victims, but I am now more and more convinced that though most of the persons listed were murdered in Holocaust, there are also several names for relatives who died before the Holocaust.
Two reasons for this:
1. There were no graves for those murdered in the Holocaust relatives, so the relatives in Israel conducted Yizkor ceremonies in Israel.
2. For those relatives who had died before the war in Lubaczow, they had no possibility to go to the Jewish cemetery in Lubaczow to visit the graves. I believe they added the names of those in this second group so that their relatives would be mentioned and prayed for in the YIZKOR ceremonies they conducted in Israel. 

Future comparison of Yizkor list, Pages of Testimony, Gravestones and Death Register
Now with the Death Register covering the years Sept 1914 - Dec 1938 and locating graves matching  those in the Death register, I have found at least one grave of a person listed on a Page of Testimony, and a few more listed on the Yizkor list. I will come back to this later.
 

Holocaust victims as part of this cemetery project

Through this cemetery project I decided to include information about:

1. The Holocaust victims who were born in Lubaczow and later lived elsewhere in Poland or in Europe.

2. The Holocaust victims who were born in Lubaczow and lived their lives in Lubaczow.

3. Those who were born on other places, but through marriage and their work lived in Lubaczow.

4. Those who during the war came to or were deported to Lubaczow and then were murdered there.

They have no graves.

They should be remembered.

                                                                  ת.נ.צ.ב.ה

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