Survivor returns to Podhajce
Holocaust survivor Leon Milch needed some convincing to set foot again in his childhood shtetl of Podhajce.
HOLOCAUST survivor Leon Milch needed some convincing to set foot again in his childhood shtetl of Podhajce.
But a trip there last month – alongside his wife Sharon and three generations of his and his brother’s family – proved to be more meaningful than he could ever imagine.
A Sydney Jewish Museum guide, Leon left the village in prewar Poland (now Ukraine) with just five family members in 1944, when it was liberated by the Russians, but returned – seven decades later – with 15 relatives.
His son, Steven, said, “I think, for him, that was huge – it showed they [the Nazis] didn’t win.”
Their trip began in Warsaw with a tour of the ghetto and the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and continued to Krakow for the annual Jewish Culture Festival, where they joined almost 600 people for the largest postwar Shabbat dinner held in the city.
Auschwitz and the memorial at the site of the death camp of Belzec were also on the itinerary.
Visiting Belzec was especially moving because it was where the majority of Podhajce’s Jewish population of 2900 [about 40 per cent of the town’s population] had spent their last moments, after being transported from the ghetto in 1942.
“We said Kaddish there for members of his family who died there,” Steven said.
“The saying goes, if you were sent to Belzec, you were dead within two hours.”
The trip continued to Lviv and finally Podhajce, where a highlight was the group being invited into Leon’s old home.
A walk around the village also took in the former ghetto, the derelict but still impressive 16th century synagogue and the vast Jewish cemetery.
Steven said the inspiration for the family’s journey was seeing the film Pockets of Hope at last year’s Jewish Film Festival in Sydney, which told the inspirational stories of Jewish families, from Australia and America, who travelled back to Poland to return to their roots.
“It became what our trip was modelled on.
“But for most of the last 70 years, he [Leon] said he’d never intended to return to Podhajce.
“After some convincing, he agreed we’d all go.”
Leon said “The trip not only brought a degree of closure for me, but also allowed me to pass on our family and Jewish history to my grandchildren and those of my late brother, Barry Milch.”
SHANE DESIATNIK
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