The commemoration took place on Tuesday at the city's Rozmarek historical square on Targowa Street, on the site of a synagogue destroyed during the war.
Among those present were city officials, local residents and school students, as well as Halina Hila Marcinkowska, chairwoman of the Union of Jewish Religious Communities in Poland.
The story of Helena Bloom
Marcinkowska told the story of Helena Bloom, a Jewish girl from Kalisz who survived the Holocaust after assuming the identity of her Polish school friend, also named Helena.
Born on October 16, 1923, Helena Bloom grew up in Kalisz and went to school with her friend, Helena Barciszewska. When German forces occupied the city in 1939, their paths diverged in tragic ways.
Barciszewska, a non-Jewish Pole, was killed by the Germans in the autumn of that year. Bloom, who was Jewish, was deported to the ghetto in the nearby town of Ostrów Wielkopolski.
In 1942, during transport to a death camp, Bloom jumped from a moving train and managed to escape.
She was carrying the identity papers of Helena Barciszewska. With those documents she was able to present herself as a Polish farm worker and found employment on a German-owned farm, where, according to the account, nobody suspected that she was Jewish.
Other than her brother, Bloom was the only member of her immediate family to survive the war.
Afterwards she moved to Łódź in central Poland, then left the country with a group of Jewish survivors heading for a transit camp in Germany in the hope of later emigrating.
She arrived at the Bergen-Belsen camp, which after 1945 served as a centre for displaced persons, where she met her future husband, Harry Berger.
The couple later received permission to emigrate to the United States. They arrived in New York on May 30, 1949. Bloom died in the US state of New Jersey in 2008.
Persecution of Polish Jews under German occupation
Alongside this individual story, speakers in Kalisz reminded those present of the wider history of persecution of the city’s Jews under German occupation.
Marcinkowska said that in 1939 the first wave of repression in Kalisz targeted Jews. Before the war, Jews made up around a third of the city’s population, numbering more than 32,000.
In the early months of occupation, Jewish residents were ordered to declare their property and register with the authorities. Religious life was attacked. Prayers in synagogues were banned and Jewish houses of worship were looted.
Marcinkowska described how Torah scrolls, the handwritten sacred texts of Judaism, were seized from prayer houses on Wodna and Ciasna Streets.
She said German forces forced religious Jews to burn the scrolls, then humiliated young Jewish women by ordering them to undress and dance around the fire.
For observant Jews, she noted, the Torah is so holy that even touching the scroll with a bare finger is forbidden.
Speakers also recalled that the main deportation point in Kalisz was a market hall owned before the war by the Szrajer brothers, on what is now New Market Square. Today a shopping mall, Galeria Tęcza, stands on the site.
Kalisz Deputy Mayor Grzegorz Kulawinek told those gathered that in “terrible, degrading conditions” more than 18,000 Jews were crammed into the building before being sent away in stages.
Between December 2 and 14, 1939, German authorities transported them by train to cities including Kraków, Lublin, Sandomierz and Rzeszów.
A ghetto for the remaining Jews was set up in Kalisz around Złota Street.
The destruction of Jewish Kalisz was almost total. From a prewar community of more than 32,000, only 2,772 Jews returned to the city after the Holocaust.
Preserving historical memory, educating new generations
City officials said that keeping the memory of Jewish Kalisz alive is a duty for the present generations.
Every year on the anniversary of the first deportations a ceremony is held beside a memorial plaque to the city’s Jews on Rozmarek Square.
"We have a moral, human and historical obligation to remind younger generations of these events, so that nobody ever forgets where hatred, contempt and dehumanisation lead," Kulawinek said.
He added that remembrance of the Jewish community of Kalisz is part of the city’s identity and that by remembering, residents symbolically return to their former neighbours "the dignity, presence and place in the history of the city which the occupiers tried to take away from them."
This year’s commemoration was attended by pupils from Kalisz schools, linking the history of the city’s prewar Jewish community with the education of its current young residents.
(rt/gs)
Source: PAP, kalisz.pl