Tomorrow night, on Wednesday 11th April, for Yom HaShoah,
I am participating in the Yellow Candle project that helps remember individual lives of the six million Jewish people who were murdered in the genocide
we call the Holocaust.
I took a candle at random from the hundreds given out at
shul on Sunday morning.
All it said on
the little card was this:
Remembering Perla
Kardasz of Luck
Who perished at Luck
1942
Aged 8
I wanted to know a little bit about the child I was remembering,
but this is all I could find out about Perla’s life. She had two parents who were called Jacob and
Tzippora, and a sister called Nechama.
Her parents must have had enough money to put a pretty bow on her head
and have her picture taken when she was around two, and that picture was kept
by her aunt, along with details of her address, and when and where she was
murdered.
I looked up the strangely named town called Luck, and I
found out how Perla died.
Luck was a town in eastern Poland that according to a Polish
census of 1931 was 48.5% Jewish.
On August 19 1942, 17,000 Jews were rounded up by Nazi Orpo
police and local Auxiliary police over a four day period. They were assembled in the town square and
taken by trucks to the Gorka Polanka forest.
They were shot into the prepared trenches. Local residents were required to help dig the
trenches beforehand and to bury the bodies afterwards. Thousands of Jewish men, women and children were
executed at point blank range.
Among
them was a little girl called Perla Kardasz.
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| Testimony given by Perla's aunt |
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| A German Orpo policeman near the mass grave at Gurka Polanka after the murder operation |
