Jan’s Testimony

The below text was written directly by Jan Kaminski.

I was born Chaim Srul Zybner on the 30th March 1932 in the small town of Bilgoraj in eastern Poland. There were six in my family: my parents, Mindla and Szulim, my two sisters, Chana-Matla and Rywka, my baby brother, whose name had not yet been registered, and me. At the time, approximately 5,000 Jews lived in Bilgoraj, which was more than half the population of the town. 

As Nazis killing squads swept through the region, the family were incarcerated in the ghetto in the centre of the small town. On the 3rd and 9th of November 1942, the Jewish population of Bilgoraj was dispatched to certain and immediate death in Belzec death camp, located 70 kilometres away. During one of these ‘actions’, I fled to a nearby forest and became permanently separated from my family. 

It was no longer safe for me to identify myself as Jewish so I adopted the name, Jan Kaminski. I survived the war on the run, foraging and hiding in woods, living off farms, and keeping my identity concealed. In mid-January 1944 I linked up with the Russian army’s Polish corps and became a child soldier in the 21st Artillery Regiment. After liberation, I spent time in Europe before eventually coming to England and then, Ireland, as a refugee. 

At the end of the war, I learnt that my entire family had been wiped out; parents, sisters and baby brother had all disappeared. Antisemitism still prevailed in Poland and elsewhere, and pogroms against Jews still took place – it was impossible to think of rebuilding Jewish life in Poland, which was also under Soviet occupation after the war. 

Since the collapse of the Soviet rule in Poland in 1989, there has been a modest project of Jewish revival taking place in Bilgoraj. For more than thirty years I have been searching for anyone of my family who might have survived, but to date no trace of immediate family members has been found. My search continues…

Jan obtained a scholarship in 1954 to study in Ireland and was granted an Irish passport when he graduated. Jan lived in Clonskeagh before he passed away in 2019.