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GBNF Trailer
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Gone But Not Forgotten - Trailer
Memory Keepers’ goal of creating a more inclusive, tolerant and democratic Poland pits them against their country’s ethno-nationalists, those to whom only Polish Catholics are, or ever were, “real” Poles. The story of the Memory Keepers is told by the son of Holocaust survivors whose ancestors, like millions of Polish Jews, still lie in Polish soil. He has befriended and filmed Memory Keepers since 1989, the last year of Poland’s communist regime.
Szymon Modrzejewski
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Szymon Modrzejewski, a pioneer and legend among fellow Memory Keepers
Szymon is a pioneer and a legend among fellow Memory Keepers. Starting as a teenage rebel under communism and continuing to the present, Szymon has fought against the efforts of ethno-nationalists to erase Jews and other minorities from Polish history. He founded a group of volunteers that has restored many abandoned cemeteries of minorities who were once part of Poland’s multi-cultural history.
Ireneusz Slipek
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Ireneusz Slipek, a pioneering Memory Keeper whose work has run afoul of Poland’s Holocaust Memory law.
In the early 1980s town officials removed all the tombstones from Warta’s Jewish cemetery to create a park and a road. Ireneusz was the only person who protested. Eventually he prevailed upon the town to stop. In 1986 the town “complied” by dumping all the tombstones back onto the cemetery grounds. With no one to help him, Ireneusz worked tirelessly for the next 20 years, including the day he died, until he restored the entire cemetery. His monument to two Warta Jews who were murdered by Poles for trying to return to their homes after the Holocaust is now at the center of a controversy.
Henryk Prajs
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100-year-old Henryk Prajs, the last Jew of Gora Kalwaria
While being hidden by a brave Polish woman during the Holocaust, Henryk was almost murdered by Polish nationalists who wanted a postwar Poland without Jews. Even after almost all other Jewish survivors fled Poland following the infamous 1946 Kielce Pogrom, Henryk remained and restored his town’s Jewish cemetery His story helps us appreciate the contribution of Polish Christians who stepped in to do the work Polish Jews were no longer able to do.
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