Students from the school’s Historical Club from Torzym together with their schoolteacher Ms. Joanna Pawlak Kopeć decided to look after the local Jewish cemetery.
Since 2000 the Historical Club meets every week. The topics are chosen in such a way as to arouse young people’s interest and to prepare them for different historical school contests.
Sometimes students invite for their meetings people who remember the difficult period in Poland’s history. For instance, students were listening with admiration to the story of the local poet who spent six years in the war exile in Kazakhstan.
Commemorating those who are gone and forgotten and taking care of the cemeteries is one of the main aims of the school’s Historical Club. Youths from the Torzym Middle School have been visiting local Jewish cemetery for years, showing their respect to former inhabitants by bringing flowers and lighting candles at abandoned graves (many of them originate from the 19th century). They believe that every human being, regardless of his or her nationality and religion, deserves to be remembered.
Students also take care of many graves from the Torzym Christian cemetery, among them tombstones of the Auschwitz survivor and Second World War soldier.