The Jewish inhabitants of Wierzbnik, a town in southern Poland now known  as Starachowice, were deported to the Treblinka death camp in the autumn of 1942, killed there in cold blood like tens of thousands of other Polish Jews.

In an instant, a venerable Jewish community, comprising about one-quarter of the town’s population, was obliterated from the face of the earth.

But for Maciej Frankiewicz, a 40-year-old Polish Catholic painter who was born and still lives in Starachowice,   the Jews of Wierzbnik never really died.

“They are present in spirit,” said Frankiewicz, whose exhibition, Visions of Wierzbnik: The Art of Maciej Frankiewicz, was featured at this month’s Ashkenaz Festival of New Yiddish Culture in Toronto. “Just because they were murdered doesn’t mean they have disappeared.”

Frankiewicz, whose birth coincided with a state-sponsored anti-Semitic campaign that gutted what remained of Poland’s postwar Jewish community, has spent about half his life preserving the memory of the Jews of Wierzbnik.

Apart from his paintings, he and his wife, Anita – the parents of 10 children – participated in the restoration of Wierzbnik’s Jewish cemetery, where more than 400 tombstones were cleaned and set upright again.

As well, he played a role in the creation of a Jewish memorial room in Starachowice’s cultural centre, where some of his paintings are displayed.

In an interview conducted through an interpreter on the final day of Ashkenaz, Frankiewicz said that, as a child during the communist era, he would play in Wierzbnik’s neglected Jewish cemetery.

He did not know any Jews, since  there were none in his town after World War II, and he was barely conversant with the Holocaust, since it was not on his school’s curriculum.

Nevertheless, he was drawn to Starachowice’s Jewish past, and as a boy, he sketched buildings of the former Jewish quarter

On his wedding day, he received an unusual gift, a drum with Hebrew letters, that drew him still deeper into Poland’s  symbiotic  relationship with Jews. Out of curiosity, he and his new bride disassembled the drum and discovered that it was made from a fragment of a Torah scroll taken from Wierzbnik’s synagogue.

“It illustrated for us the traumatic brutal force of Nazism,” said Anita, a journalist who has written articles about Poland’s pre-war Jewish community in the local press.

Frankiewicz produced his first Jewish-themed painting in 1989, when the Solidarity trade union movement formed Poland’s first non-communist government in decades.

Since then, Frankiewicz has painted more than 120 canvases, some of which have been bought by Jewish visitors on sentimental journeys to Poland.

Although he appears to be the only artist in Starachowice who focuses on Jews, he has found the names of young Polish painters on the Internet who share his interest and passion.

Frankiewicz’s paintings, which are surreal, realistic and romantic, range far and wide, at least judging by his exhibit at Ashkenaz.

Coachman at an Inn (1998), Wierzbnik Marketplace (1992) and Wierzbnik Synagogue on Yom Kippur (1992) summon up images of pre-war Poland, while Death of the Village (2001) crackles with the terror of the Holocaust.

Frankiewicz, who holds that Poland’s history would be incomplete without its Jewish dimension, has drawn inspiration from various quarters. He has consulted historical data, photographs and written records, and he has been animated by dreams and his imagination.

Eric Stein, Ashkenaz’s artistic director, stumbled upon his works in 1999 while on a visit to Starachowice, whose current population is about 65,000.

Stein – whose late grandfather was born and raised in Wierzbnik and immigrated to Canada in 1928 – was “blown away” by Frankiewicz’s virtuosity and his commitment to preserving Wierzbnik’s Jewish legacy.

Frankiewicz, a gardener by trade, restored its Jewish cemetery with the cooperation and assistance of Starachowice/Wierzbniker societies in Canada, Israel and the United States.

“I regarded it as a mission,” said Frankiewicz, who conducts school tours of the cemetery.

 As far as he knows, Wierzbnik was home to some 3,500 Jews prior to the war. Shortly after the town was occupied by the German army in 1939, the local synagogue was burned to the ground. Three years later, in late October, the Jewish residents were deported, not to be seen again.

To the best of his knowledge, there is not a single Jew living in Starachowice today. “If there are any Jews, they are very assimilated and keeping a low profile,” he said.

Frankiewicz, who has studied Hebrew, visited Israel in 1999 and liked it. “I felt like I was meeting my family.”

He cannot understand why some of his fellow Poles dislike, even hate, Jews. “Anti-semitism,” he observed, “is basically a mental disorder.”