Karol Głębocki, history and civic studies teacher from Wysokie Mazowieckie, educator at the Wysokie Mazowieckie Region Community Centre. Karol has been active in the field of preservation of the traces of Jewish culture and presence in his hometown for the past 15 years. Aside from teaching his students Polish-Jewish history of their town, Karol also engages them in tidying up the local Jewish cemetery. We are now at the spot where my journey really began, my adventure with the Jewish culture. I remember when I was a young boy this place did not resemble a cemetery at all. It looked more like a regular woodland. By the way, that is exactly how the local people referred to it: “a Jewish grove.” I used to walk in this cemetery when I was a little boy, I was fascinated by both the utter silence and the writings I did not understand. I reverted to my childhood interest in this wood while at the university. When I was writing my Master thesis on the local parish I came across lots of source materials on Jews. A year later I started working as a teacher and so, for the past sixteen years, I have been talking about it out loud. I think I was the first person in my town since the end of the war, to speak openly about its Jewish past. I started to demand restoring the forgotten Jewish history. I strove to convey my message, to make people aware that, since the second half of the 19th century, Jews constituted the majority in the town and they greatly contributed to its economic and cultural development, which is the fact that some people would most gladly forget. School education is vital here. I teach at the Regional Community Centre. It is a vocational college. While teaching history, history of society, as well as civic science, I put great emphasis on pass the knowledge on the Jewish local past onto my students. In general, I like to teach history by focusing on the local history. I feel this affects young people the most. They read about events in history in their textbooks, and I demonstrate to them that such events took place right here, too. In this specific place. Jews used to live here once, part of the town was turned into a ghetto. I also work as a field tour guide of the Podlaskie Voivodship. I try to provide guided tours to people interested not only in Wysokie Mazowieckie, but in the entire Podlaskie province, and to show them the remaining vestiges of the Jewish past in the region. Since I live in Białystok, I also joined similar activities that are on offer there. I got involved in the Museum of the Jews of Białystok communal project where I publish materials on their webpage. Also, this year I co-authored the exhibition on the shtetls in the Białystok region, as part of an event held to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Memory is of utmost importance to me. I do believe that really…. I don’t really know if memory is the first or the second Jewish homeland. This is truly important, for—as Rabbi Schudrich has once said,  Jews were murdered twice. The first time when they perished, the second time when they were deprived of memory. We cannot dream of building a better future if we do not make our peace with the past. We cannot live solely in the present. That is what I believe moulds us, and that is what I wish to teach my students.