Days of Mutual Respect

Maria Zawadzka, 16 November 2016
The Wrocław Days of Mutual Respect were held between November 6th and November 11th, 2010. They were opened by a concert of a gypsy band from Eastern Slovakia – Kokavakere Lavutára. This band also performed at the greatest festivals of gypsy music – in the Czech Republic, the Netherlands and Norway, as well as in the Carnegie Hall.

On Sunday, November 7th the play „13 Wallstrasse. Breslau-Wrocław, 1933-1968” directed by Bente Kahan was presented. This performance was supposed to show the old Wrocław“without accounting for the past”.

On November 9th was held a meeting with the Holocaust survivor Ruth Wermuth-Burak, author of the book “I Met People”. In 1999 this publication won the main award in the Ben Gurion Competition of Polish-Jewish memory.

The participants of the Wrocław Days of Mutual Respect also had the opportunity to meet the Polish-German couple Uwe and Gabriela von Seltmann – his grandfather was member of the SS, and hers died on the way to Auschwitz.

On November 9th took place the March of Mutual Respect, in which participated, among others, the mayor of Wrocław Rafał Dutkiewicz, the province marshal Marek Łapiński, the consul-general of Germany Bernard Brasach and representatives of the Jewish community. The main goal of the march was to unite “people of different faith and views”.

The participants of the March set off from the Synagogue Under the White Stork and walked to the place where 72 years earlier during the Night of Broken Glass the New Synagogue was burnt.

Icchak Rapaport, rabbi of the Jewish Communities Union of the Republic of Poland, said the Kaddish in front of a monument commemorating the victims of these events.

Another event held on November 9th was the posthumous awarding of the honorary citizenship of Israel to Feliks Kwarciak.

On February 22nd, 1989 the Yad Vashem Institute honored the Kwarciak family with the title “Righteous Among the Nations” for saving Jews during the Second World War.

During the Nazi occupation Maria and Piotr Kwarciak and their sons Alfred, Feliks and Anatoliusz rescued 15 escapees from the ghetto in Dubno, in the Volhynia region.

Before the liquidation, Fiszer, a Jew working outside the ghetto, met Piotr Kwarciak – his old friend. He offered to hide his whole family in his house on the outskirts of the village.

During the liquidation of the ghetto in Dubno, 8 members of the Fiszer family managed to escape, as well as their relatives from the Szender, Półtorak and Sznajder families. In the autumn of 1942 the Kwarciaks hid them in a hiding place on their farm and took care of them for a year and a half.