Complicated feelings arise when I consider going back to my grandmother’s Galician town.
By JONATHAN FELDSTEINDZIKOWER SYNAGOGUE, 1940(photo credit: SWITALSKI FAMILY COLLECTION)
I’m glad my grandmother died when she did. Once, I had the naïve temerity to tell her that I wanted to go to Poland, and specifically Kanczuga, the Galician town in which she was raised.When I spoke about visiting Poland, she cried, “the ground is soaked in our blood” and I should never go there. My grandmother was fortunate to leave Poland years before most of the rest of her family were murdered by the Nazis, literally in front of their neighbors. She lost her whole family except for three siblings. I don’t know if she ever knew this, but survivors reported that when the Jews were rounded up to be murdered, Poles were happy and cheered.Three years after she died, I visited Poland. It was the fall of 1990. If she had been alive, knowing of my going there might have killed her.The tourist industry around Jews coming to see how and where their ancestors lived, where and how they perished, where entire communities were erased, had not yet developed. I didn’t visit Kanczuga, but knew the history of our family there: the imprisoning of my grandmother’s brother Meir in a Nazi labor camp where he was beaten regularly before being murdered; the roundup of Jews in August 1942 before they were shot in a communal grave; the escape of one man, inspired by my great grandmother, who lived to tell about it; the pogrom that took place in April 1945, after the war was over, where several Jews who had survived and returned were murdered by Poles.MICKIEWICZ STREET, 1941. (Krzan Family Collection)Some feel drawn to go “back” and try to comprehend. Sites such as concentration camps, gas chambers, crematoria, former synagogues, abandoned cemeteries, are “highlights” of such trips. I remember seeing a wooden doorpost of a house in a small town, etched into which was a crevice, about three inches long, where there had once been a mezuzah; the marker of a Jewish home. Architectural scars like this are widespread throughout Poland, highlighting where Jews used to live, and other scars we bear as a people still.That countless Jewish homes and businesses throughout Poland were simply taken by their neighbors adds insult to injury of the murder of six million. These are among the confluence of reasons why many Jews are ambivalent, or worse, about visiting Poland and spending money there. The past is the past. Especially from an Israeli perspective; we’re building a bright future and don’t need to look back to that chapter. Though, many Israeli teens do go there for “roots trips.”I’ve been interested to go to Kanczuga, but never made it a priority to make it a priority. There’s a sense of nostalgia. There are graves of relatives who were lucky enough to die before the Nazis arrived, and there’s a mass grave from the slaughter of 1942. There are buildings that once had been synagogues that are now mundane businesses. But there’s nothing that’s compelling me to actually make the trip.I have felt, as others do, that there is nothing there for me now. I would be seen not just as a stranger, but possibly as a hostile invader. Poles are uneasy that descendants of the people in whose homes they live and simply took from the original Jewish owners, will show up and try to reclaim their property. Indeed, Poland is among the few countries that has not dealt with the issue of reparations and the restoration of Jewish properties.KANCZUGA MARKET, 1920s. (Tokarzewski Family Collection)
Recently, my perspective changed. I met a young Polish man, Patryk, who was born and raised in Kanczuga. His family has lived there for generations. As did mine. Until 1942. Patryk shared with me about how growing up he knew that there had been a Jewish community but not very much more, or about Jews, or Judaism at all. After moving to the US and finishing college, he visited the US Holocaust Museum where he was struck to see Kanczuga mentioned as one of the communities in which Jews lived and where, now, there’s not a living soul of that community which once existed and thrived.THIS VISIT changed him. He undertook personal exploration to understand, memorialize and find the descendants of Kanczuga’s former Jewish community. He’s collected artifacts, interviewed both Jewish survivors along with elderly Poles who remember their former Jewish neighbors. He organized a group of Poles to clean the cemetery. He’s been meeting descendants of the Kanczuga Jewish community and aspires to reconciliation. He was excited when I arranged a meeting with one of the handful of living survivors who was born there. Among Poles, he’s been met with interest, curiosity and hostility. Among Jews he’s been met with hope, nostalgia, suspicion, and awkwardness.For Jews today who even know that their families had once lived in Kanczuga, many see that as a remote spot in the rear-view mirror. For many, Kanczuga represents a place of antisemitism and murder, a distant place in the past to forget. Most have never met a Pole, much less one from Kanczuga, and certainly not one interested in memorializing the Jewish community or reconciliation.KANCZUGA’S TOWN Council, Jews and Poles together, 1930s (Krupinski Family Collection)Patryk has been researching and collecting fascinating relics pointing to the existence of a once vibrant community. He wants to set up a physical center of reconciliation in Kanczuga so Poles will understand what happened. It’s an awkward historical reality that during Passover 1945, Kanczuga is one of the communities in which Jews were murdered after the war by their Polish neighbors, when the Nazis could no longer be blamed.I shared with Patryk photos of my relatives from Kanczuga. About one, he said the house behind them still exists. Its unavoidable to wonder who lives there now? How did these people come to take my relative’s home after they were murdered? Where are the personal belongings including religious articles that were left behind that August day in 1942? Part of me wants to know, but suspects that I’d never get a clear or honest answer. Part of me wants nothing to do with it.Patryk and I met over kosher shwarma in New York recently. With probably no exception, this was the first time that a Jew and a Pole from Kanczuga had broken kosher bread together since 1942. There was an odd feeling of nostalgia and familiarity. He’s impressive, personable, and admirable for what he wants to do and represents. Jews’ and Poles’ narratives and understanding of one another are limited and require good will and mutual empathy for reconciliation. Yet Jews are not so interested in how Poles were also victims of the Nazis. Poles are not keen on being blamed for the atrocities that took place “under occupation.”THE WRITER’S great aunt Rachel Birnbach holds her son Natan and stands with daughter Chajcia in front of their house, which still exists. (Courtesy)To the extent that Jews and Poles coexisted for centuries, albeit with distrust and antisemitism always lurking, since 1942, Kanczuga and countless other places where Jews lived are now judenrein (German for Jew-free). There’s been no substantial relationship between Poles and Jews in over seven decades. Kanczuga embodies that.Perhaps nothing will come of this, as heartening and hopeful as it is or might be. Perhaps, through this, Poles and Jews will put the past in the past and try to understand one another, making strides toward reconciliation. If that debunks stereotypes it certainly can’t be a bad thing. Many of the Jewish descendants with whom I am in touch are grateful that if all that comes out of this is the reliance on knowing that – with no Jews left – Kanczuga’s Jewish cemetery and memorial to the victims from 1942 and 1945, are cared for and maintained respectfully, that’s good enough.This story originally appeared in a different version in Tablet Magazine, at tabletmag.com, and is reprinted with permission.The writer is president of the Genesis 123 Foundation and RunforZion.com, building bridges between Jews and Christians. He can be reached at FirstPersonIsrael@gmail.com.SCRAP OF Jewish newspaper, found after attack on Laufer family house. (Czerwony Family Collection)
