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A Day in Przemysl
© David R. Semmel 2003
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Fannie Metzger, my mom’s mother and my grandmother was one of 9
children from the town of
Przemysl
, in the foothills of the
Carpathian Mountains
in southeastern
Poland
. We knew that one of her brothers, Isaac, had survived the war,
returned, remarried and later died in the early ‘70s. It was our
hope to locate his adopted son, who we believed to be named Jerzy.
May 8, 2003 started early at our hotel in the Rzeszow, about
50km up the main highway from Przemysl, over coffee and cold cuts
with my parents, Mel and Dorothy, our driver, Jan, and our guide,
Kris.
Rzeszow
, Kris noted, was once known to Poles, pejoratively, as
“Mojzeszow” (in English ‘Mosestown), owing its once large
Hasidic population. Today it is a dreary industrial city with
little outward charm.
To simply label Kris Malczewski as a tour guide doesn’t
even begin to capture the true meaning of his work. His formula is
equal parts detective, linguist, psychologist, anthropologist,
salesman and entrepreneur, sprinkled liberally with a frenetic
activity level, a compulsive drive, and a likeable country boy
personality, and all topped off with a surfeit of raw chutzpa.
None of the wonderful things that transpired this day in Przemysl
could have been possible without him.
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(click pictures to enlarge)
Kris, David, Jan,
Dorothy & Mel
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If
you don't look too closely, the approach to Przemysl from the
north looks like a scene out of rural
Wisconsin
with gently rolling hills holding many small farms. The fields are
long narrow rectangles, radiating out from the road at right
angles. On closer inspection you find a refreshing variety of
crops, from grains to berries, potatoes and vegetables. The
tractors are Soviet vintage and you still see the occasional horse
cart. Przemysl occupies a ‘V’ shaped valley with city on both
slopes, with the swift and rocky
San River
at the crux. Because of the hills the city occupies, Przemysl has
almost no right angle intersections, and it’s winding maze of
streets and alleys give it something close to the feel of an
Umbrian ‘hilltop’ town.
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Przemysl
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Our
first stop was
Smolki Street
to see Rozia Felner who Kris knew from his past research work. She is
one of the very few Jews who survived the war and resettled in Przemysl.
Perhaps she knew of our Isaac, who had also survived and returned to the
city. We pulled up to her street, across from the 4 story apartment
building where she lived. Kris, always thinking and working, ran to a
corner store and bought her a box of chocolates.
The
building, like almost all the buildings in this part of the world, was
covered in a grey patina, laid down from years of soot from the coal
stoves which heat each apartment. While it lacked some features we take
for granted like screens and central heat, it was, by Polish standards,
solidly middle class. We ascended the 4 flights of stairs to Rozia’s,
past buckets of coal and kindling on each story’s landing. She was
expecting us as Kris had phoned her the prior evening. She lived alone
in the modest but quite comfortable flat. After she proudly served us
coffee and cakes, we got down to business. Our guide Kris is, in
addition to his many other talents, a gifted translator capable of going
from Polish to English as sentences are being uttered. Soon after we
began, she looked at us and said that she knew where our relative was
buried, next to her husband in the Jewish cemetery, and that his wife,
Aniela, was still alive but quite infirmed. It’s hard to convey the
sledge hammers impact of hearing, first hand, that a previously unnamed
and unknown wife of an almost mythical uncle was actually still alive.
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Rozia at the Cemetery
Gate
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At
88 Rozia has seen and lived through more than anyone you’re ever
likely to meet. Her eyes are foggy and one is a bit crossed but
her mind is still razor sharp and her voice clear and forceful.
She easily wields the authority of a family matriarch, at one
point looking at my stomach and suggesting that I should try to
emulate the more slender figure of my mother, rather than that of
my father. Said as
only an authentic Jewish mother could!
In a touching moment, when we had asked about her life, she
looked at Kris and said but a few words which he did not translate
for us. Later we learned that she had told him she could not bear
to recall too much of her life as it was just too hard to deal
with and for fear of kindling nightmares. A few days later in
Krakow
I bought a book that contained short life stories written by
survivors from Przemysl. Rozia
was one of the authors. She gives a brief but gut-wrenching
account of her ordeal and improbable survival amid unspeakable
horrors. In closing, she offers: “I am many times lonely
now, and I don’t like to think very much about the war and the
losses of the Jewish people.”
She knew of a man who would know how to find Aniela. She
suggested, no, more accurately she told us, that we would all go
to see him, stopping at the cemetery on the way. We descended the
4 flights, got into the car, and drove off on a mission to find
our newly named relation.
By European standards, the Jewish cemetery in Przemysl is
in pretty good shape. It has a gate and a fence and well over half
of the stones are still in place. It’s not so much a cemetery in
the American sense of neat rows and columns, it’s more of a wild
forest with stones scattered among the trees and underbrush. The
very few post war stones are in front with the vast majority of
older ones set back into the encroaching forest. As you walk
deeper into the forest, you walk further back in time. After 50
meters or so, all Latin script disappears into Hebrew. There is a
simple but poignant memorial stone dedicated to the 4,000 or so
Przemysl Jews murdered in the Shoah.
While it is not well groomed, I wouldn’t say that it
lacks for dignity. There is a fusion of nature and spirit in this
place that is hard to describe yet almost overwhelmingly palpable.
This is an intensely spiritual place. Rozia asked me to light two
candles she had brought for her husband’s grave, a duty I was
honored to perform.
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Jewish Cemetery
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With
only a dozen or so post-war stones to look at, all crowded near
the cemetery entrance, it took but a moment to locate the grave of
one Edward Metzger. Our initial confusion over the name was
quickly explained by Rozia, who knew our Isaac by his ‘street’
name, Edward. Given that he had married a Catholic woman, Aniela,
and with the political climate as it was in communist
Poland
, it is not surprising that he adopted a more Christian name.
Later,
we piled back into the van to find Joachim, a friend of Rozia’s
who she thought could help us. A former storekeeper, now a retired
pensioner, we found him at his apartment. It’s a good thing we
had a van because before long Jochiam was driving with us to show
us the area he thought she lived in. After dropping Rozia and
Joachim off, we arrived at an apartment block. As it turned out,
this was to be a dead end. Kris stopped all sorts of people on the
street, asking everyone and anyone if they know of an old woman
named Aniela who lived in this block. It was fascinating to
interact with a wide range of locals; kids, teens, drunks, young
and old couples. Finally, three older women who just looked like
they knew everything that went on it this block told us she
didn’t live there. We believed them.
Not even remotely ready to quit, Kris decided to visit the
city hall. The records department was on the 3rd floor,
so up we climbed. The building is a nondescript box, modern in the
early 60’s manner. We entered the records division and were
promptly ushered next door into a room filled floor to ceiling
with metal file boxes. Kris, who had been working overtime
charming the middle aged lady clerks in Polish started probing for
data with one of the women who appeared to be in charge and manned
the computer console. The computer was an index to the records and
looked to be from the age of ‘pong’. Unfortunately, we seemed
to be striking out on searches for any Metzger. In modern
Poland
there is a privacy law that seals any and all state records that
are less than 100 years old so, technically, what we were asking
for was illegal. Some combination of Kris’ charm, his name
dropping of the town mayor and what I believe to have been genuine
kindness and unspoken understanding with the clerks all conspired
to rally the office to our aid.
Just
as we were ready to give up and leave, one of the women comes
through a doorway from another archive waving a 5x7 card which,
with little fanfare, was deposited on the Formica counter before
us. And there it all was. Like a mini Rosetta stone, this card
laid out, in longhand, the life of one Aniela Tyczynska of
Tarnowskiego Street
. She was born
July 26, ’22
as Aniela Binczak. Her first married name was Wojtowicz, which is
also the name of her son Jerzy, born
June 11, ‘41
. After the war she married Isaac Metzger, who’s street name was
Edward. He died in 1971 after which she married a third time with
the name Tyczynska. Kris called the apartment on his cell and
quickly arranged for us to meet.
Her apartment has a small vestibule that opens into a fairly
spacious eat-in kitchen. All of the appliances are small by our
standards and electric. She showed us into the living/dining room
and sat us at a small table in the room’s center. Her balcony
doors were open and she had a small flower garden in pots growing.
The room itself, like all apartments we saw in
Poland
, was muted, lit by a single 25 watt bulb. On the walls were
photos of her children and grand children. Particularly striking
was a wedding portrait of her son Jerzy and his beautiful wife
Anna, a dead ringer for a young Kim Novak. While we know that
Aniela is not Jewish, curiously, there were few if any obvious
Catholic symbols to be found in her apartment.
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ANiela
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Aniela
began to talk in Polish, translated as she spoke by Kris. Isaac didn’t
follow his siblings to
America
because he had been drafted into the Army in the 30’. On release, he
married and unknown woman, c. 1938. She knew him pre-war because her
family, the Binczak’s and the Metzger family were neighbors and
friends, living on ‘
Kopernica Street
’. Isaac left voluntarily by train for
Russia
in ’39 with a group of other Jewish men, presumably to fight on the
Soviet side against the Nazis. (In 1939 Przemysl was the border with one
bank of the
San River
in
Russia
and the other in
Germany
. When hostilities broke out, many Jews, many of whom were also ardent
Socialists or Communists, chose to go over the Russian side to fight.)
Aniela’s family receive messages from him, indicating that he first
went to Lemberg ( L’vov) then on to Sambor.
He returned to Przemysl in ’44 as a corporal in a Polish Army
unit formed in
Russia
and fighting along side the Red Army. On return, he found his wife gone,
presumably murdered in the holocaust. Aniela’s family hid his identity
cards to protect him from the partisans (?). One theory is that he was
hiding the fact that he was Jewish since in 1946 there was a vicious
pogrom in many parts of
Poland
and the Polish Army units formed in Soviet Russia contained a
disproportionately high percentage of Jews.
He and Aniela married soon after the war, her
first husband having died, likely as a soldier.
She remembers visits post-war from many of Isaac’s Polish Army
comrades who later immigrated to
Israel
. He was a ‘tinner’ or a metal worker and a member of the Communist
party. He was also a member of the ‘nationalist’ group (?). Later,
he became a worker at a library/bookstore on the ground floor below the
very apartment we were in. There is still a sign at the entry way for
this long since shuttered store. He received money and had much contact
with the Israeli embassy. Perhaps this was German war reparations which
were officially shunned by the Communist Poles?
He was
jailed in the late ’50 for something to do with mis-appropriated
clothing and repatriated workers from the east. Aniela downplayed the
entire episode, saying she hired a lawyer and he spent only a short time
in jail. We suspect that there is much more to this tale, and a
significant political angle, than she was willing to tell us.
She remembered receiving care packages from the Metzger family,
especially from my grandmother Fannie, or Fania to her, who could read
and write in Polish. She also recalled fondly visits from Edward’s
American relatives; his nephew, Bernard Flamenbaum and wife Barbara
during the late 50's, and a visit from his sister-in law, Molly Metzger
on her way to Moscow in the 60's.
At one point there was an enigmatic exchange about Edward’s
gravestone and her feeling that his burial site needed to be better
taken care of. Coming on the heels of her remembrance of the care
packages the family sent for years, were we to interpret this as a
request for financial assistance? In subsequent discussion with Kris and
other Poles, we concluded that it is more in keeping with a tradition of
self deprecation than an overt request for money. But its not at all
clear and in the end our conclusion rests almost completely on the
nuance of translation that Kris chose to relate to us. Finally, she
recalled that the Metzger’s had a family bakery on ‘
Ratashova Street
’ until 1939.
We then
heard all about her family. Recently retired Jerzy and wife now live in
Stalowa Wola, a city about 100km to the north. Their children are Kasia
or Katarzyna (m. Leszek Warchol – both doctors) and Marta (m. Darek
Banka – both teachers). She has several grandchildren and beamed as
she proudly showed off snapshots. While not blood relations, she was
clear and emphatic on how close Isaac/Edward and Jerzy were up to his
death and how he was grandfather to the children.
Aniela has advanced Parkinson’s and tires easily. The 90 minutes
we talked had taken its toll on her, both physically and emotionally.
But this is a strong and proud woman who clearly enjoyed our visit
almost as much as we treasured meeting her. As we left, we exchanged the
hugs of a family.
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