Back to Gombin Film Distribution (2002)

Today's children of the survivors of genocide live with the aftereffects of the horrors their parents survived, and will be the bearers of the Holocaust into the next millenium. They will journey back to Poland - to hear a voice, remember a life, recreate a lost lineage...and find their own lives in the mist of history.

Back to Gombin started shooting in March of 1999 and was completed by Packer Productions three years later, having shot on location in New York, Florida, California, and Poland. It is distributed by The National Center for Jewish Film.

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Rededication of the Gombin Jewish Cemetery (1999)

In August 1997, the Gombin Society undertook to save and protect the Jewish cemetery in Gombin. The decision came after exploratory visits by members of the Board of Directors and consultations with the Gabin Land Lovers Association, a local group dedicated to the preservation of the town's history.

At the site of the abandoned Gombin Jewish cemetery the oaks planted by our ancestors were still standing, but the space was desecrated on a daily basis because of lack of protection. The cemetery was used by children to play soccer, littered with garbage, and cited in the study of the World Monuments Fund as endangered by pollution and nearby development. Few headstones remained at the site, the majority having been used by the Germans to build roads, sidewalks, and even a bridge near the center of town...

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Memorial Monument at Chelmno (1999)

Gombin was occupied by the German army on September 7, 1939. On arrival, the Germans subjected the Jews to a regime of forced labor and a few weeks later they burned the town's wooden synagogue and Beit Hamidrash. At the beginning of 1940 the Gombin Jews were evicted from their homes and concentrated in a ghetto. In the following months, about 200 Jews were deported to labor camps in Konin, Eindziov, and Hohenzaltz, many of them eventually ending up in Auschwitz. In the Spring of 1942 the Germans liquidated the Gombin ghetto, dispatching the more than 2,000 remaining Jews to the extermination camp at Chelmno. Only 212 of the Jews who were in Gombin at the time of the German invasion survived the Holocaust.

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