Dancing and Tears

Today was a day of highs and lows - we started our day with an early departure from Krakow and after a four hour drive through Western Galicia, we made our first stop at Lancut. In Lancut, whose pre-war Jewish community was approximately 2,700 (40% of the town) we visited the magnificent synagogue which was built in 1761 and survived the war because the Nazis used it for grain storage. The synagogue was restored to its splendor after the war by students from a local art school and today is a museum. While in the synagogue we davened mincha (the afternoon service) followed by a moving story about a young boy from a small Polish town and an aktion that happened on simchat Torah. Moved by the story our group sang and "danced with the angels" of the Lancut synagogue.








After our dancing at Lancut we drove east through more Galician towns until we arrived at Belzec. One of the most horrific places we will visit on this trip, Belzec was the site of the murder of between 434,000 and 600,000 in just 13 months of operation. There are only 5 known survivors of this camp. 6 Years ago a memorial was built on the site (the camp had been entirely razed by the Nazis in the Spring of 1943 after it had served its purpose of murdering the Jews between Lvov and Krakow). One of the first things our group noticed is the small size in comparison with Birkenau - this was truly a death factory only 2 barracks for prisoners were here during the war, almost all who arrived at Belzec were immediately sent to the gas chambers. Around the perimeter of the memorial site are the names of towns from where deportations to Belzec took place and the month that they took place in - as she was walking around the site, our survivor Judy Altman saw the town where her sister and niece lived, although she never knew what had happened to them during the Shoah, she knew that they had been murdered, she now believes that this is where they were taken and killed. Needless to say this was a very emotional moment for both Judy and our group as we recited Kaddish and the El Malei Rachamim for them.