More amazing discoveries...

One thing about Poland:  there are absolutely no signs and hardly any information about how to find obscure Jewish memorials.  Memorial plaques in cities like Krakow or Warsaw - easy to find... Sosnowiec - not so much...

But Isabella did her research and this is what we found...

This is the house where Wladyslaw Szpilman (the famous pianist who was the subject of the Oscar Award Winning movie, The Pianist) grew up.

The Sosnowiec Gymnasium - otherwise known as the Jewish high school where my grandmother and her siblings went to school....

A memorial to the Jews of Sosnowiec who died during the Shoah. Look carefully at the second photo... You can see where someone had scratched a swastika into the marble in the top left hand corner....

The Strzemieczyce cemetery where my grandfather's community members would have buried those who had died.  It was in the middle of nowhere - and I mean NOWHERE... There were farms surrounding it but no signs whatsoever and we drove around a little until we found it.  An older woman lived in the house that was attached to the property and when I say that these graves were in her backyard, I mean she looked out her kitchen window into a yard filled with ancient, crumbling graves.  We spoke to the woman who lived there and she explained that her original house somewhere in town burned down due to a fire.  The local municipality decided to 'give' her the house attached to the cemetery since the caretaker had recently passed away and they gave her money every year for the upkeep of the cemetery.  As of the last ten years, the government stopped giving her money to take care of the property but she still trims the grass once or twice a year, so we left her some money to put towards the upkeep of the cemetery.  A lot of the headstones were broken or missing so it was difficult to find names.  We were specifically looking for a brother of my grandfather, Yaakov, who was killed before the war but we were unable to find it....