All photos here are courtesy of Ruth Botchan - also see travelogue excerpt, below. 

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Excerpt of a travelogue from Ruth Botchan

(copyright 2008, Ruth Botchan)


“…Then we drove to our Zawady.  Our guide was showing us a row of very old looking wooden cabin-like houses, a little outside of the town center which he said were very typical before the war, and were mostly destroyed.  Every time he saw some standing he pointed them out.  We stopped in front of one because we got side-tracked by a stork that we wanted to photograph. They build their huge nests on top of telephone poles and sign posts, and nobody disturbs them as they are very loved, and considered good luck.  70% of the white storks from South Africa spend the summer in Poland and come back to the same nests year after year.


“Whilst we were doing this, the owner of the little wooden house came out and got to talking with our guide, and then his wife came, and the next thing we were invited to coffee.  We sat in their huge backyard, beautifully planted with flowers and all kinds of berries, and had coffee, homemade berry cake and berry brandy also made by our hostess.  It turns out, they live in Warsaw but now that they are “pensioners,” they spend the summers in the old family homestead.


“They have a son who lives in Pennsylvania. Every other family in the town has family in the States, and there’s a lot of traveling back and forth.  Of course, there’s always the question, Do we have family in Poland?  And then the answer that we’re Jewish...  That led to questioning them about Jews in Zawady, but he was too young to remember names.  He said he played with Jewish kids as a child, and that most of them lived around the market square.


“We drove to the square, which hardly exists anymore as such, but does have a kind of grassy center.  The only thing recognizable from the diagram was the church, which our guide said was original, so using that as a reference point, we saw that, as in the diagram, there is a school next to it.  It’s a new school, but our guide thought it likely that it was built on the site of the old one, and then, lo and behold, there was what looked like an old, closed-up well next to the school, just like in the map. Surrounding the square at one corner were the remains of cobblestones which looked like the ones drawn in the diagram.  It is remarkable how many details are in the picture that we didn’t realize before. Using that and the location of the road, we were able to guess where the houses on the map might have been located.  There were actually a few of the old wooden structures in the general area, so we could easily imagine them circling the square.  One of them seemed to be deserted and falling apart, but another was inhabited—a boy went in and out as well as chickens, and a big billy goat was contentedly chewing leaves by a fence.  Not a little, white goat like the one under the cradle in the song, but we did see one like that later.


“Next we drove to Tiktin (Tykocin in Polish)—less than 10 km from Zawady.  It was at one time the center of Jewish life and religion in the region of Eastern Poland, including Bialystok.  Our hosts thought it likely that Jews from Zawady would be buried in Tykocin.  We saw what had been the Jewish cemetery.  It’s a large area, just looks like a meadow, with very few gravestones visible above the ground [WF and AB-D note that Beryl Root’s map shows a cemetery in Zawady, about 3 km NW.  FODZ has confirmed with AB-D that there are no stones left there].


“Tykocin as you may know, has a very beautiful restored synagogue...there was clearly a very rich Jewish culture there.


“This is the part of Poland (eastern) that was occupied by the Soviets until 1941, as a result of the Stalin/Hilter “non aggression” agreement.  When the Nazis finally made their push east of the Bug River and invaded, they decided to skip the deportations and camps and just get down to the business of extermination—it was getting late.  This was the area of the Einsatz gruppen or mobile attack forces—where they just rounded folks up and shot them close to home.  If they couldn’t do them all in the forest, they brought them to Treblinka.  Mike marveled at the remoteness of some of the villages, and how the Nazis could be so efficient in finding all the Jews.  He of course was wondering about collaboration.  Poles are very sensitive about this, and it’s hard to question them about it.  Our guide said they would be killed for not cooperating, and of course, there’s truth to this. Some of his explanations seemed a little questionable, but for the most part he was sensitive and respectful, and sad about it all.


“Our guide drove us into the forest where there are three mass graves that were found. That’s where most of the Jews of Tykocin, and Zawady were murdered.   It’s hard to describe the beauty of the sun dappled forest and birdsong in that place where such terrible things were done. There are three fenced areas, not very large, maybe 20’ by 30’.  The fences are green metal and there are candles and stones on them that people—visitors like us—have placed there. 


“Next we drove to Bialystok …”

Photos from Zawady today