In October 2014 my wife and I went to Stawiski Poland to see where my mother and the Brozozowska/Barron family had come from. Stawiski is a small town about three hours from Warsaw, surrounded by farmland and far from the cities. We traveled there with Hubert Pawlik, a Polish guide from Warsaw who is familiar with the area. Hubert helped us find the abandoned Jewish cemetery outside of Stawiski as well as the place in Plaszczatka forest outside of town where 740 Jews were murdered by the Nazi's in 1941. These pictures show both of those places as well as pictures of buildings still standing in the town that my mother would likely have seen in her daily life as a small girl.
After Stawiski comes images for a new project, A Tour of Memory - Echos From a Lost Jewish Culture. These are pictures made in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Germany. Pictures made as I began to grasp that the holocaust was not just about the deaths but also about the destruction of a beautiful and vibrant culture. These are pictures about the ghosts you can see in the abandoned Synagogues and streets
Thank you for sharing this slice of our history and insight to the plight of our ancestors.
Thank you for allowing us to come along on your journey. Our own roots must be close by.
All images and text copyright Andy Romanoff© - all rights reserved
