Alex Dancyg, 2012.
Photo: Robert Szuchta.
The ‘Grodzka Gate – NN Theatre’ Centre and the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial and Educational Site dedicate this exhibition to our coworker, colleague and friend, Alex Dancyg.
Alex was born in Warsaw in 1948. He left Poland with his family in 1957 and embarked on a new life in a kibbutz in Israel. He was a farmer and historian, an educator on the history of the Holocaust at Yad Vashem, a guide for youth groups from Israel to Poland. As a son of Holocaust survivors whose family members were murdered during ‘Aktion Reinhardt’, he was personally connected to the history of the Holocaust. With his dual Jewish and Polish identity, he was actively involved in Polish-Jewish-Israeli dialogue.
My father’s family was murdered in Treblinka. They were in the Warsaw Ghetto. I can’t even remember all of their names exactly. I don’t have any pictures of them. I have nothing. But if I go to Treblinka to learn about my grandfather, I’m an idiot! My grandfather was not born in Treblinka! He was murdered in Treblinka. An entire Jewish civilization perished in Treblinka. It was a huge civilization of European Jews and most of them lived in Poland, in Eastern Europe. It was a complex, rich civilization that wasn’t only beautiful because not all of them were poets and painters, some were pimps and prostitutes. And they all perished together. They cannot be resurrected. One can make films, write books and Ph.D. dissertations, and one should! But we must talk about what perished here, and how. This is the dimension that ought to be reached somehow – that life which existed for 800 years in the Polish territories.
–
Alex Dancyg, born in 1948 in Warsaw, recorded in 2021.
On 7 October 2023, Alex Dancyg was taken hostage during the terror attack on Israel by Hamas. He was officially declared dead on 21 July 2024.
Media
‘Voices 4 Dialogue’ Webdocumentary. Alex Dancyg.
Biography
Alex Dancyg (Danzig) was born in Warsaw on 21 July 1948. His father, Marcin (Mordechaj) Dancyg, was a lawyer, working as a military judge and then a barrister. His mother, Nina (Nycha), née Welczer, was a historian. His parents survived the German occupation in the eastern territories of Poland, living under false names. He had an older sister Edyta (born in 1941). After the war, the family lived first in the Mokotów district of Warsaw and then moved to Waryński Street.
The Dancygs moved to Israel in 1957, when Alex was nine years old. Alex completed school and studied history at the Ben Gurion University of Beer Sheva. He was a member of Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair, a left-wing youth movement. He did his compulsory military service, and then fought in several wars as a paratrooper.
Alex collaborated with the Yad Vashem Institute and actively participated in the Polish-Jewish dialogue. In 1986, thirty years after leaving Poland, he returned there as an interpreter with one of the first groups of Israeli youth. A few years later, in 1990, Yad Vashem and the Israeli Ministry of Education offered Dancyg to run guiding training courses for guides leading Israeli study tours to Poland.
Alex lived in kibbutz Nir Oz in the south of Israel, working as a field irrigation specialist. He and his wife Rachel had four children: three sons, Ben, Mati and Yuval, and daughter Li, as well as eleven grandchildren. Alex was the hero of Krzysztof Bukowski’s documentary film ‘Czytając Sienkiewicza na pustyni Negev’ (‘Reading Sienkiewicz in the Negev Desert’) and Marta Rebzda’s radio documentary ‘Podwójna tożsamość’ (‘Double Identity’).
Alex Dancyg was kidnapped by Hamas on 7 October 2023. Information about his death in Gaza was confirmed on 22 July 2024.
