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.  

Galicia Roots Trip Part III, in which we visit Lancut Castle -- like regular tourists

On our second day in Poland we ventured beyond the town we'd landed in, Rzeszow, and beyond my immediate roots-seeking agenda. Like regular tourists, we went to see the Lubomirski castle in Lancut, an official historic site of Poland.  With the help of the hotel desk and map, we made our way to the Dworzec Autobusy and found the right platform.  A young woman waiting with us spoke some English. The driver, over 50, did not, but helped us figure out the fare and showed us where to get off.  We were very proud of ourselves, using my 100 words of Polish, and pantomime, to make ourselves understood.

At Lancut's bus station the platforms were all marked with the names of towns that were thrillingly familiar to the Jewish culturally educated: Chelm, Tarnow, Przemysl, and Przeworsk, too.  Just standing there, mythical places in big letters, like Summit, South Orange, Montclair, just bus rides of a few zlotys and an hour or less.

Towns famous to Chasidic and Yiddish folklore and literature, all short bus rides away -- the traces of their people sought by indirect survivors from later times and distant places

The entrance to the huge grounds of the castle was across the street.

We walked for about ten minutes through that park, past the greenhouses, the tennis court, the carriage house, to the fortified castle and its gardens, surrounded by an open tunnel that was once was a moat.  A young woman happened to be walking in our direction; she said something and I caught the almost-Russian word for weather.  Since the sun was shining and the temperature and humidity better than anyone could rightly expect for June in subCarpathia, I agreed. Grandmother... born nearby... I think I managed to say, in near-Polish.  She smiled.

We made it ahead of a school group. 

Lancut Castle, Lancut, near Rzeszow

While the castle compared favorably in grandeur with the ultimate  field trip of our youth -- to the American Museum of Natural History -- I can't imagine that the posh furnishings of the Lubomirski's castle compared in these kids' interest with dioramas of gazelles and eskimos in kayaks, not to mention the whale.  We geezers, however, enjoyed the displays of aristocratic wealth (the last owners, the Potockis, were among the richest people in Poland in the 20th century) the fabulous furnishings, portraits of noble ancestors, swords, china, brocaded wallpaper, rococo statuary and moldings, fireplaces, ceramic heating stoves that servants emptied through invisible openings to inner corridors, private theater, ballroom.  Comparable to any of your better Newport mansions, plus long aristocratic lineages and marital alliances all doomed to be forgotten within the hour.

You're not supposed to take photos in the Castle.
So this was early in the tour...

The man who took our tickets motioned us to a room off the entry lobby, with shelves of big shoes.  I figured, like bowling, I had to put these on. But someone stopped me from taking mine off and showed me that these went over shoes, to protect the flooring from our gummy, gritty soles. 

"One Grecian Urn"

Displays detailing the restoration effort -- especially interesting is the remake
of Potocki's Roman hallway, complete with painted shafts of sunlight. 

Attendants  in each room turned on the English-language narration for us. Stanislavs, Isabellas -- it's all in Wikipedia somewhere.  One name I do remember is Count Potocki; I think I did hear one of my grandmothers invoke that name on occasion, the way we Americans say rich as Rockefeller. 

Gardens, fountains, an orangerie where we met up with the school kids looking at rabbits and turtles.  

And right next to the park, very easy to find, was Lancut's synagogue, built in 1761. 

That's where we met Miroslaw, a curious Pole who was just finishing a tour with a Polish couple.  We'd been told about him by the guide we were set up to meet the following day. Miroslaw had left a sign on the door in Polish and Hebrew, with a phone number to call.  We called it and he opened the door.  Fiftyish, in appearance a tossup between Pole and Jew; blue eyes, a shy smile, a cap.  The anteroom we met him in had lots of Jewish gravestones in one corner of the floor, in pieces.

The clipboard hanging from the Lancut Synagogue's
door says "I'm in the building."
The Hebrew part says "Please call."

The plaque on the building's exterior 

Miroslaw  almost apologetically asked for the tour fee. He then asked, equally apologetic, if he could give us the tour in Hebrew; he said it was better than his English. 

Miroslaw was not Jewish himself, but he'd made a career of tending this place in recent years. His little anteroom displayed pictures of the droves of Hasidim who descend on Lancut by the thousands on the yahrtseits (death anniversaries) of beloved rabbis long gone, and daven in this space.  He showed us the Hebrew-Polish dictionary he was studying from, and some Jewish ritual objects.  He said that to townspeople, he was Jewish, although he also had a post-Catholic appreciation for Jesus. 

He said, almost apologetically, that "in a place where there are no Jews, you must be a Jew,"  paraphrasing Hillel's proverb,   "Where there are no (decent) men, you must be a man."  It also came out that the stone with the plaque we'd seen in Rzeszow had been erected by him and his circle of curious, Jew-bereft Poles.

Then he led us into the sanctuary itself, which was a beautiful restored example of the kind of primitive painting that used to cover the interior of many Eastern European synagogues: Hebrew scripture, animals, plants, signs of the zodiac... and all kinds of reliefs decorating bimah and ark.  There was a traditional velvet curtain covering the ark, and a Torah inside.  

We later saw the "surviving" bima in Tarnow; a sad ghost of this four-pillar artwork

 There was a bima, orthodox-style in the center, on which stood four fabulously decorated pillars supporting an inner dome.  There was a two-story women's gallery. And most of it had all been repainted in fresh color.  To get some idea, you can visit the Bialystocker Synagogue in Manhattan; it's become a regular stop on Lower East Side walking tours.

What there wasn't, was anything made of wood.  No pews; just a concrete floor, if I remember correctly.  The story goes (see plaque) that when the Nazis set fire to the synagogue, Count Alfred Potocki, in residence next door, appealed to the conquering thugs and got permission to let the fire brigade put it out.  So the building itself was saved.  From the outside, it's a quite nondescript yellow building, except for the signs and plaques on the door and the exterior staircase for women. 

I wondered if my grandmother had ever seen the inside of this shul; Lancut had been over 40% Jewish once and Przeworsk was a stop or at most two down the train line. Today we were clearly visiting a pilgrimage site; a place where the nearest living Jews were hours away, in Krakow, except for a Chasidic Brigadoon I didn't want to visit. Here in Lancut too, the Jewish cemeteries were walls and weeds. New pews might bring in destination bar mitzvahs. A start? 

When we were done we had some ice cream in the store across the street.  There was a cross on the wall behind the counter and a semi-scowl on the face of the woman who made the cones.  Maybe I imagined the scowl.  We walked back through the edge of the park, and picked up the bus back to Rzeszow.

The view from the ice cream place.

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.  

Roots Trip to Galicia, Part I

The problem with telling the story of my trip to Poland is getting started:  Do I cut to the chase, my visit to my grandmother's hometown, Przeworsk?   That was day three after we landed.  There's too much that comes before.   And the visit itself -- is that the highlight?  Not necessarily.

Waiting for the first leg, Newark to Toronto.

 

Then there's the disconnect -- even if I expected it -- between the place in my head, with all its significance and history, and the places I actually touched: a minor monument with a weathered, barely readable inscription, in a corner of a bus station -- that one visits for a few moments, leaves a pebble on, takes a photo standing in front of, and leaves to make time for all the other plans in the itinerary.   A street that bears no sign of its historical Jewish inhabitants, nevermind my grandmother's home.  A wooden door around the corner on an old brick building that's faced strong morning sun for who knows how long, with the gouged-out hollow of a mezuzah on its doorpost.

First view of Rzeszow Airport

Was it a mistake to hope for a thrill?  Should I blame Google Street View for having seen it virtually before?  No. 

Now that I'm back home, Przeworsk resumes its historic, far-away quality.  If I can look at my visit there, the pictures I took, the people I met and the things I saw,  from the same great distance, then maybe the two conceptions will line up.  Actually, I wish I'd spent more time there, just walking around.  Just sitting in the park that now occupies the market square, imagining back a hundred years.  Perhaps finding the school my grandmother attended. Or the train station. Just trying to channel the ghosts...

Just like Google showed me, Przeworsk is a modern little town today.  Parking is a problem.  There's a park with lovely plantings and benches in the rynek, what every Polish town calls its original market square.  The town hall is on the square, recently repainted and mostly converted to restaurant.  But let me back up, and start at the beginning.

When I first asked my grandmother decades ago where Przeworsk was, she told me it was between Rzeszow ("Zheshov") and Jaroslaw (Yaroslav).  Easily found on the map, all three towns sit along the major Galicia A4 east-west highway, running east of Krakow. Then years later, on a trip to Europe 101 (Italy), I was very excited to see Rzeszow listed on an airport arrivals board in  in Munich.

Of course, it doesn't take much to be an international airport in Europe -- one-hour flights will take you across a good number of international borders.  But I think my grandmother would have been surprised to know you could fly there.  And that's what we did, after changing planes in Toronto and Warsaw.  The name of this mythical place was spread wide across the glass front of the terminal, for the amusement of the grandmother living in my memory.  We walked right through it after stepping  onto the tarmac from our LOT Polish Airlines puddle-jumper.

Marek, from the next seat on LOT Toronto-Warsaw

We'd spent most of our eight-hour flight, the Toronto-to-Warsaw leg, talking to Marek, a fit, grey-haired man in the window seat. Even though this flight ended in Warsaw, we had the same destination: he, a Rzeszow native, was going to his niece's wedding, and would see his brother and family for the first time in two years.  I was surprised when he told us he was 63. He lived with his wife, also Polish, in London, Ontario, and worked installing staircases.  He'd also lived in Spain and Germany, and had left Poland shortly after the fall of Communism. He was well spoken and had a recognizably amiable and ironic sense of humor. His family (at least the Drozd part) was originally Czech.

I told Marek the point of my trip without explaining that we were Jewish; I bet he'd figured that out, since he never asked, that I recall, if I would see any family there.  But we wondered if he had. There was this sense of traveling incognito, perhaps unsuccessfully,  for the first few days in Poland. 

We followed Marek like ducks off the plane; he had by now felt a little duty, or desire, to see us to our next location. We made it together through Warsaw's Chopin airport to our connecting flight to Rzeszow, and off the small LOT plane onto Rzeszow's tarmac. Inside the terminal, a shiny baggage carousel or two, car rental desks, an equally shiny  snack bar, rest rooms.  On the other side of the terminal Marek met and hugged his brother and introduced us.  We exchanged email addresses and got a cab.

The driver spoke almost no English and a little German.  Since I can only rudely approximate German by guessing at the vowel substitutions from Yiddish, we pretty much left it at "Hotel Bristol." Poles over 38 or so were schooled in Russian but don't care to speak it; people younger than that have studied English and are perfectly happy to use it. (The two generations have also been taught two different versions of recent European history, the older one learning of Soviets as liberators, the younger one learning of Soviets as occupiers. They've also grown up with different statues and monuments, economies, entertainment, mass media, and living standards.)

Rzeszow turns out to be a fairly big city, with big traffic circles, "Galleria" malls, billboards, ATMs, wireless stores and lots of banks and colleges. Also a lovely rynek, with a baroque town hall built in 1897, other Baroque pastel buildings, a statue of Kosciuszko dressed like George Washington (his brother-in-arms), a lit gazebo, a performance space, and hundreds of tables, chairs and umbrellas extending from restaurants on every side, just like an Italian piazza. The cobble-stoned square buzzed from afternoon to late at night with attractive young people.

Rzeszow's Rynek, Hotel Bristol in the center

Rzeszow's 1897 town hall

Kosciuszko. Everyone know's he's got a bridge named after him between Queens and Brooklyn. Few people know he fought in the American War of Independence.  The plaque there in the corner notes that the Germans destroyed the statue in 1940 and it had to be rebuilt.  Note me still in the same clothes I left Newark in.  

The Hotel Bristol is right on the rynek; the driver had to go from the streets behind the square into the hotel's dark basement garage, pointing us and all our bags at the even darker hallway to the elevator.  Which, we were relieved to see, went up to the lobby.