The Staszow Jews were forcibly assembled in the Market Square at 8 am that morning, and about 20 were murdered on the spot and subsequently buried in a mass grave in the cemetery. Just last November, after 40 years of searching, we have located this mass grave by an accidental discovery.
In their sadistic efforts to obliterate all traces of Jewish life (and death), the Gestapo on that grim day ordered the approximately 1000 tombstones in the 120 year-old cemetery to be uprooted. Most were laid down in the town square and in side streets, to be used as paving for the muddy walkways in the winter of '42 - '43.
When World War II ended the Mayor of Staszow ordered the stones to be dug up and stored in a warehouse. With no Jewish residents any longer in the town, nor any authorities the Mayor might have consulted about these stones, he was said to have sold the gravestones -mostly carved from sturdy sandstone - to construction companies. The tombstones, as such, disappeared forever.
On November 8, 1992, exactly 50 years to the day after Block Sunday, we dedicated a Holocaust Memorial Monument on the site of the Jewish Cemetery, which Polish friends and I had helped restore after half a century of its desecration and abandonment A number of Christian families, hearing of the restoration project, came forward and presented us with 10 gravestones they had preserved in their gardens and backyards We re-erected these stones alongside the Memorial Monument as a symbolic minyan , a silent quorum of witnesses to a devastated burial ground.
After that event, there seemed to be no further traces of those 1000 gravestones that had stood in the Staszow cemetery. Three years ago, just as I was embarking on my annual journey to Staszow, a letter from an Israeli arrived. He told me that he had visited Staszow and seen a stone with Hebrew inscription in the courtyard of a house on Koscielna Street.
Following his tip, I went to an imposing, meticulously maintained residence owned by a high school teacher. "Yes", 'Mr. Z told me, he had a stone in his courtyard. He had to have it lifted up in order to install a gas line on his property. He had left it propped against a wall. It was too heavy to move further. In the gloomy November dusk, I slowly read the Hebrew inscription, which was clearly visible. It was the gravestone of my grandfather.
The next morning under a grey overcast sky, al said Kaddish and we laid my grandfather's stone hack on the earth, incredibly, the clouds parted and a shaft of sunlight illuminated Staszow. After further investigation, I discovered that the Z property had been the Gestapo Headquarters daring de Nazi occupation. Later, it had housed the offices of the Communist Security Police (UB), and had also once been a military barracks. Mr Z. now revealed that there were at least 40 more Jewish gravestones in the courtyard and the floor of his garage.
I was determined to recover every single one of those stones. I offered to repave his courtyard with my own chosen, workmen in exchange for the stones. At first, he agreed, but later he then changed his mind. I negotiated with him for three years as he escalated his price from year to year because of "inflation" and his insistence on using his own "quality" workmen. I never knew whether my questioning the "morality" of the daily treading on these sacred stones had any real effect on this small town school teacher.
At the start of this project to recover the stones, l went to the German Embassy in, Warsaw explaining it was apparent how these stones got to the Gestapo Headquarters in the first place, and it would be a nice gesture for the German Government to help defray some of the $5,000 cost of their recovery. "Mr, Goldfarb," the young and sympathetic German Counsellor assured me, "We will cover the entire cost of this project."
But the difficult negotiations with Mr. Z continued to remain at an impasse, as his price rose at one point to $10000. Meanwhile, the German offer of help, limited to $5,000, was nearing its expiration deadline of January 1, 2003. At this juncture, Rabbi Michael Schudrich, the Chief Rabbi of Poland, who had made many invaluable efforts to resolve the situation, came to the rescue. He asked Eliza Chodorowska of Warsaw to help. Eliza, a conscientious and diplomatic young woman, had top-level governmental experience dealing with difficult matters regarding Jewish issues. Miss Chodorowska convinced a trio of experienced mediators to travel to Staszow. The three were Father Michal Czajkowski, an ecumenical leader in promoting Christian-Jewish relations, Joanna Branska, president of the Polish-Israel Friendship Society; and Mr. Laszynski ,a prominent journalist for Rzeczpospolita a, widely-read national newspaper,
The 'haggling' reached an end when Mr. Z accepted $7,500
It took a crew of workmen from nearby Tarnow just three days to extricate what turned out to be 120 gravestones from Koscielna Street property. In addition, 400 smaller of stones were recovered. which are being incorporated into two freestanding concrete Memorial walls The gravestones have risen again in long orderly rows under the cemetery's tall acacia trees. Returning from their 60-year humiliating exile, the stones of Staszow silently celebrate a belated triumph.