WARSAW, Poland — The son of a Holocaust survivor fulfilled a years-long personal mission on Wednesday by unveiling memorials in a Polish forest honoring hundreds of Jews killed by German forces during World War II, including dozens of members of his father’s family.

Michael Pomeranc, an American, was joined by his relatives as well as the families of other Holocaust survivors to commemorate all those who were killed at the site of the former German Adampol labor camp.

In a speech, Pomeranc spoke about growing up in the United States with no graves of his murdered ancestors to visit.

“We’ve never had the opportunity to lay a flower for any of our loved ones who died here,” Pomeranc said at the ceremony. “But we will mourn them today. Their souls in heaven will always be with us.”

The ceremony took place at the site of a Nazi labor camp where Jews were forced to work in the fields before being killed in 1943. During World War II, the area was under occupation by Nazi Germany, which used Jews as slave labor and carried out mass executions in death camps like Auschwitz, but also in many other places that — like Adampol — have received very little attention.

Jewish and Catholic prayers accompanied the event, which was attended by local schoolchildren and watched live by descendants of Holocaust survivors far beyond Poland.

The Israeli ambassador spoke as a letter from the US ambassador was read. There are two living survivors of Adampol, but they do not live in Poland and were unable to make the trip.

Pomeranc, a prominent New York hotelier, recalled visiting the site 25 years ago with his father, Jack Pomeranc, who managed to escape from the camp and joined Jewish partisans to blow up the railroad tracks. train and buildings occupied by the Nazis, seeking to sabotage their war effort. .

While Jack, then known as Jankiel, survived with a brother and two sisters, the Nazis killed his parents, two younger sisters aged 3 and 4, aunts, uncles and cousins.

“He had tremendous anxiety, regret and fear,” he recalled of his father, who died last year. On that visit 25 years ago, he was “crying and apologizing to his family that he wished he could have saved them and he could have, but he didn’t and he should have.”

“And at that point, I really understood that this was something that I had to close for him because he was traumatized his whole life because of this,” Pomeranc told The Associated Press on the eve of the memorial service.

At the ceremony, he said: “Today we close this chapter in our lives.”

The commemoration included the unveiling of a memorial with the names of 73 of the more than 600 victims who have been identified so far.

The aim is to restore the identities of as many victims as possible – and preserve the memory of all.

Commemoration is also part of a greater effort by the Jewish community in Poland to commemorate the sites of the mass killing of Jews during the Holocaust, which were neglected and remain unmarked decades after World War II.

Most of the 3.3 million Jews who lived in Poland before the German invasion of 1939 were killed in the Holocaust. Only in recent years has the office of Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich and a group called Zapomniane (Forgotten) been able to systematically locate mass burial sites and mark them for future generations.

They are aided by non-invasive technologies that allow researchers not to touch or remove human remains, thus complying with the dictates of Jewish law.

The technologies, used in conjunction with witness testimony from Jack Pomeranc and local residents, helped researchers identify more than 20 possible mass graves at Adampol, according to Caroline Sturdy Colls, a forensic archaeologist who has conducted years of research at the site.