AFTERMATH

The gravestone of Lipa Sattler in New York City shows the names of his wife and four children, captured by the Germans in the family's hiding place on a local farm. He had left them to forage for food.		This marker, erected at Zolynia's market square in 1983, memorializes locals who resisted the Nazi occupation. It lists the names of twenty-four Poles who were shot by a German firing squad on June 4, 1943.

The brutal German occupation continued. Any Jews in the area who had been spared from the August roundups were consolidated into a ghetto at Sieniawa, thirteen miles (21 km) east of Zolynia on the far side of the San River. The ghetto's remaining inhabitants were murdered in May 1943. A handful of Jews still hid in the forests and other places, knowing that discovery by the Germans meant death. In 1983, Zolynia would be one of several thousand towns and villages awarded the post-war Polish government's Grunwald Cross (Class III) recognizing the active underground work of some residents against the Germans.

One last time, Zolynia was on the front lines as the Soviet Army drove the Germans out of the area. The Germans evacuated Zolynia on July 26, 1944 and during their advance, Soviet bombs fell in and around Zolynia. As the Germans moved out, they plundered and burned the remaining farms and anything else that might supply the Soviets. Count Potocki decided that Soviet-controlled territory was no place for a wealthy nobleman and slipped away to Vienna and then to Switzerland, along with over six hundred railway crates filled with valuables from the Lancut castle. Not long after, Tass, the Soviet news agency, announced that "The estate of Count Potocki has been expropriated and divided for the benefit of the people." The last owners of Zolynia and their vast properties were gone.

The war ended, but in Poland the violence against Jews would continue for two more years. Some Zolynia Jews, perhaps a few dozen out of six hundred or so, survived the war and the camps. A few actually returned to the town, to find or mourn their families and to seek out a familiar place. But Zolynia was no longer familiar. Not only were the Jewish people gone, but so were their places and their institutions. The synagogue had been used as a stable by the Germans. The cemetery was gone, its six-foot brick walls dismantled and only a few fragments of the hundreds of headstones scattered about. The study house, the shops, the houses and the other remnants of the Jewish community were gone or taken over by others.

But resentment of the Jews was strong across Poland, and in Zolynia. In hundreds of towns and villages across the country, there were beatings and murders of Jews. At least one returning Zolynia Jew, Chaskel Kesten, was murdered by a Polish squatter when he tried to visit the house in which he lived before the war. Forty-two Jews, including several Polish Army officers, were killed in a pogrom in the city of Kielce, eighty miles (130 km) northeast of Zolynia, in July 1946. After the Kielce Pogrom, many surviving Jews gave up on making their home in Poland. Over the coming months, most of the surviving Jews of Poland and all of the surviving Jews of Zolynia and the surrounding villages fled the country, most of them to Palestine or to New York. Some went to other cities in the United States and western European countries.

For the first time since possibly the early 1500s, there were no Jews in Zolynia. There are none there to this day.

In the late 1950s, a single Jew named Baruch Sapir returned to Lezasjk after more than a decade in Soviet prison camps in Siberia. For years he would walk the roads of nearby towns and villages, collecting books, papers, Bibles, Torahs and other artifacts of the Jewish communities in the area. He purchased the items from farmers and villagers and collected them in boxes in his small one-room apartment. A kind of a local legend, Baruch Sapir was still alive in 1970, the last Jew for many miles around Zolynia. What happened to Sapir and the collection he desperately wanted saved after his death is not known to current researchers. Perhaps the items are in the Jewish Museum now established in the restored synagogue at Lancut, one of the most beautiful pre-war synagogues still in existence in Poland.

Years after the war, the government of Poland made a payment to the First Zolynia Society in New York as partial compensation for the town's large synagogue, dismantled for bricks after the German occupation. The money was sent along to surviving Zoliners in Israel.