The „Guardian of Memory” Jakub Müller has passed away

Jakub Müller, guardian of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, died at the age of 86. He remained active until the end, a week before his death he was still presenting a plan of initiatives for the next year.

He was born in 1924 in Nowy Sącz in a poor, very religious Jewish family. He survived the Second World War thanks to the help of Poles. After his escape from the ghetto, he reached Sienna on the Rożnowskie Lake, where the Górowski family sheltered him. His whole family – his brother, two sisters and parents – was killed.

As he later recalled: “This old, prewar Sącz (…) isn’t this dream town from my youth anymore, it was brutally destroyed by the war and the Holocaust. My sisters, beautiful girls, were shot by the Nazis and buried in the Sącz cemetery. My brother Salomon was killed in 1942. Elias vanished without trace in Russia. For years, I tried looking for him through the Red Cross, in vain”.

After the war, as a modest tailor he co-founded with other Holocaust survivors the tailor’s cooperative “Pokój”. Escaping from the persecutions of the postwar authorities, he emigrated to Sweden. He was banned from returning.

Jakub Müller testified in court at the trial of the chief of the Sącz Gestapo Heinrich Hamann in Bochum in Germany, he also participated in visions to the scenes of crimes in Nowy Sącz.

After 1989 he was able to return to Poland. First, he visited the Sącz grave of the tzaddik Halbersztam.

Thanks to the efforts of Jakub Müller the cemeteries in Sącz and Grybów have been renovated. He also helped to rebuild a small synagogue in the Sącz region.

He always repeated that his main motivation is the protection of the memory of the Diaspora, living in this area before the war.