WARTA, Poland -- For 40 years, the old Jewish cemetery lay forgotten. Cows grazed among the cracked and fallen
headstones. The residents of Warta dumped their trash on the graves near the road.

Then the passion took hold of Polish bachelor Ireneusz Slipek. Every day, he goes to the graveyard, clearing trash, cutting
weeds, righting and reassembling the heavy stones. Neighbors stop to watch -- and to criticize.

"They watch me working and they all ask the same question," Slipek, 63, said recently: " 'Why? Why do you do that for the
Jews?' "

More than 11 years after Slipek began his lonely task, someone will finally say thank you. On Sunday, Israel plans to honor 23
people for preserving Jewish history in Poland, a nation whose vast Jewish community perished in the Holocaust.

The ceremony, to be held during the annual Jewish festival in Krakow, was the brainchild of Michael Traison, a Detroit lawyer
who travels frequently to Poland.

Traison, who is Jewish, said this week he was dismayed to find that so many Americans and Israelis know Poland only as a
place of hatred and death.

"The primary reason for the ceremony is to say to people like Slipek, 'Thank you very much,' " said Traison, a partner at Miller,
Canfield, Paddock and Stone in downtown Detroit. "But I also wanted to show the Jewish world that Poland is full of very
good, decent people who know and care for our Jewish heritage."

None of the 23 honorees is Jewish. Some are professionals who work in Jewish history museums. Others work with young
people visiting from Israel. And some, like Slipek, act out of a sense of duty toward their martyred neighbors -- an estimated
3.5 million Polish Jews who until World War II comprised one of the world's largest Jewish communities.

"Innocent people died here. Hardworking people. Kids. Women. Old people," Slipek said as he strolled this week through the
restored cemetery, grown high with wildflowers, clover and Queen Anne's lace.

"The Jews built Warta, and they died sotragically," he said. "I had this need in myself to care for this place." Slipek has spent
long hours alone, sorting through the stones and matching them to the ancient, mossy graves.

Many stones had been stolen. Slipek found them laid as flooring in warehouses, lining drainage ditches and broken up to
sharpen knives. One stone, its Hebrew inscription still visible, was used as the foundation for an outhouse. Slipek hauled them
all back to the cemetery.

Some stones had been reduced to fragments. Slipek painstakingly pieced them together, using cement and glue to form odd
mosaics. Other stones were still whole, but they had been broken off and moved away from their pedestals. When Slipek
matches one of these, he said, "I feel like I've been born again."

Few in Warta share his passion. For more than a year after he began his work, someone came at night and dropped dead rats
by the cemetery gate. Even today, children throw rocks at the gravestones.

Slipek keeps the gate locked. So far, no one has tried to destroy Slipek's work. But few help him. Even Slipek's friends
demanded money for mowing the grass after he suffered a heart attack last year. A retired office worker, Slipek paid them
from his pension check of about $150 a month.

Slipek greets it all with a tight smile and a little shake of his head. People accuse him of working for the Jews, but, no, he says,
this was all his idea. In fact, when the passion came upon him, Slipek didn't know any Jews.

That's not unusual in a place such as Warta, a town of a few thousand on the rolling plains of central Poland. In the 1800s,
Jews comprised more than half the town's residents. Today, there are none.

The last one, a woman who survived the Holocaust and then converted to Catholicism, died in 1983.

The demise of Warta's Jews is a familiar story. After the Nazis marched into town in 1940, nearly 2,000 Jews were herded into
a ghetto. German soldiers burned down the synagogue, built in 1550, and forced Jewish women and children to build roads
with the stones.

The ghetto was liquidated in August 1942 when the Nazis moved 1,800 people north to Chelmno, the first of many Nazi death
camps in Poland. The feeble, the sick and the disabled -- and a few Jews who tried to escape -- were shot on the spot and
buried in the cemetery in Warta.

Slipek was barely school age when the Chelmno crematoria began to emit their awful stench. But he remembers hearing talk of
"places where people are burned in ovens."

Millions of Poles did die at the Nazis' hands, but Slipek survived, only vaguely aware that 400 years of Jewish history in Warta
had come to an end. He entered the Catholic seminary in Krakow, where he studied a bit of Hebrew. Poor health forced him
to abandon his dreams of the priesthood, and he became an office worker. He never married, but busied himself with hobbies
-- singing in a choir, transcribing music, collecting military artifacts and other bits of history.

Then in the late 1970s, Slipek took up photography. For the first time, he was drawn to the old cemetery where, among the
mounds of stinking trash, he found headstones carved with candles, angels and other icons of ethereal beauty.

"I was enchanted. They are works of art, these stones. Masterpieces," Slipek said. "And when I see the names of the people
buried there -- Abraham, Moshe, Miriam, Deborah -- I feel like I'm reading the Old Testament."

In 1986, Warta city officials announced plans to bulldoze the cemetery and build an athletic field. Tractors appeared and began
to knock over the stones. Slipek was horrified.

"When I saw the people demolishing it, at that point, the cemetery became my passion," Slipek said. "So I began the struggle to
save it."

With help from a Jewish organization in Warsaw, Slipek brought a halt to the destruction. The city admitted the cemetery's
historical significance and agreed to build a fence, prohibit further dumping and clean up the trash. But the job of restoring the
cemetery fell to Slipek, Now, his work is nearly finished. By the end of the year, he says, every stone will be back in place.

So far, only two survivors of the Warta ghetto have returned to see what Slipek has done. One was a woman from Israel who
came while Slipek was away. The other was Ruben Gelbart, 72, of Lucerne, Switzerland. Gelbart was 15 when the Nazis shot
his oldest brother and buried him in the Warta cemetery. Gelbart's youngest brother died in Chelmno; his parents died in
Auschwitz. Gelbart survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, and has become Slipek's closest friend.

"I was so surprised and emotional to learn that there was somebody who wants to take care of the cemetery," Gelbart said in a
telephone interview. "What he's doing means everything to me."