by Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

July 30, 2009

What really surprised the Schonwetters was how many people came when the cemetery was dedicated.

“I didn’t expect much,” said Mark Schonwetter of Livingston. “I figured a few people would come and say a couple of words, and then they would open the cemetery and we would walk through.”

A Holocaust survivor, Schonwetter was born and raised in Brzostek, Poland, where fewer than 10 people out of a Jewish population of 450-500 survived the war, including him, his mother, and his sister. Schonwetter declined to give his age, but was still a child in the 1940s. The town had a total prewar population of about 1,500.

On June 14, the town dedicated its restored Jewish cemetery. Schonwetter attended the ceremony together with his two daughters, Isabella Schonwetter Fiske of Livingston and Ann Schonwetter Arnold of Norwood. Also there were his sister, Dr. Sophia Joachims, a dentist who lives in Israel; her husband, Dr. Henry Joachims; and their eldest child, Dalia Marom.

Instead of just a few people, a crowd of about 600 attended the event — area residents, including entire families; dignitaries, among them the chief rabbi of Poland; the town mayor; reporters; and even the town priest.

Ceremony participants donned kipot before entering the cemetery, which is now slightly smaller than the original, through the wrought-iron gate with a Hebrew inscription, and found baskets containing rocks to place on the headstones, or matzevot.

Many of those markers were returned by the townspeople, who had found them in junkyards and in the masonry work in their own homes. When they heard that the cemetery was to be restored, they began to donate the stones, until, by the time of the dedication, about 50 had been recovered. Among them was the matzeva of Schonwetter’s grandfather, Fischel Schonwetter.

The dedication included speeches, a shofar blowing, recitation of prayers, and some Jewish folkloric rituals.

After leaving the graveyard, the commemoration continued at the local high school, where students sang songs in Hebrew and townspeople served both Jewish- and Polish-style homemade foods and kosher cuisine.

“It’s good to see that people realize that whatever happened at that time shouldn’t happen again,” said Schonwetter.

The day’s events were organized through the efforts of anthropologist Jonathan Webber, UNESCO Professor of Jewish and Interfaith Studies at the University of Birmingham in England, and his wife, Connie Webber, managing editor of the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization and a member of the executive committee of the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies at Oxford University.

Jonathan Webber has been studying the Jewish communities of southern Poland for more than 20 years; his book on the subject, Rediscovering Traces of Memory: The Jewish Heritage of Polish Galicia, will be published by Indiana University Press in August. But the Brzostek cemetery project was personal. His grandfather was born and lived in the town before the family left for England in 1876. Webber felt that a restored cemetery “would help restore Jewish memory in the town,” according to his wife, who spoke to NJJN from her home in England.

But while a private memorial in the cemetery, would have been “fine for doing honor to the dead,” said Connie Webber, “it does not restore to the town the public memory that there were Jews there.” So in organizing the day’s events, the couple reached out to the town’s residents, sending invitations to every household, and arranged for a plaque in memory of all the Brzostek Jews who perished to be placed on the wall of the town hall.

‘Really heartbreaking’

At the cemetery, three new memorial headstones were dedicated, including one for Schonwetter’s father, Israel, who had been the leader of the local Jewish community.

Schonwetter said he tried to keep his emotions in check at the ceremony. “It was like I was holding on but not crying — I was trying not to show my wet eyes,” he said. “I don’t remember well my father, but the thought of it all was really heartbreaking.”

During the ceremony, he retold the story of his father’s heroic decision in 1942 to die with the community rather than save himself.

This month, Isabella Fiske, who was named for her grandfather, repeated the story for a guest at her Livingston home. Schonwetter had planned to join them, but was called away to a funeral and spoke with NJJN separately.

“One night, as they often did, the police came and took my grandfather away for questioning,” Fiske related. “A few hours later, my grandmother heard a knock on the door.”

It was the wife of the police chief, warning her that the Gestapo was coming for Israel’s wife and kids. They had told her, said Fiske, “‘We’re rounding everyone up tomorrow and we want to make sure they’re here.’”

The grandmother turned to a non-Jewish neighbor, her husband’s loyal employee Piwat. “He said, ‘Leave your son here. Go and take your daughter and I’ll get you all out,’” Fiske said. “My grandmother took all her valuables and money. She brought some money to the jail where they had my grandfather; because they were prominent in the community, the police knew them. She put the money down and walked out.”

The family later found out that the police chief opened the jail cell and told Israel to take a walk. He did leave the jail, but soon returned. “‘I know exactly what I’m doing,’” Fiske said he told the police chief. “‘I know exactly what’s happening. But I am the leader of this community. I will stand with my people.’”

Later, the family confirmed that Israel Schonwetter died in Brzostek in 1942 with the Jewish community. His wife and children got out with the aid of Piwat, who helped them find shelter. After the war, they returned briefly to Brzostek to sell their home, then moved to Tarnow, where they lived until 1957. Mark Schonwetter attended law school in Poland; in 1957, when he was in his 20s, they left for Israel, where his sister settled. In 1961, he came to the United States, eventually settling in New Jersey.

Guilt and redemption

During the family’s five-day stay in Poland, they saw signs that Poles are still wrestling with their difficult past.

“‘You were the little boy who lived in the house,’” Schonwetter said one man told him, as the family stopped in front of Schonwetter’s childhood home. The man took a childhood photo of Schonwetter and his sister out of his wallet. “‘I keep this with me all the time, to remember.’” The man was the son of Piwat, the family’s hero, who saved them from almost certain death time and again.

Some Brzostek residents told tales revealing guilt borne through the decades; others were less remorseful — like the woman, a child at the time, who, according to Fiske, told them, “Remember, it was the Germans, not the Poles.”

The Schonwetters were inclined to forgive, or at least not judge. “Not one Jew has lived in the town since 1942,” Ann Arnold said. But for the June events, the community “rallied and said, ‘These were our people, whatever our parents did or did not do or were afraid to do. We as their children want to recognize that there were people who lived here, who grew up with our families.’ They embraced the situation and they embraced us.”

Fiske wrote, in an e-mail, “Upon thanking the mayor for this wonderful day, he responded by saying, ‘Don’t thank me. This had to be done and I am sorry it has taken so long.’ To hear these words spoken and to know that the future generations will learn the true history of their town makes me feel that there is still hope and that the brutality that my father, aunt, grandmother, and millions of other Jews experienced will not be forgotten.” 

The Webbers offer additional insight. “People are not doing this because they need to make it up to the Jews, but because they remember,” said Connie Webber. “They miss their Jews.”

For Mark Schonwetter, who returned to the town only once before, briefly, with his family 18 years earlier, the trip was “an opportunity to come and bring back my father’s memory. It was very exciting for me that my two daughters wanted to be there to put up a plaque in memory of their grandfather.”

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