00:00This forest north of Warsaw holds a secret, a little-known chapter of the Holocaust.
00:12Michael Zev Gordon only recently learned that his grandfather was murdered here by the Nazis.
00:18I came here in September 2022 with two of my sons in this extraordinary silent forest.
00:33And I came here to find something out about my grandfather who was shot here in summer 1941.
00:43A story I knew nothing about because my family never talked about it.
00:50Zalman Gorodetsky, Gordon's grandfather, is one of about 1,500 Jews who were shot and buried in mass graves near the Polish village of Sumowo by German forces.
01:03A victim of what's been called the Holocaust by bullets.
01:08Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941.
01:12In the occupied regions, mobile killing units soon began systematically shooting Jewish men, women and children.
01:20In all, more than 1.5 million Jews lost their lives in these mass executions.
01:32It's believed that about a quarter of all Holocaust victims were killed in mass shootings.
01:41Not in concentration and extermination camps, but in or near the towns where they lived.
01:54In many cases, Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska says, these murders took place in full view or at least with an earshot of the local population.
02:04Yet many details of these mass shootings remain unknown.
02:08The German Historical Institute in Warsaw is conducting a project to study the locations where these executions took place and their post-war history.
02:19Unfortunately, there are many places where there is no remembrance at all, where the mass graves haven't even been identified.
02:28And where they have been identified, where the location is known, and there may be a monument or a memorial plaque, it's mostly locals keeping the memory alive.
02:42One of these initiatives also helped Michael Zev Gordon find his grandfather's final resting place.
02:52Thanks to the Polish organization Zapomniane, Polish for forgotten, a memorial stone now commemorates the 1941 massacre.
03:02The NGO has already located and secured hundreds of mass graves from the Holocaust.
03:15We need to follow Jewish law in terms of dealing with Jewish burials.
03:21So we can't use the traditional archaeology, we can't open graves, we can't dig out the bones.
03:29We can only use the tools of the so-called non-invasive archaeology.
03:36Zapomniane uses ground-penetrating radar and other techniques to locate the graves.
03:43This is followed by commemorative work and analysis, often in collaboration with the German Historical Institute.
03:51The organization also relies on the memories of the local population, which has been involved in the process from the very beginning.
04:00Our stories are very personal. They are personal for us and they are personal for local communities.
04:06Because still we meet people whose grandparents used to remember those Jews.
04:13Whose grandparents used to be in the same bench at school with those people.
04:18We dream that the place that we will at some point commemorate will become a part of their local history.
04:25Because this is their history, it's not ours.
04:29For British composer Michael Zev Gordon, the trip to Poland three years ago marked the beginning of a deeply personal journey.
04:37An experience he processes through his music.
04:41In the last 18 months I've written a piece of music called A Kind of Haunting.
04:46And in it, I try to work through these things, and particularly memories that were surrounded by silence.
04:55I grew up with so much silence, but I wanted to find out.
05:01And somehow, by being here, by making this film, I was able to do that.
05:08And somehow, by being here, by making this connection, it's all the more possible.
05:14And for me it's a vital thing to be able to pass this on to the next generation.
05:20I'm his grandchild, but I can pass it on to my children.
05:26And so somehow his story moves forward.
05:37He's not forgotten.
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