Roots Tour in Galicia -- Part V -- Przeworsk's Bus Station

The trip from Rzeszow to Przeworsk couldn't have been any more than forty five minutes, rynek to rynek (market square to market square). We were mostly on the same road the bus had taken to Count Potocki's Castle in Lancut, plus another ten minutes or so further east.  The weather was fine. Bennett and I peppered Jakub with questions all the way, about Poles and Jews today, about the shift in education after the fall of the Soviet Union, about his family, his girlfriend, his girlfriend's parents, his story, his current job, the masses of Hasidim he guides to former synagogues, other roots-seekers.

He stopped at the first sign marking the town.  Just a regular white-on-green sign, Przeworsk; just like Route 3 to  Passaic, NJ.  No grand lump rose in my throat.  I snapped the picture from the car.  It was just what I had expected, and the sign was so clearly of another Przeworsk, of another time, one where schools and restaurants and campgrounds meet you on the outskirts of a town so much bigger, more normal, better fed, and safer than the one my grandmother knew.  And of course, Judenrein.  Empty of Jews, who had once been up to 40% of Przeworsk.

The countryside was very pretty; lush green and mostly flat, with the Carpathian hills off in the southern distance.  In fact, the tourist brochures call this the SubCarpathian region.  It looked to me like flatter parts of upstate New York, with the same trees, the same wildflowers and tall grass, the same rolls of hay on open fields.  No wonder the Catskills looked so inviting.

Jakub took us first to the place where the maps indicate the former presence of a Jewish cemetery. Destroyed by Nazis, today it's the Przeworsk bus station, built during Soviet times.  I knew where to go before Jakub did, from many views on the web.  The little stone monument off in a grassy corner looked more worn up close. 


And the Polish inscription -- "Jewish Memorial" -- was barely legible, even to Poles, and the words below that even more ground down.  I knelt down to touch its crumbly surface, wondering which and how many ancestors' bones lay under the asphalt and concrete.

People sitting on benches, waiting for buses, didn't pay any attention to me that I could see.  Someone with a camera and perhaps a Jewish face, taking pictures and leaving pebbles must have been a sight they saw from time to time, maybe even with increasing frequency.  Somebody had already left pebbles on top; someone else had left a tinned yahrtseit candle, and someone else one of those reddish candle lamps you see at other Polish gravesites and monuments. The little monument was shaded by a few trees.

 It was a run-down bus station, at that, with skimpy shelters that didn't shade very well, and benches and railings in need of fresh paint.  Polish web sites (thanks again, Google)  report that plans to renovate the station have been hampered by the chief rabbi of Poland, who will not give permission to do any more violence to a Jewish burial site.   Nowadays this is a consideration.  Could they move the bus station?  It's right alongside the main road, choked with traffic. 

Again, it was hard to connect the physical place I saw, heard and smelled with the emotional place I had contemplated remotely.  Maybe the more Zen could wait for something to connect in the head.  We had more places to see.

Across the street from the bus station is a triangle-shaped park that probably covers some of the cemetery, too. We saw other places, like Rzeszow, where that was the case. And on that triangle I got a better look at the huge crucifix I had also seen via Google Street View.  This, too, I learned to my surprise, had been erected under Communist rule.  But I'm not sure anymore.  Because what I saw up close was a tall three-part column commemorating Poland, or more probably Polish war heroes, with eagles.

The huge crucifix was bolted onto one side of that column.  Perhaps an addendum, a retrofit, or possibly even a retort, to that original secular, military monument. 

And at the foot of it all, a huge inverted stone pyramid with an inscription in honor of Pope John Paul II.

The naming of a Polish pope in 1978 is a point of national pride still sharp today, and if I understand the words for "Millennial Year," in the middle of his papacy, in 2000.  Typing the words into Google Translate gives me what is probably a quote from that pope: "Open the doors to Christ, victims of fights for freedom and human dignity."

Perhaps all expressions of Catholicism were a defiant gesture at Russia, once the Iron Curtain fell.  Because today and maybe since forever, Polishness seems to have been inextricably bound up with the Catholic Church.  It was an institution the Russians knew better than to try to mess with. In contrast with a secularizing western Europe, Poland, we're told, is 97% Catholic and 70% observant. A principal export is priests. And unsurprisingly, this is especially true in small towns like Przeworsk.

Certainly nobody had to ask any rabbi's permission when they erected that crucifix, staring out over what they surely knew, and still know, was the Jewish cemetery.