In 2010 , when I found myself leading a small "mission", including my mom and my two older kids , to Poland - we came to the site of the Belzec extermination camp, which is not on the "usual path״ of the Israelis who visit Poland.
We knew that most likely - some of our many missing branches - were buried there or in Rohatyn's mass graves...
The rustic sign on the entrance wall said : March 17, 1942.
We had no idea that was the date of the first transport to Belzec.
The date was march 17, 2010...
I am re - reading jack (Kuba) Glotzer's account of his crazy survival from the Rohatyn ghetto, as I prepare for my unexplained trip.
Marking the mass graves? Surveying them? Why? and why do I feel that I have to be there??
Seating in Ben Gurion airport, waiting for my flight to Lwow, I get to the chapter where Jack describes the day of the final liquidation of the Rohatyn ghetto, when he sees both his mother and brother being murdered by the Nazis.
It was on the day of the Shavuot holiday of 1943...*
So, for me - that was the reason. No more questions Asked.
My grandfather's father, three sisters, three brother in laws and quite a few nieces and nephews are probably buried in the Northern mass graves, from the last Aktion in Shavuot of 1943, unless they were on one of the trains sent from the Ghetto to Belzec.
We know nothing about his other sister, her husband, and daughter who lived in Lwow. We know nothing about my grandmother's sister with her husband and four kids who lived in Chodorov before the war. They all vanished without a trace.
*
June 6, 1943 was not the First day of Shavuoth.
June 9 was Shavuoth.
Jay suggests that this Aktion might have ended on Shavuoth.
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