The Memorial Tombstone

Though it looks like an ordinary tombstone, the inscription reveals it to be both a tombstone and a memorial. The Jewish cemetery in Zolonia was destroyed by the Nazis, who ordered Jewish tombstones all over the country to be uprooted and used as building and paving material. It remained an empty field until after 1989 when the national government passed ownership of the land to the local government. Jozef Waldman's mother, Sabinie died in November 1939 and was buried here shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War. Not pictured here are the twenty-three headstone fragments found in the cemetery which were mounted on pedestals as a memorial to the dead who rest there in unmarked graves. The tombstone pictured here functions not only as a rebuilt tombstone for Sabinie Waldmann, but also as a memorial to the other Jews buried in the cemetery.

This method of commemorating the dead was increasingly common following World War II, especially after 1989. Many Jews returned to Poland and erected gravestones for the family members who were murdered during the Holocaust and, on the same headstone, also acknowledged the countless other Jews. 

These memorial tombstones are drastically different from the tombstones built prior to the Second World War. Often, they acknowledge how they were related to the deceased - my mother, my father, my sister, my brother, my son, my daughter - but the inscriptions and symbols that signify the deceased was scholarly, virtuous, charitable, a man, a woman, a Levite, a Kohen are gone. Gender no longer mattered outside of relation - what mattered was whether or not they survived the Holocaust, how the Holocaust was remembered, if it was, and that they were not the only ones affected.