In a back yard in the Polish town of Wojslawice around 90 kilometers southeast of Lublin, a mass grave from the time of the extermination of the Jews under the National Socialists was discovered.
The remains of 60 Jews were found in the grave, including 20 children, Israeli media reported.
The grave was discovered by the Israeli Holocaust research and education institution "Shem Olam".
Such a find was a "shocking discovery" so many years after the Holocaust, said the director of the organization, Rabbi Avraham Krieger, according to a report in the daily newspaper "Jerusalem Post" (Thursday).
Discovered by pandemic
The Covid pandemic contributed to the discovery of the mass grave.
After the libraries and archives usually used by researchers in Poland had been closed, people began to visit Polish towns where Jews lived in order to look for clues on site.
In Wojslawice, the researchers came across local reports of a mass grave. The organization received permission from a local resident to look for the grave in his backyard. Using modern scanning technology, the grave was precisely localized. Accordingly, the organization also succeeded in identifying the names of the victims. A memorial for the Jews killed there is to be built at the site, for which Shem Olam and the residents of Wojslawice laid the foundation stone on Wednesday.
Since the early 19th century, between 1,500 and 2,000 Jews were reported to have lived in what was known as Voislavize among Yiddish-speaking residents. With the outbreak of World War II, the place became an open ghetto with exit times for Jews. In 1942 the Nazis began to deport the Jews of the ghetto to concentration and labor camps. A single synagogue survived the Nazi era and is now a museum.