Roots Trip to Galicia, Part II

Our room at the Hotel Bristol gave out on a great view of Rzeszow's rynek/old market square and the old town hall.  The strange thing about the room, aside from a total absence of closets or drawers, was the bathroom: The walls separating it from the rest of the room were simple glass.  And outside of this glass there were floor-to-ceiling curtains. Two days later I asked our guide, who came up to check out the place for his clients, if this was a Polish thing or just weird.  He said it was weird. So maybe just avoid Room 205, depending how much you value the view.  Either one.

View of Rzeszow's rynek from our window

Room 205 also had a nice big flat-panel TV on the wall,  desk, free wifi, mini-bar, coffee maker, hair dryer, iron and ironing board.  And on the beds, duvet covers with blankets inside.  My grandmother used to make her beds that way. I don't know where we got top and bottom sheets from: the British, maybe?  Thank you, Brits, because a) it takes some practice to insert blankets into duvet covers and b) they were too heavy, even in the oddly cool June weather,  forcing us to waste energy  on air conditioning.  Or it would have wasted energy, had we had any real control of the air conditioning.  We didn't;  although we had thermostats, we discovered that they rarely worked, in any of the six hotels we slept in between roots tripping and guided tour. So we finally just shook the blanket down to the bottom and slept under the cover.

After a nap, we started exploring our neighborhood, armed with a map from the hotel desk.  There were several little Jewish star icons on it, marking former synagogues, right near the square.  So after checking out the square a bit, and taking pictures with Kosciuszko, we went off in the direction of those Jewish landmarks. Go to Google street View, and search on 6 Boznicza, Rzeszow; it'll put you there, right near some theaters. 

Of the two former synagogues, the white building was now a town archive, and a notice at the door advertised some workshops or lectures on Jewish history, given in the mornings.  I don't know what the other, pink-and-tan one was now; it was marked with a small mogen dovid and other plaques, in Polish and satisfyingly imperfect English.  These were home-made, if not home-funded memorials.  

Here's the view around the corner of the pink building

These are the plaques on either side of the front door.
This one, clearly older, is in Polish, German and English. 

There was no surviving Jewish insignia on the buildings themselves, which stood across the street from a park.   And in the near corner of that park -- if you just turn around in Google Street View you'll see it -- stood the first of many plaque-bearing stones we were to see, also with a Jewish star. 

The stone's plaque noted, in Polish and Hebrew, that this had been the site of a Jewish cemetery since the sixteenth century, and was therefore chosen by the Nazis as the "concentration point" i.e., the roundup point for Rzeszow's doomed Jews, in 1942.  This was the first of many somber and unsurprising monuments.  The only surprising thing might have been how recently that stone's marker had been put there.  We met one of the men responsible for mounting it there the following day.

In spite of our jet lag we schlepped ourselves perhaps a mile farther, past a hospital and other medical/therapeutical sites, through a rainbow-colored bridge over a small canal flanked by a bike path, to another marked site: a Jewish cemetery.  When we got there, we found high brick walls, plastered over; parts of that wall painted over, a tall iron gate, and through that locked gate, a partial view of a field of tall weeds. We knew the Nazis had destroyed most Jewish cemeteries, but Rzeszow's tourist mapmakers had put this one on its map anyway. I walked along the wall, seeing only old phone poles and their wires beyond and inside.  Perhaps there was an office in there once, perhaps it had a phone by 1942. Or maybe these were strung to other places, beyond the wall. There was another starred cemetery  further from our hotel; we skipped it.

In the same vicinity as the former synagogues, was "Ghetto Victims' Plaza," where this memorial stood.  In some places formerly Soviet-bloc countries allow a few Soviet-raised monuments to remain, acknowledging their role in liberating them from Nazi Germany.  

Back on the rynek we enjoyed a decent supper at an outdoor table, next to a table of young men speaking French.  The waiters gave the diners  blankets against the rare June chill.   

In checking some facts, I just came upon this site, which documents, with remarkably exact names and dates, the terrible fate of the Jewish third of Rzeszow, and the ghetto,which held Jews from around the area on their way to Treblinka, Auschwitz and mass graves in forests.

 Galician Jews had their own name for Rzeszow: "Reishe."

The shiny little airport we landed in, just north of the city, was probably once the military airport where slave laborers were sent during the war.