Ten years of bringing memory back (2007-2017)
by Krzysztof Czubaszek

For more than a half of the century after the end of World War 2 there was a silence about the Jews of Łuków. Nobody mentioned them, nobody cultivated a memory about their century-long presence in the town. The Shoah swept not only the people and their world, but also erased them out of the local consciousness. As if they had never existed. The breakthrough came only in 2007 when the Regional Museum in Łuków opened an exhibition dedicated to the history of the localJewish community. I was privileged to support it substantively as well as to publish an article on that topic in the concurrent edition of „Zeszyty Łukowskie” (Łuków Papers).

The exhibition was open for over six months. It wasn’t the end of bringing memory back. In 2008 I published a book „Żydzi Łukowa i okolic” (The Jews of Łuków and Its Vicinity). Three years later my website www.zydzi.lukow.pl was initiated. In 2012, on the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the ghetto in Łuków, I founded a plaque commemorating the mass execution of the Jews at theformer town hall’s courtyard. On my initiative in 2015 a monument was built atthe place where till 1944 stood the synagogue. After ten years the Regional Museum in Łuków again opens an exhibition dedicated to the local Jews, thistime the permanent one. This is a symbolic completion of the decade of restoring memory about people who co-created the town, lived and worked, were born and died there.

In the past ten years I have contacted descendants of the Jews from Łuków living in Israel, France and the USA. They shared with me their stories and miraculously saved photographs. Some of them I put on my website and into articles published in local newspapers. In the booklet Twarze. Fotografie Żydów łukowskich / Faces. The Jews of Łuków in Photographs which I prepared for the opening of the permanent exhibition in the Regional Museum in Łuków, I posted other photos and stories, among them many unique ones, extracted from family albums especially for that occasion. They save a tiny part of the world which no more exists. Thanks to them we can look into the eyes of inhabitants of Łuków who several decades ago were innocently sentenced to death. We can see happy families, laughing children, noble old men. Their lives were suddenly and brutally broken, their reality annihilated. Through the exhibition, this modest booklet and other activities – both already implemented and planned for the future – we’ve been challenging the oblivion, expressing our respect for human dignity and building a bridge between the past and the future.