Tarnow, Part 2, Roots Tour, Part X

We would have liked to have met up with other Jews and Jew-lovers at the concert at the Bima in Tarnow that evening; we could have shared both the ghosts and living presence.  But my husband wasn't inclined to drive in a strange country with a schizo GPS in the dark.  So instead, we proceeded along the proscribed Jewish heritage path on the map given us at the information centre on the rynek, to leave before nightfall.  This led us to the remnant of the city walls, which we could stand upon.  And past that, to a monument to the first Transport to Auschwitz. 

This tells the story of the first transport to Auschwitz;
it came from Tarnow and it was 738 political prisoners.

Monument to first transport to Auschwitz, Tarnow

There were posters to this fact plastered around Tarnow's rynek; the first transport to Auschwitz was not a Jewish one. This transport was of 708 non-Jewish Poles and 20 Jews; they were sent in June 1940 as political prisoners, and the square from which they were taken was marked with a modernistic, minimalist art work.  The wide marble panel represented outlines of people rounded up from everyday worklives, holding briefcases, led by outlined soldiers in identifiably German helmets, jodhpur pants, with rifles slung over their shoulders. A couple of police were stationed there; a Polish flag waved on its pole. 

The former mikveh of Tarnow.  It must have been beautiful once.

Opposite this monument was a building with perhaps Persian-style keyhole windows and ornamentation; it had been the local mikveh.  Now it housed a restaurant, a salon and some other offices. Air conditioning units poked through the keyhole windows, indifferent to restoration.

Further along the route we came upon three posted sheets with the timeline of the destruction of Tarnow's Jews -- half of the population, or around 25,000 people.  Unlike something you'd read in America, this plaque showed the difference made by local familiarity; it named the who, what, where and when of each Aktion, day by day.  It named names, dates, times of day. 

This "Chronology of Tragedy" noted that the Germans first bombed Tarnow on Sept. 3, 1939 and took over the city five days later. They immediately started capturing Jewish men on the streets, confiscating their property and sending them off to forced labor camps. In November of that year the synagogues were torched.  The first 1940 transport of political prisoners to Auschwitz were tatooed with the numbers 31 to 758.

The Tarnow ghetto was formally established in March 1941; it was eventually stuffed with 40,000 Jews from the city and surrounding towns.  The first Aktion was in June, ordered by Obergruppenfuhrer F.W. Kruger.   Paul Reiss, head of Tarnow's Judenrat, was shot and killed on the spot when he refused to hand over lists of Jews marked for transport.

 "Due to the enormous task pose by the first Aktion, the security services sought assistance from the local and district police, a company of Waffen SS, headed by SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Klienow, stationed at Debica training Camp, the Sonderdienst (Special Services), the Baudienst (Polish Pioneer Service), and several employees of the Tarnow Labor Exchange."  My friend Pat's grandparents were from Debica, which we passed on our way back to Rzeszow.

"On the morning of June 11, after a speech by Klee, commander of the criminal police, the SS men were issued rations of alcohol and they and the Baudienst, armed with axes, broke down the locked doors of the Jewish houses."  The description that followed, of this and three or four more Aktions,  were obviously eye-witness accounts of mass murder and deportation to the Belzec death camp.  The final liquidation of the Ghetto was the work of Amnon Goth, who had proven his capacity for brutality in the ghettos of Krakow, Przemysl, Rzeszow, Lublin, and other towns. He was played by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's List.

This Chronology of Tragedy was posted on that wall only in English; so for the benefit of Jewish tourists. Would the Polish version have remained unmolested on that wall? 

Krakowska Street, leading to Tarnow's Rynek

On our way back to the car we walked down Krakowska, looking for the address of my grandmother's cousin Chaim's tailor shop.  49 and 53 looked original, but 51 was obviously a post-war building.  We found another historical plaque on 53, with pictures of the occupation 1939-45.  We also had dinner in a very nice place called Tatrzanska. And we passed a huge red brick church, rose petals strewn all over the sidewalk in front.  A banner on one side of the door featured Jesus; on the other, Pope John Paul. Children stood near a side entrance in First Communion robes, a costume I recognized from Catholic Queens.  We also passed a large billboard, also featuring the Polish Pope, urging the congregation to take part in an upcoming group trip to the Holy Land.

Tarnow is named after this guy, I think.
I used to know more about him. Nobility?

We found a sign that said "Rzeszow" pointing out of the city, so we took the long way home, on a lesser road, as the sun set. Found our way into the hotel basement parking, from behind the rynek.

Roots Tour Part VIII: From Przework east to towns she knew -- Jaroslaw and Przemysl

Feeling victorious after our historian produced the census records from a room right behind her office, we left the Przeworsk museum for the next town, about 15 minutes east: Jaroslaw.  It was a place my grandmother had mentioned. A quick hop by car train or horse, I think the doctor had been there.  An attractive little town, it had its own rynek, of course, and two repurposed synagogues still standing.

The plaque on the art school in Jaroslaw

Jakub took us inside one of them; it's been an art school for many years.  You can't tell it was a synagogue until you enter the soaring gallery of students' drawings and paintings. Then you see the high vaulted ceiling and recognize the arched windows, round and rectangular panes of clear glass where you know all the colors and the names of donors once drew the eyes of daveners. 

There's two plaques to bear witness; one of recent vintage, in Polish English and Hebrew, and an older one, in Polish alone.

 The school is on or very near Jaroslav's rynek, which also boasts a beautiful town hall, decked with plaques and statuary.

The other synagogue, the "new" one, is not being used for anything  now. Jakub said it was under new ownership.  This one had one extremely exceptional feature: the shape of the twin tablets on its pediment; a clear surviving sign of its original identity. Everywhere else we'd been so far, the Germans had been diabolically thorough about eradicating all signs of Jewish names or symbols.

Inside, the art school shows hints of its previous function.

Anyone speak Polish?  This appears on the town hall  in Jaroslaw's rynek. 

This is the former synagogue in Jaroslaw  that bears a rare surviving symbol.

We had lunch in Jaroslaw and proceeded on further east to Przemysl, a place my Grandmother refers to on a recording as a place "we knew we were already safe."  A small hilly city of three-story, ornately fronted buildings, winding streets and plenty of vehicular ad pedestrian traffic.  There we had an address from a document of the Committee for Polish Jews placing my grandmother's surviving nephew, age 2, and his mother, her sister-in-law, in 1946.

This multilingual sign describing Jaroslaw's history as a trade center typifies the Jew-free history taught all through the Communist era.  

 

Yes, that's a covered wagon, representing Jaroslaw's past to tourists
 as a way station among traders.  I thought those belonged to American history...  who knew? 

My husband and Jakub, chatting in Jaroslaw

On our way to that address, a mid-sixtyish local woman saw us on the sidewalk and me with my camera. Happy to see her town worthy of tourism, she eagerly asked me, through Jakub, what I thought of Przemysl. I said it looked like a nice, prosperous European city.   Along with translating my answer, Jakub asked her for directions to Przemysl's synagogues.  Although I didn't catch it, he told me that he saw her enthusiasm immediately cool. But she gave us the right directions.

Przemysl's synagogue was a big building in the middle of town; it had served first as a stable and later as a library.  Same denatured windows.  Blank old plaques where names had once been inscribed.  New historical plaques with contemporary donors.

The names erased from a place of honor
on the former synagogue of Przemysl.

The symbols chiseled off, the synagogue turned stable in Przemysl.

We left the shul and walked back the way we'd come, to find my great aunt's and second cousin's address; Mikiewicza 7.  It led to an old wooden door inside a courtyard, behind retail stores of leather goods and meat. Not neat or pretty. Weather-beaten and shabby, the door shared the courtyard with garbage bins and parked motorcycles.  People of the neighborhood asked us what we were doing there. I managed "aunt" and gestured "long, long ago."  That seemed to satisfy them.

Przemysl also has a surviving Jewish cemetery, which we visited inside its walls. With burials that dated up to 1944, its grounds near the entrance were obviously kept by someone who cared in 2015.

How was this graveyard spared? Jakub said that the Germans just couldn't manage to get to every one. They got close. The woods and underbrush were reclaiming the older stones, further back from the entrance and the road.

Two plaques adorned the entrance arch: one in Polish dedicated to a John J Hartman from the USA in 1999; the one on the other side in Hebrew and Polish to an Aharon (Arnold) Rabinowicz, who, says Google Translate,  built this wall and its iron gate in the year 1913.

Jakub had one more place he wanted to show us; something that would give us a sense, he said, of old Galicia. After at least an hour's drive through gentle Carpathian hills, that place turned out to be the curated historical village of Sanok.

 Something like Stockbridge, Mass., with admission building, tickets, map, it was assembled out of actual 19th-century, thatched-roof wooden houses and businesses salvaged from other towns around southern Poland,  mostly arranged around  a market square.  And just like a Stockbridge or a Waterloo, NJ, it had its blacksmith, apothecary, clockmaker, schoolhouse, church, weaver, tinker and teacher.

And less like a Stockbridge, it had its Jews. One Jewish house stood on the square, its front-room table set for Shabbes and papercut pictures hanging in the windows.

 

There was also a well-researched synagogue going up in Sanok this year,  reflecting the new tourism traffic and Jewish historical agencies at work in today's Poland.

We'd unfortunately gotten there at the end of the day. They let us in, just in time to see the watchmaker close up shop and a straggling school group get a double-speed, last-minute tour from a man who looked authentic to the place and period.  The kids looked like they could easily be from central New Jersey; that's  central and eastern Europe for you.

Finally, we and Jakub had dinner on the rynek in Sanok, after he showed us the surviving "private" synagogue of that little town.  You don't expect a Jewish presence in remote little towns in America, but there are ghosts of them in tiny towns all over Poland.  There's a historical reason for this; I think it's that Polish nobles wanted "their" administrative Jews everywhere to collect taxes for them.  Strategic to pick an unpopular minority that relied on the nobility for protection. 

Right next to our outdoor table was a coin-operated, one-seat kiddie ride; the kind of thing you'd see outside stores in my boomer childhood.  A little boy got in it, right next to his mom, and my husband offered the mom to do the shaking for him, Which he did, making the boy laugh.

The young mom spoke a little English. The little boy's name?  "Yosh."  What does he speak?  "He speaks Yosh."  We shared a little moment of the everyday sweet silliness of being a little kid's mom.