Podwal’s mother’s Polish birthplace, Dąbrowa Białostocka, a predominantly Jewish town before World War II, lacked any traces of its Jewish past other than a few tombstones in its Jewish cemetery. To amend this absence in the townscape, schoolteacher Dorota Budzińska asked Podwal to design a mural in remembrance of the Jews who for centuries lived there. The image, painted on an outside wall of Dąbrowa's high school, includes an oak tree (Dąbrowa means “oak forest”) with the letters of the Yiddish alphabet scattered among the leaves. To portray the burning of the town by the Germans in 1941, Dąbrowa’s synagogue and homes are painted in red and orange.