Kazimierz and other Jewish sites in Krakow

We drove west to Krakow on an early Sunday morning and arrived in time for lunch.  Our bus drove to the Kazimierz district, also known as the Jewish Quarter. 

The front wall of the Old Synagogue in Kazimierz, Krakow.

We made plans to begin our tour after lunch.  The women of our group decided to eat at one of the Jewish Quarter restaurants, and had a delicious meal of fresh salads.

The "In your pocket" site claims, "no other place in Europe conveys a sense of pre-war Jewish culture on the continent better than Kazimierz."  The effects of the war and the communist regime had left the quarter in bad shape,  but in the last two decades the quarter has become a vibrant hot spot for music and nightlife.  I've just finished a novel by Peter Matthiesen called In Paradise which includes the observation that non-Jewish performers play Klezmer music in Kazimierz.  He implies that the entire quarter is run by non-Jews.  We had a similar impression of a Jewish restaurant called Mandragora in Lublin.  We had delicious food (pierogies, potato pancakes, cholent), but we discovered that the proprietors are not actually Jewish or Israeli.

Our purpose in visiting Kazimierz was to explore the Jewish environment. Following lunch, we headed to the small Remu'h Synagogue built in the 16th century.  The synagogue and cemetery are named (by way of acronym) for its founder, Rabbi Moses Isserles.  Isserles is said to have established the synagogue in honor of his deceased wife, Malka.  The little Orthodox synagogue is one of two synagogues still in operation in Krakow.

This facility is undergoing repairs, but there are some clear spots which show off the shul's features.

The cemetery attached to the synagogue is also from the mid-16th century.  As had occurred in Majdanek, Wikipedia reports that "the Nazis destroyed the cemetery tearing down the walls and hauling away tombstones to be used as paving stones in the camps, or selling them for profit."  It managed to survive the war because the headstones "unearthed as paving stones have been returned and re-erected, although they represent a small fraction of the monuments that once stood in the cemetery."

This cemetery has its own "wailing wall" made of gravestones which Nazi soldiers had desecrated.

We saw another one of these walls at the large Krakow Jewish cemetery.  As we left the cemetery we saw this plaque.

As we walked down the street, our guide told us that Helena Rubinstein had grown up in Kazimierz.

Walking further through the neighborhood, we saw a hotel with this sign beside the door (most hotels don't feature the Jewish ritual baths, or mikvehs).

Our next point of interest was the Izaak Synagogue, the second still-operational Orthodox shul in Kazimierz.

Although I did not find confirmation of this point, I believe our guide told us that this facility is now operated by the Chabad movement.  Our guide also shared a "there's no place like home" legend of the Izaak Synagogue.

We walked through a site well known to those who have seen Schindler's List (more SL references in a bit).

The weather became progressively hotter during our time in Poland.  By the time we were on this walk through Kazimierz, it was very warm indeed.  We decided to take a quick stop inside the cool, dark interior of the Corpus Christi Basilica (construction began in the 14th century and ended in the 16th).  It was a pleasant reprieve from the heat and we enjoyed the beautiful religious art.

After our cool-down, we walked through the market square and saw the 15th century Kazimierz Town Hall which houses an ethnographic museum, but there wasn't any time to visit it.

We next stopped at the Memorial to Jews located at the deportation site; each chair is meant to represent 1000 victims.

This square is  called Plac Zgody.  A plaque across the square says  it was  "the site of mass murders of Krakow Jews in the years 1941-1943; it was from here that the Jews were transported to concentration camps.  From the first days of the Nazi occupation, German authorities continued to restrict the rights of  Jews, commanding them in 1940 to leave the city of Krakow within 3 months.  The 17,000 of those who remained were forced into the ghetto formed in March 1941 in a part of the District of Podgorze.  From 1st to 8th June and on 28 October 1942, mass displacement of the inhabitants of the ghetto to the death camp in Belzec continued, and the area of the ghetto was reduced and divided into two sections.  Those in employment lived in section 'A', while section 'B' was inhabited by the unemployed  On 13th March, 1943, the Nazis liquidated the ghetto; inhabitants of the section 'A' were marched to the labour camp in Palszow, and people living in the section 'B', mostly women, children, the elderly, and the ill, were murdered or transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp."  

Parc Zgody was also the site of the so-called Krakow Ghetto Pharmacy.  Pharmacist Tadeusz Pankiewicz was the last remaining non Jew  to run a business in the ghetto.  Named a righteous gentile among the nations, he was credited with helping Jews escape from Krakow during the war.

Our next stop was the camp featured in Schindler's List, Plaszow.  I was shocked by how close it was--right in the city proper.

We drove by the Amon Goeth house and were admonished by our guide that the policy was not to take photos, but she gave us a kind of verbal wink saying if we were going to take a photo we should be quick about it.  My photo turned out very poorly--just as well.  Who needs to commemorate the evil-doers?

More important to our purpose was the large monument on the other side of the camp.

Our guide referred to this as the monument of the brokenhearted, due to the fact that there's a large gap where the heart should be.  I think it's a powerful monument.

I was trying to get a good angle, not looking where my feet were  when I tripped and fell on my knee.  It was painful and embarrassing, but most importantly to me--my camera wasn't working properly after I got myself into a standing position.  I had broken a camera last fall when I was visiting Germany, and I was fearful I'd done it again.  I truly didn't want to have to buy another one.  Regardless, the camera wasn't working properly for a couple of days. 

The day we visited, a Sunday, Plaszow looked like a holiday park.  We saw families having picnics, wandering about the grounds with strollers, bikes, and other wheeled vehicles.  It really is disconcerting to see casual holiday-makers using these grounds in this way.

Following this visit, we ended up at Schindler's Factory, now a museum recounting the Nazi occupation of Krakow.  I had visited this museum the previous year with my friend Cindy.  My impression then was that the museum told the story of the Nazi occupation from a distinctly Polish perspective.  We had to wait for our guide, an enthusiastic young man who spoke very rapidly.  This tour (I can't remember if it was at 5 or 5:30) was the last thing we had on our agenda.  I'll speak for myself here, but I wasn't really "plugged in".  The fact that I had already gone through the museum probably contributed to my lack of focus.  I told one of my friends that I was only picking up about one of every five words our museum guide uttered, which meant I missed some of the guide's comments.  At one point the guide said that maybe 30% of the Poles didn't like the Jews, but NOBODY wanted them dead.  The problem is that this statement isn't accurate.  Anti-semitism was rampant throughout Europe, and was very marked in regions around Poland (see Jan T. Gross's Neighbors and Edward Reicher's Country of Ash).  He ended his presentation with a reference to the blood libel, saying only very stupid people believed it.  It was a very strange thing to say, and a very strange way to end the tour.

Actually, the day ended in an even more strange way.  Our hotel rooms were very, very cramped.  It wasn't a problem for me since my assigned roommate had never shown up leaving me alone in the room.  Almost everyone else shared a room, and it didn't make for a happy situation.  People had no room to place their suitcases.  Traveling all those hours, walking around all day in the heat, listening to erroneous commentary at the museum, and then settling in to close quarters did not make for a good combination.  There was also the issue of the other visitors on our floor--Irish footballers who had been drinking for three days straight.  While I did not observe this myself, other people in my group were greeted by naked young men who were getting sick in the hotel corridor.   Oy.

A murder of crows-- Majdanek

This isn't my photograph, but it shows something similar to what greeted us when we arrived at Majdanek.  The phrase "murder of crows" sounds ominous, but the meaning is less sinister.  The PBS program "Nature" recently aired an episode on crows and offered a summary of the program and its reception on their website.  Among the responses was this one:  "Crows are ... empathetic with our loss. ... The Blackfoot teach that in the ancient times, the crow had its same shape but was the most colorful of all birds. And all other birds were solid black, as the brother crow is now. One by one, the species came to the crow and asked for a color. And each time the crow give away a color. Eventually the crow had only brown, but the lowly sparrow came and asked, and so the crow gave away even that so it had no color. It became black. For its selflessness and infinite generosity, the Blackfoot revere the crow ... ."

The crows we encountered seemed to be witnesses from a time past.  They made their presence felt.

This camp was the first of the five we visited, one of two extermination camps. One of the noteworthy features of Majdanek is the fact that a Lublin suburb is less than a kilometer from the camp borders.

We saw people walking from the apartment buildings nearby through the camp.  Most strikingly, we saw a father bring his two little girls (one was a toddler) through the gate into the camp.  There was something so blasé about the way this threesome strolled past the tower,

parallel to the camp fence,

past the "baths, disinfection, gas chamber"

and down the path made of the broken tombstones from Jewish graves.

I have to acknowledge, it was disconcerting to see this trio making their casual "spaziergang" through this horrific site.

Tomasz Kranz, in his book, The Extermination of Jews at Majdanek Concentration Camp,  says
"Majdanek's functions underwent partial changes even during the planning stage.  From a camp created for the needs of Globocnik [Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin District], it evolved into one of the elements of the 'SS state', i.e. the system of Nazi concentration camps." Majdanek was a Prisoner of War Camp, a labor camp (construction and manufacturing), and, Yad Vashem says "The camp's official purpose was to destroy enemies of the Third Reich, help carry out the extermination of the Jews, and take part in the deportations and 'resettlement' of the Poles living in the Zamosc region of the General gouvernement.  In all, approximately 360,000 victims perished at Majdanek."

As we toured the camp, there were a number of featured statements from former prisoners posted on placards, such as this one regarding "reception":
Along come several SS men whose ranks I cannot recognize, and they order us to enter an empty barracks.  There we must undress and hold all our valuables and clothing under our arms.  That's the order.  We stand there naked and wait.  The double gates of the stable-type barracks are wide open, and we get goose bumps.  The reading of the transport list finally begins; those whose names are called cross to the other side.  Reading out seven hundred names takes a long time.  The ones called out leave behind their clothing and food supplies, which no one marks with a name or number. [...]  They set up a table where we register and obtain numbers  stamped on tags cut from tin cans.  [...]  Registration, or rather the taking of things on deposit, again lasts a long time.  I am shivering all over my body.  Finally they order us into the shower in groups of one hundred.  Naked and barefoot, we run across the frozen group to an adjacent building, about a hundred meters away.  In the cloakroom sit several barbers, Slovakian Jews, who shave off the hair on our heads, our mustaches, the hair under our arms, and all over our bodies.

The selection site was outside of the bath/disinfection/gas chamber, euphemistically called Rosengarten.

After showering, prisoners had to immerse themselves in baths of disinfectant.

Following that initial "ritual" prisoners bathed infrequently and rarely changed underwear.


Majdanek had five gas chambers, operational from September 1942 to September 1943.  Most of the victims of the gas chamber were Jews, but elderly and sick prisoners from other backgrounds were also victims of the gas chamber.

The "Prussian blue" color at the back of this gas chamber is residue from Zyklon B.  The Nazis also used carbon monoxide to kill their victims.

The camp is considered a museum, and as such, a number of barracks contain displays which offer photos (of both prisoners and perpetrators), artifacts, maps and statistical charts.

Another barrack included the bunks prisoners used.

Majdanek was also involved in SS enterprises and warehouses.  Kranz writes that "Several thousand Jewish men and women worked [in Operation Reinhard's central sorting plant] unloading, sorting and cleaning clothing and footwear brought by train from ghettoes and death camps.  After disinfecting and sorting, stolen property was sent by rail to the Reich."

The Majdanek Guide says that of the 300,000 objects in the museum's exhibition, the overwhelming majority consist of the 260,000 shoes belonging to the victims of Majdanek and the other camps involved in Operation Reinhard.

The monuments at Majdanek are noteworthy.  We encountered this column, erected by Polish prisoners of war in May of 1943.

The Majdanek Guide quotes the creator of the column, Albin Maria Boniecki, as saying, "We gave the birds the form of half-doves, half-eagles.  The dove is a symbol of the innocent soul, and the eagle of the nation and victory.  I linked the birds in a symbol of victory  and embodied them as a trio of Man,  Woman and Child with their feet resting on the globe they are protecting."

While the Nazi SS perceived the column as embracing the Nazi emblem, the prisoners "secretly placed the remains of victims inside the base of the column."

We concluded our tour of the camp grounds with a visit to the Mausoleum under which rests the kurhan mound of the remains of those who died at the camp. 

We saw the execution ditches from the platform of the Mausoleum.

We were fortunate to meet with the director of the museum for almost two hours before leaving for Izbica.  Before heading southeast for the cemetery, we stopped to take a picture of The Monument to Struggle and Martyrdom.

The Monument gate alludes to The Gates of Hell in Dante's Divine Comedy.  It is recognized as the symbol of Majdanek around the world.

The Jewish cemeteries of Lublin

As I've been working on these posts I've learned a great deal about what was once referred to as the "Jerusalem of Poland," or "Jewish Oxford"--aka Lublin.  This city has a ghostly legacy marked here and there with placards explaining its Jewish past.

One of the online sites I visited (The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe)  noted that by 1939 Lublin's population was made up of 31%, or 38,000, Jews.  This figure has been larger and smaller at different points in its history, but the bottom line is that Jews had a significant presence in Lublin for hundreds of years.  As I mentioned in the post on the Yeshiva/Hotel, the Jewish population of the city today is considerably smaller and harder to estimate.  YIVO says there were just 50 Jews in Lublin in 2000, but a women we met from Jagiellonian University suggested there might be 120 Jews in the community today.  For reasons we can well understand, given what happened during the Holocaust, they are not very public people.

One of the primary objectives of this trip was to tend to a small number of Jewish cemeteries in Poland.  The first of the cemeteries we were asked to work on was the so-called "new" cemetery, just a few city blocks from Hotel Ilan (#1 on the map below).

 The caretaker of the hotel (and by extension the synagogue which is on the third floor of the hotel) is also the caretaker of the two cemeteries we were assigned. I think it is unfair to label these cemeteries as neglected.  This one gentleman has so much to do I think it seems more accurate to suggest that the task of upkeep is overwhelming.  Groups like ours can offer minor assistance.  If enough groups participate this man's burden is lessened, but only somewhat.

The caretaker loaded up his vehicle with tools and we "geared up" with the gardening gloves, work clothes, tools, bug spray and sunscreen we had been asked to bring.  Like a ninny, I forgot gloves, but my colleagues were willing to share.

According to the Virtual Jewish Library, the "new" cemetery on Waleczynch Street, "was established in 1829 and was seriously damaged during the Holocaust. It is still used today by the small Jewish community and has a number of Holocaust memorials."

The Sara and Manfred Frenkel Foundation financed the renovation of the cemetery, which was completed in 1991. According to a site called "Virtual Shtetl", "The area was walled in

and a building holding a memorial room was erected, which is connected with a little synagogue commemorating its founders."

The Nazis desecrated this cemetery during World War II, using some of the tombstones to form the pathways of the Majdanek extermination camp, just outside the city of Lublin.  Surprisingly, one of the headstones remaining was that of famed Rabbi Yehuda Meir Szapiro, the founder of Yeshiva Chachmei Lublin.  Although his remains have been moved to Jerusalem, his ohel (a structure built over the graves of Rebbes, prophets and tzadikim) can be seen at this cemetery.

This wall is a fragment from the original cemetery and sits in front of a mass grave of victims of the Nazis.

This monument marks the mass grave of over 100 children from the Lublin Jewish Orphanage on Leczynska Street and residents from the Jewish Shelter for the Elderly murdered by the Nazis on April 24, 1942.  In 1947 their remains were re-interned here from the place of their execution.

 

Our job was focused on a few gravesites.

The goal was to weed the beds and sweep the sidewalks.  We managed quite well.

The younger members of our crew trimmed branches and wrestled the slimey snails.

There's something terribly disconcerting about the "pop" of stepping on one of these critters (not that we wanted to).

We worked at the "New" cemetery for less than two hours, and were then taken by mini bus to the "Old" cemetery.  This cemetery dates back to the early 16th century and now has the distinction of being the oldest Jewish extant cemetery in Poland and the oldest in situ Jewish gravestone in Poland, the ohel of Talmudic scholar Ya‘akov Kopelman (d. 1541).

One of the most interesting focal points in this cemetery is a small matzeva/gravestone with a unicorn and shot through with a missile.

Between the "old" and the "new", the "old" cemetery looked much the worse for wear.

 

The caretaker assigned the younger members of our crew (young men ranging in age from 17 to 48) the task of cutting branches and brush.  The "elders" among us swept the sidewalk in front of the cemetery.

This stretch of block was what I would gauge to be about four city blocks in the U.S.  At the far end was a memorial to the Poles who had been murdered by the Nazis.

A sign nearby says "This place hallowed by the blood of Poles Prisoners of Lublin Castle executed by the Nazis on 23 December 1939."

Thinking about the significance of these sites, one has to recall the Jews who lived in this community dating back to the 14th century.  Seven hundred years of Jewish history were all but destroyed.  These artifactual wisps located here and there throughout the area underscore both the fragility and the brutality of human existence.  Why?  Words fail...