Their Legacies Remain...
“The people are no more – but their legacies remain…”
Ida Fink, “Ikvot,” Kol Hasipurim (All the Stories)
"Forlorn, so forlorn! From the Munkács community… that used to make up half the town's population – only two whole families remained. One, the Ungar Family, the watchmaker, whose shop stood at the corner of the Latorica courtyard – the parents and two sons returned. The second: our family, that is, my wife, my son and me. None of the other families remained complete. When we immigrated to Eretz Israel, only a few hundred Jews were living in Munkács…
Complete annihilation".
(Eliyahu Rubin, Mimunkacz ad Auschwitz [Hebrew], p. 52)
The vast majority of the Jews of Munkács were murdered. Only documents, testimonies, archival films, Pages of Testimony and a handful of photos remain, that tell their stories – testimony to the persecution of an entire Jewish community. Rabbis, teachers and their students, tradesmen and slave laborers – men, women and children.
Every family, and every name represents an entire world, with its history and its memories. Before you are the stories of two Jewish families from Munkács as well as a group of friends, members of the third graduating class of the Munkács Hebrew Gymnasium. We see their faces, learn their names and reveal their stories and thus, we remember.
