Remembering the Nameless

I f there were to be only one symbol of the Holocaust, it would be of a concentration camp dedicated solely to industrialized killing. A total of 2.7 million Jews were murdered at Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, and, within the Auschwitz complex, Birkenau. The extermination camps were the logical endpoint of Nazi genocide, a “solution” that was not only final but also efficient and, to a degree, out of sight.

Up to another million Jews perished behind the walls and barbed wire of other camps or ghettos, and millions more were slaughtered where they lived, often in plain view, murdered in — or, more likely, just outside — the villages, towns, and cities of the east. They were butchered by the SS, by the Wehrmacht (taking a break from that “clean war” of theirs), by the Einsatzgruppen, by the police battalions (such as the “ordinary men” described by Christopher Browning in his book of the same name), and by foreign auxiliaries.

The massacres had begun with the German invasion of Poland but were transformed into something infinitely more systematic and thus infinitely more deadly — the “Holocaust by bullets” — throughout the vast territory occupied by Germany after its attack on the USSR in June 1941. This included the eastern areas of prewar Poland annexed by Moscow under the terms of 1939’s Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, although Hitler’s death squads also roamed well to the west of the former dividing line between the Nazis and their Soviet accomplices.

Nearly eight decades after the Germans destroyed most of Warsaw, some gaps in the city’s historic fabric are still being filled in. This process of repair and reconstruction extends far beyond the buildings of Poland’s capital. In the course of a trip to Warsaw in May 2023, the party with which I was traveling visited the culture ministry. An empty picture frame hangs on one of its walls, part of a wider campaign highlighting cultural artifacts looted by both the Germans and the Soviets. Some have been retrieved, and there are more that yet could be.

But if the deaths of up to 6 million Polish citizens, 3 million of whom were Jews, during World War II could never be undone, they could be recognized. The dead are commemorated by memorials, museums, and, notably in the case of the concentration camps, by the preservation of the sites and traces of atrocity that the Germans left behind.

Those organizing the Holocaust were nothing if not meticulous. Because of their record-keeping, supplemented by information collected after the war, the names, at least, of most of their victims have survived. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Remembrance center in Jerusalem, retains the names and (where they have been found) other details of over 4.8 million murdered Jews. That matters. There is an uncomfortable truth to the saying, based on a comment attributed to Stalin, that “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths a statistic.” But the more that we know about the individuals who made up the Holocaust’s toll, the more difficult it ought to be to reduce them to a numerical abstraction, or, worse still, to be unaware of or even to deny how and why they died. And yet one recent poll shows that 20 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 now believe that the Holocaust is a myth (another 30 percent were not sure either way).

More than a  million of the dead have yet to be identified. To those who run Yad Vashem, it is a “moral imperative to persist in . . . efforts to recover their names and restore their identities” (my emphasis added). Many of those who make up the unnamed will have been killed in the Holocaust of bullets, their bodies left to rot or dumped in mass graves. In Poland such graves are occasionally uncovered by chance, but there are those not content to leave it at that. And one of them is businessman Zbigniew Nizinski, a rare Protestant in Catholic Poland, a man described to me as a “Baptist on a bicycle.” He has traveled — yes, often by bike — around the old killing fields of rural Poland for years, searching for the Holocaust’s unmarked mass graves. In 2008 he established the Lasting Memory Foundation and continues to be its president, as it carries on with work that has inspired others to do the same.

His story underpins a 2010 documentary, Safeguarding Memory: Commemorating Jewish Mass Graves in Poland. At one point in the film, an elderly man tells Nizinski how, as a 13-year-old looking after some cattle, he watched the machine-gunning of “maybe more than a hundred” Jews in nearby woods. Living under a post-war communist regime that was sporadically antisemitic but consistently suspicious of those who spoke out too much about the past, such witnesses tended to hold their peace. But with the communists gone, they can tell outsiders what they saw or knew — and where the mass graves are.

On being shown these sites, indistinguishable on the surface from the fields, ravines, and woodland in which they are located, Nizinski relates how “the silence and the feeling of abandonment were terrible.” People were “resting there, and no one was there to take care of them.” He “felt obliged to commemorate [these] places.” Before too long, Poland’s New York–born chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, was involved. And then Harley Lippman, a successful American businessman and philanthropist with family roots in Poland, entered the picture. Lippman, the executive producer of Safeguarding Memory, was introduced, he told me last year, to Nizinski’s work by Schudrich, and persuaded — I don’t think it took much — to provide financial assistance, which he still does. When we talked, Lippman referred to the importance he attached to the Judaic concept of tikkun olam, “repairing the world.”

In Safeguarding Memory, Lippman notes that 86 of his relatives were killed in the Holocaust and that he wanted to ensure that Jews “shot in the woods” were given “the dignity that they deserve at least in death by honoring their memory.” This was to be done “by erecting a monument that will be there forever and that shows what the Nazis did to them.” The film features the dedication of monuments at two mass graves, but its narrator concludes that, given the age of the witnesses, “the chances are slight that much more of this story will be known.”

The narrator was, thankfully, wrong. The foundation’s search for these graves has continued, and more have indeed been found. After what happened at the sites has been researched, memorial stones are often put up, frequently with funding from Lippman. The names of the victims may sometimes be discovered, but regardless of whether it is known who is buried there, their presence is acknowledged, their memory is honored, and their fate is recorded. Overall, about 70 sites, Nizinski said in an interview last May, have now been commemorated, but that is only about a quarter of the mass graves “we have learned about.” There must be countless others out there that remain unknown.

Lippman, a member of our group in Warsaw, was presented by the culture ministry with a medal for his support for the work on the mass graves. He mentioned that there would be a commemoration at one grave site later that day. Within a few hours, some of us, together with Rabbi Schudrich, were on a bus heading southeast to Leokadia, a village about 40 miles outside Warsaw.

By the time we arrived, a number of people from the village and its neighboring area had gathered by a somber black memorial stone, erected in 2014. According to an account published by the foundation back then, it marks the grave of twelve Jews who had escaped from a nearby slave-labor camp. They were recaptured by the Germans in October 1943 and shot. No one knew who they were, but even the incompleteness of this remembrance has its own power. A million people went to the grave of Britain’s Unknown Warrior within five days of his burial in London’s Westminster Abbey in 1920, with many drawn by the idea that he was in some way the loved one they had lost who had no known grave of his own.

Those attending the memorial’s dedication in 2014 included 15 Israelis, each with Polish roots and relatives who had been killed during the war. “Who knows,” their guide said, “their relatives might be buried here. . . .” Such memorials transform these once neglected sites into equivalents of the tombs of the unknowns, places to mourn, remember, and reflect — places that warn, too.

And so on that overcast day in May 2023, some of those present placed lighted candles, others flowers, at the monument’s base. Lippman, Nizinski, and Schudrich were among those who made speeches. Schudrich also recited prayers and sang the 23rd Psalm. The occasion was quietly and profoundly moving.

After the ceremonies ended, Nizinski indicated that there was something he wanted to show me. We walked up a little incline toward some railway tracks. Not far from them is a small gravestone, marked with the Star of David, a date (1942), and an inscription of heart-breaking brevity: “Here lies one Jew.” That one Jew had jumped out of the train that was taking him to Treblinka. The train’s wheels cut off one of his legs, and he was then shot dead by a German patrol. Local people were ordered to bury him, and they did, but this lone, anonymous man was never forgotten. In 2014, his death was marked with the respect it had long been denied. As it still is today.