The only Jew in Oświęcim, Poland, can see Auschwitz from her bedroom window
Hila Weisz-Gut’s grandmother survived Auschwitz. In 2023, Weisz-Gut moved to the town where the concentration camp is located
A parade of dignitaries and dozens of Holocaust survivors came to Oświęcim on Monday to pay tribute to the 1 million Jews who died there.
Some of them encountered the single Jew who lives there.
Hila Weisz-Gut, 34, moved from Israel to Oświęcim, the Polish town where the Auschwitz memorial and museum is located, in 2023 to join her boyfriend, a Pole whom she met on a Holocaust education trip.
Since then, she has drawn attention from international journalists and townspeople alike for being the only Jew living in the town that most starkly symbolizes the Nazis’ murder of millions of people just like her. Many members of her family were killed at Auschwitz, and her grandmother survived the camp.
“For me, it’s a statement that they tried to break us and exterminate us, but they failed,” Weisz-Gut told CNN this week about living in Oświęcim, where she can see Auschwitz from her bedroom window. “We are the generation that is here to say ‘you didn’t succeed. No more. Not again.’”
Weisz-Gut, who has a master’s degree in Holocaust studies from the University of Haifa, works at the local Jewish museum, which aims to draw attention to the town’s once-thriving pre-Holocaust Jewish community.
She married her Polish husband last year in the museum’s cafe, which is also the former living room of the town’s previous sole Jewish resident, a survivor named Shimson Kluger who died in 2000.
On Monday, as Auschwitz hosted ceremonies to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation, the museum and its synagogue — the only one in Oświęcim — opened their doors for attendees who wished to pray with a Jewish community.
Weisz-Gut told the Forward last year that she frequently visits the synagogue alone and also asks visitors to the museum to help her say the Mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer that requires a quorum of 10 Jews, for her father. “I am my own community,” she said.
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