The meetings with these relatives are thus part of the process of remembering and commemorating the victims of persecution and murder. What is more, often these items are the only ones left that can testify to the carefree life the father or brother led before his persecution and murder.
The returns of the objects and the families’ reactions are a confirmation of ITS’ time-consuming and intensive efforts in this regard. In 2016, for example, seventy-five-year-old Joost de Snoo - who was named after his murdered father - held a photo of his parents and himself as a small child in his hands for the very first time. His father died when he was four years old. In the fall of 2017, Wanda Różycka-Bilnik, the daughter of Armia Krajowa soldier Czesław Bilnik, received her father’s pocket watch.
“All I can remember is that my sister and I cried and screamed when those strange men forced their way into our flat and took my father with them.” Czesław and his wife had cared for wounded partisans and hidden them in their home. It was when he was arrested by the Gestapo in late 1943 that Wanda last saw her father. He was deported first to the Gross-Rosen and then to the Neuengamme concentration camps. He died in the tragic sinking of the Cap Arcona in the Bay of Lübeck in May 1945, shortly before liberation. “Nothing else of my father’s has survived…I’m never going to part with it [the pocket watch] again. I might even take it with me to my grave.”
The family of Czesław Bilnik