BU Today Article–BU Alum Saving an Ancestral Jewish Cemetery

Saving an Ancestral Cemetery
BU alum searches for Jewish headstones used by Nazis to fortify roads

By Lara Ehrlich

Icek Wluka led his son David through the iron gates of Auschwitz. It was 1988, the first time he had returned to Poland since the war, and he remembered every inch of the camp where his seven siblings had died. Wluka showed David the barracks where he had slept from age 20 to 23, the crematorium where he had been forced to work, and the field where he had sown potatoes with a rifle pressed to his head.

Hoping to evoke the life the Nazis had ripped from him 46 years earlier, Icek brought his son four hours north to his ancestral hometown, Nowy Dwór, Poland. He wanted to show David where he came from: his house, his father’s blacksmith shop, the synagogue, and the cemetery where his father was buried. But the Nazis had purged every trace of the 4,000 Jews who once lived in Nowy Dwór. Even the cemetery was gone. The Nazis had used the caskets, sand, and bones for concrete and the matzevot (headstones) to fortify the roads for their tanks.

“There’s no sign that it ever was a cemetery,” says David Wluka (CGS’66, CAS’68, GRS’70). “It was just a big vacant field with holes.” Squatters had taken up residence on the land that “belonged to no one. There was no place to go back to, where our roots were, and see the house or go to the cemetery. We had no history we could put our hands on.”

There, the father and son said the Mourner’s Kaddish for the Jews who had been exhumed from this sacred ground, and Wluka was swept with emotion, watching his father praying in the barren field. When they left Poland, David and Icek were determined to save the cemetery, but life intervened, and it would be more than 20 years before David could revive the lost history of the town where his father was born.