JEWS IN THE GARDEN

One Holocaust survivor’s search for answers in his homeland.

Former investigative journalist Rakowsky documents the efforts of her cousin Sam to discover the fates of his relatives in Poland after the Holocaust. Sam had been among the workers who survived the era through the now-famous Oskar Schindler factory. After the fall of communism, he made his way back to Poland for what was to be the first of several visits in an attempt to trace the lives of various family members. The author accompanied him on several of these trips and provides detailed firsthand accounts of what transpired. Over the years, Rakowsky also used her journalistic skills to contribute to the search for answers via friends, public records, and local officials. Much of the book focuses on the rural county of Kazimierza, near Kraków, where Sam grew up. Upon returning, his first hope was to find cousin Hena, who was rumored to have survived the slaughter of her family after being discovered in hiding. This first search, however, led to a different discovery: the burial place of another family of relatives, the Dulas. Also routed out of hiding and murdered, the Dulas were buried in a small grave together on the property where they hid. For decades after, locals taunted the family living there about the “Jews in the garden” on their property. Both the Dulas and Hena’s family, the Rożeńeks, were murdered not by Germans but by fellow Poles near the end of the war. An important part of the author’s investigation involved the reality of bands of Polish resistance soldiers who systematically searched for and killed Jews in hiding just prior to Soviet occupation. In the process of discovery, both the author and her cousin came to find that memory of the war in Poland is a sensitive, selective, and politicized topic.

An intriguing look into a little-understood and largely unrecognized part of Holocaust history.