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Image source: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Ziemi Kutnowskiej
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[Not included in the original book]
by Marysia Galbraith and David Goren
The Jewish cemetery in Zychlin is located about 600 meters east of the town center, 90 meters north of Lukasinskiego Street. It is surrounded by farmland with a farmhouse to the east. The cemetery is enclosed by a chainlink fence, with an unlocked iron wrought gate facing the road. No signs on the road mark the location of the cemetery, though it is indicated on Google Maps. The size of the cemetery is variously listed as 1.25 or 1.46 hectares.
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| View of the Jewish cemetery in Zychlin Image source: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Ziemi Kutnowskiej |
The cemetery was established during the first half of the 18th century, around the time the first Jewish settlers arrived in Zychlin. According to the 1928 list of real estate owned by the Jewish Religious Community in Zychlin, there were two cemetery plots: an old one, and a new one. Their combined value was about 8,000 zlotys, and they produced and income of about 600 zlotys annually. A caretaker building was located in the old cemetery. Since there are no further details about the location of the new cemetery plot, Polish historian Tomasz Kawski suggests that new land was probably purchased next to the old cemetery. On maps of the town from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as on contemporary Google Maps, the cemetery is shown as covering a square-shaped area.
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| Zychlin satellite map showing the location of the Jewish cemetery Image source: Google Maps |
Testimonies indicate that, during the Second World War, the Germans shot Jews from Zychlin at the cemetery and that numerous other victims were buried in the cemetery grounds. During the liquidation of the ghetto in March 1942, when over 3,000 Jews from Zychlin were deported to the Chełmno death camp, there were mass executions in the town. Postwar testimonies at the Polish Institute for National Memory include the names of 176 of the approximately 180-200 Jews who were murdered on the spot and buried in the cemetery, including sick and infirm people, and more than twenty children (the list is included in the “Additional Materials” section of this book). According to a survey of the European Jewish Cemeteries Initiative, about 200 forced laborers were also killed in the cemetery a few months later, in the Fall of 1942. Analzing LiDAR aerial imagery, Zychlin's local historian Henryk Olszewski has detected the possible location of two mass graves in the cemetery grounds (light detection and ranging LiDAR data are collected from aircraft that scan the reflections of a laser beam to build a high resolution model of ground features).
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| LiDAR image showing the possible location of two mass graves in Zychlin's Jewish cemetery Image source: Henryk Olszewski |
Following the liquidation of the Zychlin ghetto, the Jewish cemetery was devastated by the German occupiers, who used the tombstones for construction work, including the building of a pigsty on a nearby property. There are also reports that some tombstones were used by local residents in housing construction after the war.
During the postwar years, the cemetery gradually deteriorated. On September 25, 1965, the Presidium of the Municipal National Council in Zychlin adopted a resolution to demarcate the cemetery with an area of 1.33 ha. In 1966, Szyja Hamburg, a former inhabitant of Żychlin, wrote in a letter to the Jewish Religious Union in Poland: “A neighbor of the cemetery set up a pasture for cattle there (…), he tried to cultivate a piece of the cemetery for planting potatoes, in the place where the murdered Jews rest”. After the intervention of the Jewish Religious Union, the authorities of the Kutno district enjoined the Zychlin municipality to terminate the cemetery's lease agreement and install information boards prohibiting grazing animals and digging ditches.
In 1989, the Association of Zychliners in Israel and America launched an initiative to memorialize the Zychlin Jews and restore the Jewish cemetery of the town. The project was led by the president of the organization in Israel, Moshe Zyslender, an architect and painter who lived in Haifa and was himself a Zychlin Holocaust survivor. Zyslender spent time in the Zychlin cemetery designing and building several concrete lapidary structures that incorporate about fifty recovered fragments of matzevot.
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the Jews of Zychlin Image source: Marysia Galbraith |
with recovered fragments of matzevot Image source: Leon Zamosc |
The main memorial monument features plaques in Hebrew and Polish with the following text: “In memory of our brothers buried in this cemetery for hundreds of years and those murdered by the Hitlerian criminals at Chełmno in 1942.” The dedication ceremony, which took place on August 27, 1989, was described in the regional newspaper Tygodnik Płocki as follows:
“The unveiling the monument was led by the Dean of the Catholic parish in Zychlin, Franciszek Sliwonik, the activist of the Association of Retired and Pensioners and author of a beautiful poem for the occasion, Irena Adaszewska, and Moshe Zyslender. The poem was read by Irena Dylik. The Rabbi of the Jewish community, who came from Warsaw, recited prayers in Hebrew. Speeches were delivered by the city governor, the parish dean, the president of the Association of Refugees and party leader Ryszard Gawronski, social activist Ludwik Zalewski, and former Home Army soldier Henryk Popowski. Numerous delegations of institutions and businesses from Żychlin laid wreaths and flowers at the monument. The ceremony was filmed by a team of the TV Daily.”
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| Unveiling the monument commemorating Zychlin's Jews in 1989 From left: Moshe Zyslender, Franciszek Sliwonik, and Irena Adaszewska Image source: Tygodnik Płocki |
Five years later, in 1994, the Polish government recognized Moshe Zyslender with the Polish Knight's Order of Merit award.
More recently, Rabbi Israel Meir Gabbai's organization Agudat Ohalei Tzadikim, installed a monument to Rebbe Shmuel Abba (1809-1879), founder of the Hasidic Dynasty of Zychlin. The Hebrew plaque reads: “This matzeva is on the resting place of Rabbi Shmuel Abba of Zychlin, son of Rabbi Zelig, grandson of the holy Rabbi Fishel from Strykow. May his merits protect us. Taken to his grave on 1 January 1910”.
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| Monument marking the grave of Rebbe Shmuel Abba of Zychlin Image source: Marysia Galbraith |
Today, the legal owner of the Jewish cemetery of Zychlin is the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODZ). The Association of Descendants of Jewish Central Poland (ADJCP), established in 2019 to recover and preserve the cultural heritage of the region's Jewish communities, works in cooperation with FODZ and local residents and organizations to clean, restore, maintain, and commemorate the Jewish cemetery in Zychlin.
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| Cleaning the Jewish cemetery as part of the program “In the Footsteps of Żychlin's Jews.” Image source: Łowiczanin.info |
In 2022, Bożena Gajewska, director of the Society of Friends of the Kutno Region (Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Ziemi Kutnowskiej, TPZK), in collaboration with the School of Dialogue program, led a program for school children in Żychlin called “In the Footsteps of Żychlin's Jews.” They learned about the Jewish history of the town, participated in the commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liquidation of the Żychlin ghetto, and joined in clean-up activities at the Jewish cemetery. The Zychlin Group of the ADJCP plans to continue the maintenance and commemorative activities at the site in collaboration with the Matzevah Foundation and local partners.
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