Finalists of 2023 POLIN Award: Saga Grybów Association, Grybów

Saga Grybów Association is a group of local activists who have been working for 13 years to preserve the tangible and intangible heritage of the town and region of Grybów. This heritage encompasses both Jewish and Lemko cultures. The association educates about the Holocaust of the Jewish residents of Grybów and creates a space for Polish-Jewish encounters.

The name of the Association—"Saga Grybów"—comes from SAGA, the Social Archive of Grybów, which emerged in the wake of building a social network. Discovered, collected, and documented materials such as memorabilia, photographs, and recordings, interwoven with the narratives of the intercultural SAGA, create new dimensions of the town’s identity. Over the course of several years, the group has incorporated into it the history of the Jews who, before the Holocaust, constituted 1/3 of Grybów’s population. However, for many decades, their existence and tragic fate fell into oblivion.

Since 2010, when Grybów resident Kamil Kmak created the group, several people have joined, and educational, documentary, and artistic projects have supported hundreds of Grybów residents, both current and former, including members of over 30 rediscovered families of Grybów Jews from Canada, through Israel, to New Zealand.

In 2011, with the assistance of members of Saga Grybów, a biography of a boy who had survived the Holocaust, Grybów native named Leon Schagrin, came out. In 2013, the group began tidying up the Jewish cemetery, and, since 2015, they have commemorated the anniversaries of the murder of the Grybów ghetto prisoners at the mass grave in Biała Niżna, which they renovated in 2022. In 2019, the Saga members joined the project People, Not Numbers, commemorating 1,770 victims of the Grybów ghetto by name, thanks to nine years of archival research.

From 2020 to 2023, the Saga Grybów members ran a project titled Silent Memorial – Grybów Saga, through which they commemorated, among others, two Jewish families who had perished in Bełżec with murals and an album. In 2022, in partnership with the local high school, they organized a project and art exhibition featuring Grybów artists from the first, second, and third generations of Holocaust survivors, titled "Uprooted/Rooted," building a platform of empathy for the families of the Shoah victims.