On August 25 and 26, 1941 half of the population of Tykocin was murdered by the occupying Germans. That half, approximately 2000 people, consisted of Jews only. Whatever their Christian neighbors may have thought of them and of their sudden disappearance from their homes, shops, and the streets of the town, some mourning the loss, others perhaps pleased that the Jews were now gone, the emptiness of the town on the “day after” and the days to come after that, must have been a great shock. The tragedy of the murder of half of Tykocin’s population is not just about the many Jewish lives destroyed then, though that is the tragedy in its most profound sense.

​

The tragedy was, and still is, also about the destruction of the ancient human fabric of this town, its warp and weft, consisting of Christians and Jews living and working together in relative peace over hundreds of years. The first Jews set foot in Tykocin in 1522.  Like the town’s Christians who earlier founded and built the town over the centuries, the Jews of Tykocin were also to become permanent residents of Tykocin, a place also built and bonded together with their labor, their love, and their hopes for the future, a town that prospered with the combined labor of its Christian and Jewish peoples.

​

As a descendant of a Tykocin Jewish family, I would like to express my deep gratitude to those responsible for placing this plaque bearing the names of all the Jews of Tykocin murdered in August 1941 in the center of town where it rightly belongs.  For the first time since the end of the war the last Jews of this town, each and every one of them, are to be publically recognized and remembered in the place where they once lived, not just in the Łupochowo forest where they were murdered. With this noble deed you have, in a symbolic sense, brought them back home. This personal memorial is a profound gesture of goodwill and an important step toward a long-sought reconciliation of Jews and gentiles, past and present, in this society. Bringing their names back to Tykocin now allows those murdered to be properly mourned alongside their Jewish brethren and Christian neighbors, all now resting in peace in the town’s two cemeteries. With their names displayed for all to see they are to be remembered as the individuals they once were. Let us hope that as time passes we learn more about these people, about the lives of this “missing half” of Tykocin. Let us also hope that the town’s Jewish cemetery, the sacred place of rest for generations upon generations of this town’s Jewish residents, will in good time be restored in the name of it’s missing half.

​

Alan Duben

August 24, 2021

​​​