Starting Agfiin Starting Again
The Bones of Ludvipol
Three years later, in 1996, Shmuel Shafir and the committee made a second trip to Ludvipol, armed with details provided by the woman who had watched from the bushes. It was a team effort to accomplish the project. Viktor Borisovitz Palchovsky helped by convincing residents who knew the graves’ location to reveal the secret. A young Ukrainian laborer from the Russian army found the unmarked mass graves in the yard of a local family. The effort was assisted by Michel Kostoztensky, a secret Jew whose real name was Meir Eisenstein. He had been living in Rovno as a Christian ever since the German occupation and had only disclosed his true identity when Jews started to visit the area in the 1990s. Contribu- tions from the community, including my son Ben and myself, Arje Katz, Samuel Keck, and Moshe Furshpan, helped fund the project. On July 18, 1997, survivors, their children, and their grandchil- dren went back to Ludvipol to rebury the skeletons from the mass graves in town at the memorial site. They opened the grave and worked all day to remove the bones and personally carry the skele- tons to a decent burial. A memorial service was conducted. During the ceremony, Shafir said, “I don’t think there is one of us...who is not moved to the bottom of our hearts and souls in the face of the atrocity we witnessed. What we have heard today from the survivors, which is minor compared to the horrible things we have seen, will be marked deep in our hearts and consciousness. This thing will never be forgotten. It is extremely important to transfer it to the younger generation, the children and the grand- children. We, the survivors, are obligated not to repress it anymore, but to talk, to tell, and, most important, to remember.” I could not go on that trip, either. Some others were not willing to visit Ludvipol. My friend Itzak Gurfinkel, for instance, said, “For me, there was no reason to go back there. It is only a place. And it has bad memories for me...it is where my family lived and died.” 2 In addition to the main monument in Ludvipol, there are two smaller monuments. One was erected at the main site in memory of my father, mother, and two sisters, whose remains could not be found. The other is in the woods at the approximate location
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