We arrived in Perehinsko - a town of about 14,000 people - towards eleven and decided to visit the mayor's office. We were received pleasantly and the mayor himself took us to meet a man Ephraim's age, Dmitry Korol, who remembered many Jews and Jewish businesses by name. He pointed out several houses and named their Jewish residents. We walked the streets for some time time with Dmitry and any number of older citizens joined in with their own recollections. (I did not take notes on the specifics of all this.) Dmitry himself was in the Red Army during the War and therefore had no first-hand account of the killing of the Jews.
Eventually Dmitry insisted on inviting us to his home, which he shares with his wife, daughter - a nurse - and two grandchildren. (The daughter's husband works somewhere else - I forget where - and gets home infrequently.) The house was comfortable but very small. They had a television and a VCR, but no telephone or indoor plumbing. We were received very graciously.
Our final stop in town was the cemetery. The Perehinsko Jewish cemetery is about the size of a good-sized house and yard and is fenced in. It is located in a residential area not far from the western entrance to town.
The horizontal stones (with no inscriptions) were more or less intact, but all the vertical stones were broken off at the base, although one had three lines left at the bottom:
The cemetery in Rozniatow is fairly large with a couple of hundred stones, many at precarious angles. The area is partially fenced and contains quite a few trees which disturb both the stones and access to them. The inscriptions face away from the graves and are often fairly legibly, but do not include surnames. One of the first stones we saw was for someone "ben Pinchas Yosef" who seemed to be the uncle of the man in Perehinsko. I did not consider it significant and did not photograph it and later could not find it again.
At the far end, I saw some stones with surnames - some in Hebrew letters,
some in Latin letters - and one was Rechtschaffen, which is a family of
Ephraim's Perehinsko cousins. When I turned to call to the others,
I saw that many of the stones had surnames on the reverse side. (In
general the reverse sides were badly eroded.) I also saw that the
Rechtschaffen grave was also Pinchas Yosef, so it seems that the lone Perehinsko
gravestone is in fact one of Ephraim's family. We found several other
Rechtschaffen graves of varying degerees of legibility - mostly marked
with surnames on the reverse side. These included Israel ben Moshe,
Pinchas Yosef (Pinie) ben Shalom Chaim (died 22 Second Adar 5700), Eliezer
(ben maybe Israel) and Raizie bat Baruch HaLevi (died 5 Second Adar 5632).
Ephraim took pictures
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