Less known than the Holocaust by gas chamber and concentration camp is the Holocaust by bullets. In areas that the Nazis captured from the Soviet Union, German troops would round up and murder Jews with bullets–such is the case of Tykocin, Poland. In late August of 1941, German troops gathered the 1,400 Jews of the town of Tykocin, loaded the elderly, women, and children onto trucks, lined up the men from tallest to shortest, and drove/marched them to the nearby Łupochowo Forest. One by one, the German soldiers shot every man, woman, and child, until the 400 year old Jewish community of Tykocin was no more. Entire bloodlines were murdered, with no one left to remember them.
We traveled to Tykocin and visited the synagogue, and drove over to the forest and visited the three mass graves into which the Germans slaughtered the Jews of Tykocin. At one of the mass graves, I was given a candle with the names of a family that had no one left to remember them.
Tzvi, son of Abraham Saniak, his wife Leah, their daughter Dvora and their son Shabtai–we remember.
-Adrian Niedermann, Mason High School
