The original double grave
Salomia Korznik and Rochele Pecher, two Jewish eighteen-year-old girls who were murdered during the Holocaust, will be brought to reburial in separate graves at a new site.
The decision to exhume their remains and rebury them according to strict Halachic norms is the initiative of a Polish organization "People Don't Tell" which operates to restore and keep up Jewish cemeteries in Poland so as to preserve remembrance of the Holocaust.
In August 1942, the Nazis told the Jews of Sowin and its environs that they could redeem their death sentence by relinquishing all of their valuables. The families of these two young girls gathered at the meeting point together with other local Jews, bearing their valuables.
Shortly after, the two Jewish girls were sent to fetch the heirlooms of their separate families which had been hidden in a silo some seven kilometers from the meeting place. Upon their way back, they were accosted by a Polish officer, Theodor Dzyzka.
He seized their valuables and then shot them to death. Their families also met their deaths that same day, though Salomia's father succeeded in fleeing to safety. He begged his friends to erect a monument in their memory but disappeared after the war. His friends kept their promise and did create a memorial for Salomia and Rochele.
Local residents would often visit the combined gravesite of these two girls but when the plot of land which included their remains was sold, the new landowner decided to fence off the area and to prevent access to the mutual grave so that he could use the area for real estate purposes. The members of the organization "People Don't Tell" approached him but he refused to believe that the grave held the remains of the two murdered Jewish girls, no matter how hard the members tried to argue and convince him.
They brought the matter before halachic experts regarding the possible sin of desecration of the dead and were told that they should exhume the remains. They contacted people from the Rabbinate in order to proceed according to strict Halacha. During the upcoming days, the new burial sites are being prepared for the separate reburial, 79 years after these two girls were so brutally murdered. May Hashem avenge their blood.
