DAY OF THE RIGHTEOUS IN RZEPIENNIK BISKUPI
On June 6th, 2011 at the Rzepiennik Biskupi Secondary School was organized the “Day of the Righteous”. Due to health problems of Maria Świerczek , honored by the Yad Vashem Institute with the title “Righteous Among the Nations”, it was not possible to organize a meeting with the Righteous.
However, representatives of the students had visited Maria Świerczek earlier and during the “Day of the Righteous” they shared with other students their impressions of this meeting.
During the preparations for the “Day of the Righteous”, young people tried to find information about the history of Jews in Rzepiennik, their tragic history during the Second World War, as well as ways of commemorating those who rescued Jews during the Nazi occupation. They prepared a multimedia presentation for all students.
Scouts also visited the grave of Jews murdered in Dąbry, they cleaned it, laid flowers and lit candles. During their works, students from Rzepiennik used interviews from the DVD prepared by the program “Polish Righteous – Recalling Forgotten History” of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.
The project was coordinated by Krystyna Markowicz, teacher from the Rzepiennik Biskupi Secondary School who had earlier participated in the training being part of the project “Bringing the Righteous to Polish schools”, carried out by the program “Polish Righteous – Recalling Forgotten History”. The main goal of the training was to prepare educators of memory about the Polish Righteous.
The “Day of the Righteous” was the crowning of numerous educational activities organized by the school, that were supposed to sensitize students to the history of Polish Jews. Among other things, they talked about Jews during history lessons, visited the museum in the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp and watched a film about Irena Sendler.
