Polish Tatra resort celebrates renovation of old Jewish cemetery

In Poland earlier this week, both on November the First - All Saints' Day, and November the Second - All Souls Day, hundreds of thousands of people visited their family graves as well as the tombs of famous figures in the nation's history. On the eve of Poland's Remembrance Day, an old Jewish cemetery has been renovated in the Tatra resort of Zakopane.

Before World War Two, Zakopane had a three-thousand strong Jewish community. Only a handful of Zakopane Jews survived the Holocaust. The Jewish cemetery in the town was destroyed by the Nazis in 1942. Its renovation was completed on the 62nd anniversary of the last transport of Zakopane Jews to Auschwitz. The most important person at the dedication ceremony was Ronald Weiser, the American ambassador in Slovakia, who played a key role in the project. Talking to him over the phone I asked him how it all began:

"My father was born in Zakopane in 1911. He left in 1912 when he was a year old with his mother and father and came to the United States, to Chicago. And no one from my family had been back there for 90 years, when President Bush selected me to be the ambassador to the Slovak Republic. I had no idea that Zakopane was so close to the border. I began to do some research and then in the early summer of 2002 I went for my first visit there. We had asked to see the Jewish cemetery when we were there because we assumed that there were probably ancestors buried there in the cemetery.

"We retained the services of a man who used to be the mayor of Zakopane. There was very little information on it or where it was located because it had been abandoned and covered with weeds. So we finally located it and it took us a lot of time even walking in the fields where we finally went to find the location of it. And I knew almost immediately that it was the right thing to do to restore it."

The renovation of the Zakopane cemetery was a very deep emotional experience for Mr Weiser:

"The devastation was complete. The Nazis had destroyed all the headstones but you could see the tops of the sarcophaguses where the dead were buried, the cement tops. There's no way really to identify who's who or where they are. So now it's just a matter of a preservation of the whole site. A lot of Zakopane citizens were there and government officials and so forth. I said - finally my ancestors and the people who are buried there can rest in peace. I'm sure that God was smiling at us yesterday."

The Warsaw-based Foundation for the Protection of Jewish Heritage in Poland has worked closely with Ambassador Weiser on the project.