“People, not Numbers” Memorial

The area of the Jewish cemetery with Czarny Dunajec was deteriorating and overgrowing for several dozen years after the war, only half of the stone wall has survived to this day, not a single matzevot has survived in its entirety, almost all of them have been taken from this place. In 2016, Michał Szaflarski and volunteers started an annual action to clean up the Jewish cemetery. The work was assisted by the commune office, students and teachers from the local school, as well as volunteers from Podhale and other regions of Poland.

In 2019, the initiator of the cemetery cleaning campaign was contacted by Dariusz Popiela, a whitewater canoeist and Olympian from Nowy Sącz, as well as the president of the Popiel Family Center Foundation, which restores the memory of Jewish victims of the Holocaust as part of his project "People, not numbers". After the projects in Krościenko nad Dunajcem (in 2018) and Grybów (in 2019), the next edition of the action took place in 2020 in Czarny Dunajec, where over a dozen volunteers worked for almost a year. People from Czarny Dunajec and the surrounding towns joined the project "People, not numbers".

As part of the work at the Jewish cemetery, a granite monument and two plaques with the names of Holocaust victims from Czarny Dunajec and the surrounding area were created. Thanks to the cooperation with the Rabbinical Commission, the sites of mass graves were located and secured, in which the victims of executions from the Second World War were buried, and white matzevot of remembrance were placed next to them.

As part of the work, the cemetery area was also tidied up, paths and a new fragment of the missing part of the fence with a gate were made. During the project in 2020, several whole matzevot or their fragments were recovered. After their renovation, they were placed in the lapidarium created on the site of the former pre-burial house, the remains of which had previously been found during work at the cemetery. Next to the remains of the pre-burial house, a well was dug out and secured, and a seven-branched menorah was installed over it.

During the project, it was possible to determine the names of almost 500 victims of the Holocaust from Czarny Dunajec and the surrounding towns. Two plaques with names are part of the main monument dedicated to the Jewish inhabitants of the area. The official unveiling of the monument took place on October 11, 2020.