(JEWISH GROUP) A secret bunker, tunnel and a Star of David tell a story of Jewish resistance in a Polish town
A secret bunker, an underground tunnel and an armband bearing the Star of David are among the rare findings in a house in southern Poland that was used by Jews, including young members of the resistance, to hide from the Nazis.
“This armband is a witness, it’s like directly touching that evil which people created for other people,” Karolina Jakoweńko from the Cukerman’s Gate Foundation, which organized the search, told The Associated Press. Seeing it felt like a “jolt,” she said.
Jakoweńko spoke inside a two‑story redbrick house in the town of Bedzin, within the former Jewish ghetto during the World War II. The house served as the site of a “kibbutz” organized by youth from left‑wing Zionist groups — in this case, a network that relied on each other to try to ensure its members survived and resisted the Nazi occupiers.
Each piece of rubble may hide a treasure
In the days before the interview, Jakoweńko and her colleagues cleared the house attic in preparation for renovation, lifting floorboards one by one and collecting rubble in buckets, then carefully examining each handful. Among objects spanning several decades, they discovered a Jewish prayer book from 1934, and the armband bearing the Star of David.
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