commemoration events and publications.
To support their educational activities, they rely on the various elements present in the Park of Survivors:
The trees of memory: “One of the survivors suggested the creation of a place which is devoted to the survivors, which is a connection between the past and the present. She initiated planting trees and, then, there were almost 300 trees planted. There are 620 of them today. Each of them symbolizes at least one family. Whole families often survived thanks to the survival of one person. The trees of memory are also an important element in our education because we teach the stories of those families before the war and what their stories were after the war. […] I believe that this is one of the chances of commemorating the victims, teaching empathy, and allowing our students and pupils to find themselves in the numbers representing the genocide.”
The monument of the Righteous Among the Nations: “It contains the plaques with the names of the Righteous, those who were nominated by the Yad Vashem Institute […] who were rewarded with the medals of the Righteous Among the Nations. The memorial was unveiled in 2009 (with 6,000 names) and in 2014, more than 200 other names were included. Only two people come from Łódź, but this element helps us to talk, especially to foreign groups.”
The Żegota memorial: a Polish organization which was established to save the lives of Jews during WWII.
Jan Karski bench: “Jan Karski is important in our education; everybody knows who he was and what role he played during WWII and in Polish-Jewish dialogue. He is also important from the perspective of Łódź because he came from Łódź - he was born here in 1914.”
Then she exposed the main challenge they are facing: big groups of Israeli students arriving in several buses and not wanting to take part in the Dialogue Center’s activities. “They are not using our exhibitions; they want to see the park, to have a ceremony, but they do not look at the exhibition in the Center. They have their own education. This is one of my greatest problems here. How to solve it, to make it elegant and correct and to make people aware that we are an important place on the map of memory. We wouldn’t like to just be a place where the toilet is used, where people eat their sandwiches.”
She finished her presentation by mentioning various projects organized by the Dialogue Center, and with which they had real dialogue and connection with the groups. They once had a beautiful artistic project between two theaters, one coming from Israel and the other from Poland. In these groups, one Polish woman and one Israeli woman had a grandparent connected with Łódź and the history of the Second World War. The Polish woman was the granddaughter of Jankiel Herszkowicz, who was a singer from the Warsaw ghetto and who stayed in Łódź after the war. As for the Israeli artist, her grandmother was in the Łódź ghetto. For the anniversary of the grand “Sperre”, their performance was staged five times in the theater and outside in the open air. The grand “Sperre” happened in September 1942, in the harshest period of the history of the ghetto, when everybody who was not capable of working was deported, mainly old and sick people, as well as children under 10 years old. Speaking about the whole project, Dr. Podolska said, “It is mostly about the process, the process of creation, […] and whatever was going on between them and between us was the most valuable.”
She also mentioned a European project, gathering young people in their twenties coming from Norway, Germany and Poland. During their stay, they walk around Łódź, go to the archives and learn about the history of people living there. The objective of their stay is to be involved in memory projects and to prepare projects for teenagers. They have to be creative and during every edition some ideas appear to be very interesting. For Dr. Joanna Podolska, “There is no better idea than to propose a project to be prepared by young people for young people.”
The last project she spoke of was “The Children of Bałuty”. It consists of old photographs of children of the Łódź ghetto which were painted on the walls by artists. They were painted in the same area where the Roma camp was established. The children had different origins - Polish, Jewish and Roma - but they are not introduced as such. Their fate was identical and they are presented in the universal value of simply being a child and having been persecuted.
These three projects are different examples of what the Dialogue Center in Łódź organizes to commemorate the tragic past of the city and to educate young people in this matter. Dr. Joanna Podolska stressed that they have really far-reaching educational activities and various projects that can be set up with schools. Teachers are welcome to contact them and the Dialogue Center can adapt and travel to the schools with their educational activities.