We all woke up remarkably rested after several precious hours of actual sleep.  Sipping surprisingly respectable coffee, our indulgent splurge for those few extra inches of business class was easily rationalized.   At the moment our jet hit the tarmac at Krakow ’s Balice airport, the packed rows of tourist seats behind us spontaneously erupted in cheer, followed by sustained clapping. I looked at my mom and dad across the aisle. We all chuckled, and then started clapping ourselves. Our adventure had officially begun.

After a modest baggage delay, seems one of the sniffing hounds took a shine to my dad’s bag, we were met by our guide, Kris, and were rolling luggage carts toward our van. Jan, our driver and the van’s owner was leaning against the bright yellow Mercedes 10-seater, smoking a cigarette. We exchanged niceties, reached a firm no-smoking in the van agreement, loaded up and were off.

  The first real sight seeing sight, and I use that term quite liberally, we came to was the Nowa Huta steelworks, once one of the world’s largest mills, embodying all the charms of Gary , Erie and Youngstown but without any emission controls.  It is flanked by row after row of poured concrete stacked living cubicles, each painted or soot stained with a 50’s rainbow of grey hues. As we passed, and that took almost 10 minutes by car, our guide explained that the Communists thought Krakow was too ‘liberal, educated and nationalistic’, so in the 50s they built Nowa Huta and populated it with 25,000 of the Polish equivalent of blue-collar red-necks as a counter weight.

(click pictures to enlarge)

             As ugly and stereotypically ‘Soviet’ as the mill town was, it turned out to be an anomaly in an otherwise quite beautiful country. Not more than 5 minutes later our van was well into the rolling countryside, pointed at our first stop, Nowy Korczyn. We stopped just short of town to buy some local cheese from a roadside vendor. The cheese is from the mountains, which our guide swore you can see from the road on a less hazy day. It was a bit too intensely smoked for our palates but then again this was rural Poland and I had just paid about 60 cents to feed the 5 of us.  

Nowy Korczyn is today a small, somewhat sleepy agricultural town just north across the Vistula River , an hour’s drive from Krakow . But in the past, from the end of the 18^th century up to WWI, Nowy Korczyn was an important border town in Russian controlled Poland , just a short river crossing away from Austro-Hungarian Galicia to the south. It was a commercial city and, by reputation, a hub for smuggling.  

It was also a heavily Jewish town with almost 2,500 in residence at the turn of the 20^th century. To many of them, Nowy Korczyn was known by the name Neustadt, or ‘New Town’ in German.  One of them was my grandfather, Morris Semmel, born as Mordche Zemel near Lodz , in the now nonexistent town of Rakow . When his father died, in 1900, his mother likely returned with him to Neustadt to be near her surviving family from her previous marriage.   In any case, this was the city he lived and worked in before sailing for New York in 1910.  

After the obligatory photos at the town’s road sign, we pulled into town. The main road passes the city’s main church – an impressive Romanesque structure in limestone with a slightly out of place Baroque façade. The town plan has a large, rectangular park at its center, a few blocks off the main road that was probably once the market and meeting place. There is a small grocery, a few bars and one or two other stores.

Where to start? We drove around the square, just looking, attracting a few stares. Kris spots a lone middle age man and directs Jan to drive toward him. For the first, but not last time, we see the true Kris swing into action. He engages this man in an animated discussion, in Polish, and after a good five minutes, Kris tells us that he can show us around the town. The van door opens and in steps our new friend, Marion. He was my age but showed the mileage of someone whose 45 year ride had been much harder than mine. His eyes had large dark bags beneath and carried a telltale red lining of disease.

            Like a bolt, it hit us, me, my mom and dad, all at once. Perhaps it was because this massive structure was the first really Jewish thing we had seen since hitting the Balice tarmac. Maybe it was its sheer size in relation to the little village we were in. Likely it was all of the above plus some jet lag. Built from a classic 18^th century design, the perfection of the scale simply screams out in golden means. Like a mini-Parthenon in the most unlikely of places, it was hard not to think about the people, evidently a lot of them, whose culture and industry built this place. Once, this was quite a large congregation.

We climbed over some rubble and entered the structure under a decaying colonnade of pillars. From the entry vestibule, there is a library or rabbi’s study to the right and the remnant of a wooden stairway to the Ezrat Nashim (women’s gallery), above, to the left. Ahead, under a graceful arch, is the main room.

The most striking feature of the great room is again the scale. The roof, soaring above, is now fully exposed, ancient wooden stringers in place that once held a fresco painted plaster ceiling. The bema is gone but much of the Aron Kodesh ( Ark ) remains with small flanking statues and stone carvings hinting at what once must have been. Looking backwards, we can still see the remnants of the friezes that once surrounded the congregation.

Only after many hushed minutes in this sacred place do we start to become aware of the graffiti, beer bottles and garbage strewn everywhere. I suppose that with enough funding anything can be restored, but I doubt if this structure will even be standing in another 5 years. Later we find that most of the damage to this place was done after the holocaust, in 1946, and that the structure was used as a grain storehouse in the 50’s.  

Leaving, my dad and I joke about whether or not his not too religious father, Morris, ever actually set foot in this place. We chuckled, but it didn’t really matter as this structure, ragged as it is, is all that remains of him or the thousands like him in this town.  

            Back in the van, Marion promised to direct us to the Jewish cemetery. We drove around for a while, then hiked around for a while before concluding that the well meaning Marion hadn’t a clue as to where the cemetery was.

A quick sidebar on our guide, Kris. Kris is a wonderful study in both contrast and contradiction. He has the intellectual capacity of a studied anthropologist, psychologist, historian and linguist coupled with the élan of an entrepreneur and a detective. He is a Polish Catholic with almost limitless interest and empathy for the near vanished Jews of his native land. But most of all, he is immensely likable and blessed with a surfeit of chutzpa.

Not one to quit while the sun was above the horizon; Kris had Marion direct us to the local high school, ‘gymnasium’ in Polish.  He hailed the first person he saw, a woman, evidently a teacher, leaning out a second floor window. A fast exchange produced the woman and another teacher at the front door to meet Kris. Though I couldn’t follow the Polish, I could see Kris turning on the wit and charm. Every few minutes he turned to us and tried to give a synopsis of his tact which was to try and locate an older person who acted as town historian. Such a person was identified and happened to live just up the block. Our caravan, half in the van and half on foot, lit out down the street.

Josef Stojek met us in the driveway of his home. His wife came briefly, her hands in dirt caked dishwashing gloves, carrying tools for tending the serious garden in the back. Her English wasn’t bad. She had lived for 10 years near Chicago working for a family that was half Jewish. We were quickly invited into their home. Curiously, she left us and returned to her garden.  Josef, a Catholic who must be close to 70, looks fit and hale with a full head of white hair and a steady voice matching his manner. His passion is woodworking, and the interior of his home is both a shrine to his art and a testament to his near obsession. . The house is a beautiful 4 story ‘A’ frame that would fit in just fine in either Salzburg or Aspen and very square inch of the interior is covered with his handiwork. Inlayed floors, ceilings, wainscotings and stairs. 

After cold drinks and ubiquitous Polish sweets, Josef began speaking, in Polish, with Kris performing his uncanny translating tick almost as each word came out. He told us four stories from the war and the holocaust.

 1.      A local man named Macugowski hid 11 Jews during the war in his home, saving them from certain death at the hands of the Germans. Because buying food for 11 would have aroused suspicion, he bartered directly with local farmers for grain and ground it in a coffee mill. After the war, he was invited to Israel to visit the survivors and their families who band together and offer him a literal ‘blank check’ to pay him for his bravery. He turned down all payments, insisting that it was his Catholic duty to help his fellow man. Josef added that after returning, no one noticed any change in Macugowski material status, confirming his righteousness.  

2.       He related a short story of a Jew and a Gentile both stopped by the SS. The Nazis ordered the gentile to shoot the Jew. He refused and himself was shot by the SS officer.  

3.       As a teenager, Josef was walking in a field near town when he came upon a woman and child fleeing the SS. The woman handed the child to Josef and ran toward the safety of the nearby forest. The child was dressed in typical Jewish dress. Josef took his vest off and redressed the child. When the SS stopped them, the child looked Polish and they were let go.

            4.       The last story was about a local Polish collaborator who was kidnapped by the partisans, dressed in Jewish clothing, and put on the train with the Jews to a concentration camp.

We asked many questions about life during the war and about the pogrom that happened just afterwards, in 1946. While he was sensitive to the ultimate fate of his Jewish neighbors, it seemed important to him for us to know that everyone in his town suffered at the hands of the Germans.

             Finally, he told us he would show us the remains of the Jewish ghetto and the cemetery. He told us that the townspeople and the church supported and perhaps paid for, the cemetery fence. Later, in Krakow , that notion was roughly dismisses and we were told that the fence was paid for by a wealthy Jew from New York .  We followed Josef into the van, glad for the extra seats and drove back to the square.

             The old Ghetto is nothing more than two buildings and two now empty lots off one corner of the town square. It was very hard to get a sense of the crowding and desperation that must have been this place in the early 40s.

           We then drove to the edge of town where the road petered out first into two muddy tracks, then into open, unmarked pasture. This, Josef assured us, was the way to the cemetery. We drove a good ½ km across the field, nearly rolling the van on swales and ditches more than once, before we came to a fence, enclosing... more grass. It was a well built fence of iron set in concrete, with a Jewish star formed into the locked gate. One pillar had a space for a memorial plaque, but it was missing, leaving behind only adhesive grout. Even thought the gate enclosed a good size football field, only two tombstone fragments are visible.

Recovered from the overland trek, we tried an alternate exit route but were stymied by a line of deep culverts. Retracing our steps we finally made it back to the two track road. Dead ahead was an apparently stalled tractor surrounded by several young men or teenagers. We pulled to within 10 feet of them but not a one would so much as acknowledge our presence. Finally, after several awkward minutes, the tractor started and they cleared the road, never having made simple eye contact and without uttering a word. In retrospect, it makes sense to suspect a connection between the teen’s passive hostility and the missing commemorative plaque in the cemetery in the middle of their pasture. On the way to drop Josef off, he mentioned that there had been some friction between the local farmers and the efforts to erect the fence, seemingly over grazing space. As we exchanged addresses, Josef bid us a warm and sincere farewell and invited us back to his house, anytime.  

            And that, apparently, is all there is left. It’s an eerie place, full of suggestions of what once was. A huge, beautiful, ruined 18^th century Synagogue and an enormous but empty cemetery in the middle of a cow pasture. I thought about my grand father, Morris. I’m proud that he was from here, but I’m also glad that he up and left.

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