Roots Expedition to Przeworsk

In a few weeks if all goes according to plan and, in my grandmother's words,  mechishem (God willing),my husband and  I will be in southeast Poland, walking around the town, Przeworsk, that she and her sister left in 1921.   My own private little March of the Living, without the marching.  More like a pilgrimage, perhaps.  Or, more narcissistically, the closing of a great mythic, cinematic circle.  As if the last three generations made up an epic saga that I get to conclude.

Practically speaking, I doubt I could possibly meet anyone there who would remember her family. They left for Rava Ruska, a town further east and now in Ukraine, a few months or years before being gassed in Belzec and shot in Kolomay, according to Yad VaShem documents.  So their presence in Przeworsk -- pronounced "Pshevorsk" -- could have lasted until 1941 at the very latest.  Using the address listed on her brother's entry on his immigrant ship's manifest, some years after she arrived, the Jewish street her family lived on has been completely transformed, from low-slung, rough-hewn wooden houses to neat, stuccoed, three-story apartment buildings.  And from early-20th-century Jews to contemporary Poles.

Przeworsk town hall, old market square

Who will even notice this return? You readers, I'm hoping. I imagine we'll simply be pedestrians in this town, one big enough for residents to not know each other.  Not big enough for tourism. I'll walk amid schools, parks, pharmacies, beauty salons, shoe stores, insurance agencies, churches. The churches and a few elegant buildings around the old market square may be the only things there my grandmother might have seen, back before 1921.  

Or perhaps Jewish American roots-travelers are a familiar sight in the more distant precincts of Galicia by now -- even as far from Krakow as Przeworsk.  Przeworsk has no surviving synagogue buildings, only pictures.  Przemysl, a bigger town further east, has two.  Przeworsk does have a historical museum, the web tells me, with perhaps a case of Jewish ritual artifacts, some photos and some facts.

Google's 360-degree Street View camera has made it to Przeworsk.  I've already virtually strolled around. Although their faces are blurred, the townspeople look perfectly ordinary, if consistently white.  Kids with backpacks. Mothers with strollers. I can copy the words on the store signs and paste them into Google Translate and poof, they turn into English. Shoe store.  Appliance shop.

Jewish street in Przeworsk before 1944

I can also search Google News for "Przeworsk" and "Zydowski," to see if the town has generated any news of Jewish interest in recent years.  And I can click to instantly translate whatever news items turn up.  What shows up only serves to show how thoroughly all traces of Jewish habitation have been erased. What shows up is an article about Hebrew writing that was found on the back of a child's gravestone.  Turns out the unfortunate child's name had been engraved on a rare, recycled headstone that hadn't been plowed under with the rest of the Jewish cemetery.  Such a rare artifact that today's Przeworskers found its finding newsworthy.  

Here is the Google- translated caption to this article on nowiny24.pl:

This Jewish gravestone stands on the grave of the deceased
in the sixties girls - says Natalia Figiela. This is a great rarity,
because the Nazis meticulously covered during the
 war all traces of Przeworsk Jews (Fig. Janusz Motyka)

It's been reported that young Poles are showing new curiosity about the vanished Jewish 10% of Poland that my grandmother left behind. If you can believe it, I've been told by reputable sources that more people are studying Yiddish in Poland than in the US and Israel combined. The young man who's meeting us in Rzeszow to drive us to the smaller towns, translate, arrange a visit to archives and guide is one such curious Pole.  We arranged to hire him for the day through the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.  He comes well recommended; I wonder if he's discovered some Jewish ancestor of his own.

Przeworsk's Jewish cemetery lies buried in the middle of town, right along the main road, under the bus station.  This fact is marked in Polish on a small, unobtrusive stone monument sitting on an out-of-the-way grassy corner.  When Google came by, one day in 2012, there were some flowers and a candle at its foot. They could have come from a sensitive Pole.  But perhaps not. I know I'm not the first returnee.  Others have left pictures of their visits online.