Roots Tour Part XIII: Postscript

It is now more than six months since our trip to my grandmother's home town and environs in Poland, time to write some sort of summation, and more than time to start working on the new leads it gave me.

I went there to prove that the towns my grandmother spoke of -- Tarnow, Rzeszow, Przeworsk, Jaroslaw and Przemysl -- were places that exist in real life, that you could visit. I went to get some sense of what Esther's native country looked like, even close to a century later. To stand where she and her sisters and brothers must have stood. To travel the east-west road that links these towns together. And, I guess, to affirm our place in eastern European history, in the minds of people who live there now and in the minds of people here, too.  To connect destroyed past to present.  Not an original goal, to be sure. 

In what way did my walking these old streets, visiting these restorations and ruins respond to such thorough destruction?  Because that thoroughness is one inescapable takeaway of such a trip.  It takes research and some imagination to find the skinned and gouged-out traces of Jews in these towns.

My only answer is that in the end, we are all reduced to pieces of history.  And all you can do for these relatives, in consolation or reparation, is recover and preserve their lost histories, to endure alongside your own.  Rescuing relatives from historical oblivion is what Daniel Mendelsohn had in mind in his riveting account, The Lost: The Search for Six out of Six Million.  I didn't have the time or resources to scour the world like he did, filling in my murdered relatives' histories and settling vague theories in first-person testimony.  In addition to visiting their towns and interviewing still-living neighbors, Mendelsohn also got to the right survivors in places like Australia, just in the nick of time in 2006, months before their deaths.

What  I did see in person were records, in their originals, that testified to my grandmother's and her family's presence. Six months later, I sent a Christmas card to Malgorzata Woloszyn, the museum historian who brought out and showed me the census books. I remember her and that moment fondly.  I wish she'd email me back.  But I do have a favor to ask of her; simply to rephotograph one of the pages I shot; the most important page came out blurry.   Probably because I promised not to use a flash.  Or because I was excited. Or both.

I also brought the "Anne Frank of Przeworsk" Polish diary that I bought in the museum, by Basia Rosenberg, to a Polish friend here in NJ and she's been working on translating it.  I may offer that to the museum; neither Elzbieta nor I want anything for it but to spread this history to wider audiences and set more visitors on my path.

Once I got home, things I found by googling added to what I'd learned and seen.  I found an  amazing postscript to the little "Jewish Cemetery" monument,  its inscription crumbling in a corner of the Przeworsk bus station that covers my ancestor's bones, in a recently published book, "Jewish Spaces in Contemporary Poland," by Erica T. Lehrer and Michael Meng.  Google took me right to most of the relevant pages; I bought the ebook for the rest.

Seems that  in the early eighties, Przeworsk's municipal council decided to build a badly needed bus station on the site of the former Jewish cemetery. A road widening between Rzeszow and Przemysl had already disturbed much of the site. There were no surviving headstones and presumably no visitors.  But the decision to build on the site had one dissenter on the council:  One Jan Sasak.  Outvoted,  he suggested that the town at least erect a monument to mark the spot's former existence.  Again, outvoted. 

But, as history would have it, this Jan Sasak was himself a stonecutter.  So he made the little monument himself, and had it erected in the middle of the station.  Without his knowledge or consent, it was later moved to the back, in a corner on a small bricked rectangle.  Google Streetview still shows it, but only if you know where to look.  And that is why this little monument looks like an unofficial afterthought.  It's certainly unofficial; one man's professional act of righteous, compassionate obstinacy. Does anyone know this man?  Does he still live? Can't find him on Facebook.  I'd certainly like to thank him for this act of historical rescue.

I keep in Facebook touch with Jakub Lysiak, our guide to Przeworsk, Jaroslaw and Przemysl.  He has sent me the info should I want to get more research done on my behalf in the Przemysl archives.  I should follow up on that.  Last I heard he was applying for training as a guide at the Polin Museum in Warsaw.  I'm also Facebook friends with Helise Lieberman, director of the Taube Center for the Renewal of Jewish Life in Poland.  Both their paths cross with Agnieska (Agi) Legutko, a Yiddishist  from Krakow who I met when I booked her for an adult ed presentation at my synagogue in NJ years ago. Today she heads up the Yiddish department at Columbia in NYC.

Then there's the surviving distant relatives newly turned up by Anna Przybyszewska of Warsaw's Jewish Historical Institute; third cousins, perhaps, whose existence is documented by pages of testimony they gave to Yad VaShem in the fifties.  The survivor's name: Chaim / Henryk Schopf, of Tarnow.  Married to a Helena Eisen, with two kids, a Jan and a Ludwig.  His testimony says they made it from the nearby Krakow ghetto to Budapest in 1943, and presumably all made it to Israel.  I have other third cousins in Israel who exchange messages with me all the time; how could they not know of these others in such a small country?  There's a mystery to which I could apply more time and money. 

I would like nothing more than to swim around in these records and mysteries as a full-time occupation.  I have a lot of the language skills and more than passing familiarity with the more popular tools of online genealogical research.  What I have done is given introductory workshops in Ancestry.com to my synagogue, and, with my Lifelong Learning cochair, gotten a wall-sized map of eastern and central Europe printed on sturdy vinyl and hung in the social hall. The idea is to encourage others to research and mark their ancestral towns within its borders.  (We've added inserts of Israel, Iraq, Spain and Sudan for our few Sephardi members.  And Italy for inter-marrieds.) We've just gotten started.

Then there's Poland, a place the grandmother I knew certainly didn't care about, and who could blame her.  I follow its politics a little now.  The news is not good; fear of Muslim refugee hordes, among other factors, has turned voters sharply to the right, and what has made the news but a photo of the archetypical Polish antiSemite of my grandmother's nightmares, holding a bottle, in a group burning an effigy of a Hasid holding the European Union flag. What is that about?  Is that a safer stand-in for a  Muslim effigy, which would also be repulsive but at least more relevant?  Is it cowardice, a drunken  fringe element, or just the most virulent outbreak of an incurable xenophobia, expressed against the most traditional, vulnerable  Other? 

You beautiful young people I saw sipping wine and beer on the Rynek of Rzeszow, the college town, speaking other languages:  You folks who gave me the Jewish History tour map of Tarnow: Jakub: Did you go to the polls?  Did you sit this one out? Or were you simply outnumbered. And by whom.

The "renascent" Jewish community of Poland is miniscule; somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000.  I can't see that number ever approaching even five percent of its pre-war population, which would get to 150,000.  But we could become more frequent and interested visitors. Even if somewhat transient,  the community could grow. Jewish Studies is apparently popular at Warsaw University, among Catholic-born Poles. Here's hoping that with the churn of Polish generations, we will see even wider acknowledgement and acceptance of our historical relationship.   

Roots Tour in Galicia, Part VII: In which we find the one person in Przeworsk who could find a piece of proof

The three of us, led by Jakub, went into Przeworsk's Ratusz/town hall to look for records, as municipalities are supposed to hold those that are  less than one hundred years old. Older than that, and they go into regional Polish archives in bigger cities; in Przeworsk's case, Przemysl. 

The entrance to the Ratusz was now in the back, in a new addition whose construction was photographed the day Google came by in 2013.

Now it was finished and little kids played by the fountain.

We came to an office occupied by two women in their sixties; John Paul II's picture was on the wall.  Jakub explained the reason for our visit and they explained back, through him, that they couldn't help us; only marriage records were kept there.  We wanted another municipal office, they said; the one by the elephants. 

Elephants?  Were they pulling our leg?  We walked to Jakub's car, looking for elephants on signs or in store windows, then went a few blocks west on E40 until we came upon a pair of elephants on the road's grassy median. They were topiaries.  Cute green elephants, made of hedges, with red carpet saddles. And across the street from them was another office building, at the end of a flowery walkway, showing  Przework's by now familiar coat of arms, with the star and crescent.

Actually, I think there's something between Poles and elephants. They're a motif I saw painted on baroque  buildings in Tarnow and elsewhere.

Anyway, we entered this municipal building, whose halls looked just like town halls anywhere, with signs boosting  Przeworsk and everything that happens there, culturally, athletically, educationally, commercially.  We were directed up the stairs to another, smaller office, where two younger women, sitting at keyboards, also listened to our quest via Jakub. 

 

They were very sorry, but Przeworsk was no longer holding any town records; everything, recent to ancient, was now stored in Przemysl. Disappointing, but Przemysl was on our itinerary that day, anyway.  I saw a map of Przeworsk on the wall, the kind framed with squares of local advertising, and asked them if they had any more copies.  They apologized again.  We thanked them and went back down the stairs. 

Before we reached the first floor, the women called down after us and gave us the map from the wall, rolled up; a consolation prize.  I now have a nice map of Przeworsk and immediate vicinity, with the ads of many local businesses, mostly in home improvement, all around it.

Suzanne Wertheim's web page on Przeworsk had mentioned a local teacher, a Mr. Thomas, who had helped her identify old sites from pictures.  Jakub thought of inquiring in Przeworsk's public  library -- also conveniently located near the elephants.  I sat down at a PC and launched the familiar refrain of a Windows boot-up while he went to  ask the local librarians if they knew of this teacher.  Again, no luck.  And not much English, not even from the young civil servants. Sympathetic  smiles, at least. And Windows, in Polish.

We were about to set out for Przemysl, the town after Jaroslaw, when I remembered that I'd seen a Przeworsk museum on the web.  That too, was nearby, in a park that had been another Lubomirski estate.   The museum itself looked like an old elegant country house.

I wasn't sure why I thought of the museum; I wasn't much interested in the case of surviving Judaica mentioned on their site; I know what menorahs and tefillin look like. Nor did we want to see any more aristocratic interiors, or the historical  firefighting exhibit. Again, another entrance, another explanation in the native language. 

But this time we stirred up some enthusiasm.  Wait, let us get the local historian, they said. Turns out she worked upstairs.  Here, look at these books, in this case.  Here's a book of photos on the history of Przeworsk with a lot on the Jewish community, edited by this same historian. 

Here's another book; a diary, by the Anne Frank of Przeworsk, one Basia Rosenberg.  Well of course I bought that, and for only 8 zlotys.  Yes, it's in Polish.  I'm working on it. 

I would have been delighted to buy the book of photos, too, if that hadn't been their last copy. One of only 1000 or so printed,  it was out of print.  I'll be looking for it on Polish ebay.  We were ushered up the stairs to meet the historian, a woman somewhere near 40, I think, by the name of Malgorzata  (Margaret) Woloszyn.  She and a colleague were working on computers  in a cramped paneled room, and when we greeted her and explained our mission, she went into a back room and came back barely minutes later with some 95--to-100-year-old books of handwritten census records.

One book was an index to the others. And there, in those old lined but still sturdy pages, Margaret turned the pages to Schopfs and Schillers.  Including my grandmother, and her sisters, and brothers, and many cousins I never knew about, their birth dates, names and relation to their households, and the occupations of the head of the household, which was Krawic, or kravitz. This means tailor, which matched what I already knew.

We were all very happy, finder, researcher, interpreter/guide and husband. Here was proof, still in Przeworsk, that my grandmother, and therefore I and my family, had some connection to this town. 

 I asked her if she got visits like this much, from roots seekers, and she said that yes, she gets a few every year.

I was so excited that I took a lot of blurry pictures of the pages, and accidentally used the flash twice in spite of promising not to.  Some are sharp.  At least one page I'd like to ask her to reshoot and send me.

And I can, because I asked for her email address and she gave it to me.  I gave her my card and she stapled it into some kind of guest register.   And as soon as I finish this series -- or maybe even this post -- I'm going to write her, and Google Translate will do the rest.

The fact is that millions of birth, death, military and marriage records of Polish Jews are now searchable on the web.  I've found many and expect to find more. The Mormons gave Poland lots of money and resources to digitize all these records, in their dubious but indirectly useful effort to posthumously baptize everyone who ever lived.  So it doesn't really pay to spend too much of a short in-person visit in dusty archives.  Ms. Woloszyn herself said that these census books were going to be digitized as well. But there's still a satisfaction in seeing and smelling pages in ink and paper, in a tangible ledger, in seeing the names in that elegant turn-of-the-century penmanship. In being in the same general place where they were written, so long ago.

Now here's a really strange thing: The historian's last name, Woloszyn, is the last name of some of my husband's cousins. Bruce Wolosin, his third cousin originally from Cleveland, today lives in the same town we do and he and his wife are active members of my synagogue. Volozhin is a town once famous for its rabbinic learning. 

I'm sure this helpful historian isn't Jewish.   Jesus' picture hangs on her office wall, too.  But maybe, if you do some research...

Roots Tour in Galicia Part VI -- To Przeworsk's Market Square/Rynek and Esther's address

We proceeded by car from the Przeworsk bus station to the rynek, a few blocks away.  Jakub left to find parking while I looked around. The market square, where a hundred years ago peasants had come to sell produce and buy goods from (I'm assuming) mostly Jewish merchants, was also a park now.  It had nice plantings and paths and benches, a historical plaque, and the second incarnation of a statue 

commemorating the 550th anniversary of the Battle of Grunwald against Germans.  The first incarnation having been destroyed by the Germans in 1940, and the second having been erected, with an updated plaque beneath, twenty years later.  (See Hitler referenced in the Polish plaque.)

Older people on the rynek sat and chatted, or traversed it, carrying groceries (I'm assuming) home in plastic bags.  The town hall -- the Ratusz -- that I'd seen on old postcards on the web looked freshly refurbished, and most of its front converted into a restaurant.


I walked around snapping pictures, and don't exactly recall what expression if any I noticed on the faces of the people around me.  Nobody else was carrying a camera; Przeworsk is not a tourist destination.  I may have imagined them looking at me in a hostile way; I may have imagined they were those older, more rural Poles, some of whom may have believed that Hitler did them at least one favor, or who may have feared I was snooping around in search of a lost inheritance.

But my grandmother always described her family's situation in Poland as poor.  She would probably have been one part excited to five parts appalled  to know I was ever setting foot in Poland.  I should have taken way more pictures. But it's all there, all available in Google Street View.

The retail buildings surrounding the square looked freshly painted in bright pastels, and some had smaller-town versions of the ornate reliefs you see in European cities.  One had 1912 written under its pediment; my grandmother must have known that one and the ones near it.  And she must have known the Ratusz, with its Przeworsk insignia. Which includes a crescent; some nod to Turkish invaders or Tartars, I think.



Unlike Jaroslaw ("Yaroslav") and Przemysl ("Pshemish") nearby, Przeworsk has no converted former synagogue to visit. Right off the rynek, peeking behind the Ratusz in some old pictures, it was destroyed.  You can find old black-and-white photos of it by googling Przeworsk synagogue, and Jakub determined that its former location was right on my grandmother's street, Kazimierzkowa. 

If you go on Polish ebay (www.ebay.pl) and search on Przeworsk, as I did just recently, you will find that someone in Germany is selling a rare and jarring photo of its destruction.  (Something from Opa's or great-Grandpa's old cigar box? safe deposit box?)

Jakub, my husband and I walked off the square in the direction of my grandmother's street; on the way we passed an old brick two-story building whose painted door baked in the morning sun; there was an  empty slanted groove in its doorpost, where a mezuzah had been. 

 If you don't count today's vigorous attempts at recreating Jewish community in Krakow and Warsaw, that empty space could stand for the Jewish mark on Poland today; an empty, Jew-shaped space.  You can find these indented spaces all over old doorways, and people do look.  Sometimes they're plastered over but still visible. (In fact, "Mezuzah" is the name of a group dedicated to restoring Jewish places in Poland.) This door's groove was so clear and easy to find that it was clearly deliberately left there for the occasional Jew or curious Pole to find.  And it was on a street perpendicular to Kazimierzkowa.

Now, pictures taken as recently 2005, taken by one Suzanne Wertheim,  show the old, single-story  wooden Jewish houses of Kazimierzkowa street, lopsided and low-roofed, but freshly white-washed and judging by the plants in the windows, inhabited.  One Polish site that shows them refers to them as "charming cottages." But we saw no sign of them on Kazimierszkowa in June 2015.

We couldn't find where 68 Kazimierszkowa Street, mentioned on my uncle's immigration ship manifest, might have been.  The buildings we saw -- mostly two- or three-story apartment houses and one-story businesses -- didn't number that high.  Short story,  the street was totally transformed.  There were no ancient people conveniently available to ask if they'd ever known the Schopfs.  It was just too far back in time. 

  
A young man came out of a store, but when Jakub asked him, he didn't know where 68 might have been, either.  There was a playground at one end of the street and another little park across the street. Behind the grassy strip, tall trees, and past the trees, the backs of charming, more recently built homes with lovely gardens, facing the next street.

We walked back to the rynek and to the Ratusz (town hall), to look for paper records of my family's existence.  According to JewishGen.org and other genealogy sources, all records less than a hundred years old were kept in the local municipalities.

Now that I'm home again, virtually retracing my steps, I see where I should have gone -- to the street that picks up across the intersection, changing its name to Jana Kilińskiego. Here, back  on Google Street View, I see one-story homes that recall the shape and size, if not the facing, of the old, wooden Jewish homes in the old b&w pictures.  And  on that street, an actual original wooden cottage, still occupied when photographed in 2013. 

Sigh...  I did cross that street, but if I'd only walked a few more yards. Perhaps back in 1930,  Kazimierskowa had extended further back, in that Jewish loop of Kazimierskowa, Kilińskiego and Bernardynska, east of the Ratusz/town hall.

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. 

Roots Tour in Galicia -- Part IV -- in which we prepare to set off for Przeworsk

Our third day in Poland, with our jet lag over and our bearings set, we visited my grandmother's ancestral town, Przeworsk.  For this we needed an actual guide; someone who could talk to locals in native-fluent Polish, someone familiar with the context of my trip, the lay of the land, and where to find parking.  I found such a person through the Emanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.

I had googled my way to the JHI; it occupies  the same geographical footprint as the once (as you can tell from old black and white photographs) Great Synagogue of Warsaw on Tlomackie street, blown up with official German fanfare in 1943, right after the ghetto's liquidation. Today it's a blue Met Life skyscraper, towering over north-south tram lines.  Right next to it is the associated Jewish Genealogy & Family Heritage Center, which occupies the related building that survived; it had been the grand shul's library and appears in those same black-and-white photographs, looking just the same, from the outside, as it does today.  

Both institutions are named after Emanuel Ringelblum because he, doomed to die in the Warsaw Ghetto, succeeded in preserving the history of that mass murder by starvation and final liquidation.  He and his fellow witnesses buried thousands of documents under wrecked ghetto buildings in metal boxes and three Tevye-style milk cans. One set was found in 1946; another in 1950; a third has never been found. A lot of the quotes appearing in the Holocaust section of the new Polin Museum come from that Ringelblum Archive.

But I didn't remember about Ringelblum till later. Still home and planning my trip, what I saw on the JHI's web site gave me a shiver of recognition. The executive director pictured there, Yale Reisner,  was someone I had known 45 years before; we had shared a seven-week USY teen tour of Israel in 1970.  He had been the younger son of the Philadelphia rabbi-and-wife couple who had led that trip.  I had become good friends with his older sister, and remembered him as a friendly younger brother.  I also had visited Rabbi and Connie Reisner and their kids after the trip, in Philly, and when they moved to Bersheva, the year I lived there after college. Yale had been living in Warsaw for the past 20 years or so.  That is how small the Jewish world is, or at least the part interested in history and genealogy.

But the JHI web site was somewhat out of date. Today Helise Lieberman heads the organization.  I contacted her via email; we played master-level Jewish geography, we became Facebook friends, and on a visit to Bersheva that she was making just after I'd introduced myself, she remembered me to Yale's family, who did remember me.  Fate was coming along on my trip.

Helise hooked me up with Anna Przybyszewska, the associate director of the genealogy center. Anna took the information I'd been able to glean over the years at Jewishgen.org, Yad VaShem and ancestry.com, and improved upon it quite a bit with research in Geni (another genealogical site), archives in Polish, and others not available to the general public.  For example, she drew me a family tree that started from my grandmother Esther's grandparents, which revealed a couple more second- and third-cousin survivors living in Israel as well as lost distant cousins.  One of the newly discovered survivors had drawn a whole list of lost family members himself, with their fates, for Yad VaShem. Those survivors' documents and addresses dated all the way back to the fifties, however, so finding these people's descendants  may take quite a bit more effort, assuming they're interested. 

Anna P. also found documents created in the wake of the war, by the organization responsible for relocating and reuniting Jewish survivors -- the Centralnego Komitetu Zydow w Polsce, or Central Committee of Polish Jews.  These documented the survival of people we knew. One was my mother's first cousin Memel, born in Przemysl and hidden with his parents ("on the Aryan side," the document says). But Memel's father -- my grandmother's brother Meyer -- disappeared  when, the story goes, he went out to find food.  The documents showed an address in Przemysl, half an hour east of  Przeworsk, where he and his mother had been living in June 1946, before they made their way to France and finally New York.  (Today Memel/Michael is a retired federal lawyer and grandfather of five living in Silver Springs.)

Anna also found us the address of the tailor shop of my grandmother's first cousin Chaim, in Tarnow,  90-100 minutes west of Przeworsk on the same highway.  And possible relatives, other murdered people named Schopf, in nearby Kanczuga and Lancut and other places.

Jakub and Me

Helise also found me my guide, Jakub Lysiak. A 32-year-old Pole of Catholic origin, he spoke fluent English, Hebrew, some Yiddish, and had majored in Jewish Studies at Warsaw University. He had worked for the Israeli Consulate in Warsaw, in the new Polin museum, and lately was in near constant motion touring Jewish youth groups and people like me around Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, and back and forth to Israel.  We agreed to pay his fee for just the one critical day, and planned to hit three of the towns my grandmother used to mention; Przemysl and Jaroslaw in addition to Przeworsk.

Jakub met us in the lobby of the Hotel Bristol at eight that morning, in jacket, shirt and jeans. He drove a comfortable van, parked just off the Rynek.

All Jakub's clients, naturally, wanted to know the reason for his choice of career, and most suspected at least some Jewish ancestry. He could verify none.  His Jewish story, told while driving us east, started with an essay he wrote in high school for a nationwide competition started by Golda Tencer, today director of the Jewish Theater of Warsaw.   Jakub won first place. The prize was a trip to Israel.  He was also in the first group of exchange students in a Polish-Israeli exchange.  He had both an affinity for Jews and few illusions about the persistence of antiSemitism in Poland.  In some cases, he said, it was fear of contemporary Jews seeking ancestors' property, several generations after it had been stolen by Nazis and given to Poles at firesale prices or simply as rewards. But it was an attitude receding with each new generation. 

It was also useful to know, as we did from reading, how thoroughly the Poles also saw themselves as victims of Nazism.  They had lost three million of their own, as well as 20% of their clergy. (Just two weeks before we left on our trip, I had happened to be at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, where I was visiting my daughter. I saw a WW II-era film strip there of a couple, a Polish (non-Jewish!) man and a German woman, being paraded through town and officially humiliated for defiling the Aryan race with their illicit relationship. Of course, the extent of their punishment was having their heads shaved,being paraded with signs and perhaps public shunning. Nasty enough. But survivable. And on the third hand, a clear demonstration of how Poles were regarded by Germans. Plaques blaming "German Genociders" and destroyers are all over Poland.) 

We had been emailing back and forth for many weeks.  

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.