Roughly 80 percent of American Jews are of Polish ancestry. Yet because the Jewish population in Poland was decimated during the Holocaust—2.7 out of 3 million Jews were killed—Americans rarely return to their ancestral homes there.
Laura Morowitz, a Verona resident, is an exception. In 2022 she traveled to see the shtetls where her grandparents had lived. The documentary short Lilac/Bez, a series of evocative photographs of her visit, will be screened at the Garden State Film Festival on Sunday, March 30. It is a finalist in the Roma Short Film Festival.
An art history professor who helps run the Holocaust Center at Wagner College on Staten Island, Morowitz knew little more than the names of her grandparents’ villages before her trip. “No one in my family had ever been back to Poland,” she says.
Beforehand, Morowitz connected with Marek Kazmierczak, a professor in Poznan, Poland, who helped her plan the trip. He introduced her to film scholar Mikolaj Jazdon and renowned Polish cinematographer Piotr Jaxa. The three traveled with Morowitz and her daughters Izzy, then 26, and Ollie, then 23, to the villages of Chmielnik and Stopnica.
The trip was “incredibly emotional,” says Morowitz. “These are places where my ancestors lived for more than 400 years. Then, within 17 hours, the entire Jewish population was murdered at Treblinka. These places are so filled with sorrow. In many places, I was overcome with emotion.”
In the cemetery at Chmielnik and other spots, Morowitz and her daughters sang and said the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. The film’s haunting soundtrack is of Ollie, a musician, singing and playing guitar. She studied Jewish folk music to compose the melodies.
Chmielnik was a pleasant surprise. Unlike other shtetls, the town has restored its synagogue and even created a museum preserving its Jewish past. The shtetls were remarkably unchanged, Morowitz says, “except that any trace of Jewish life is gone.” They saw buildings whose doorways had the faint outlines of mezuzahs, traditional Jewish scrolls that sanctify the home. “Nobody Jewish has lived there for 80 years,” she says. “But on the doorways, you can still see a shadow of their presence.”
[RELATED: New Jersey Holocaust Survivors Share Their Stories, Inspiring Hope in New Generations]
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