Through an idyllic countryside of tawny haystacks rolled into giant wheels, and gently undulating fields where sunflowers turn their smiling faces to the sky, we come to Zamosc where Jews have lived since 1588. Past the spectacular town square with its vivdly painted facades, we walk down Zamenhof Street, the old Jewish quarter, and Waclaw points out where the synagogue and mikveh used to be. Before the war, Jews made up almost half the population of this city, but the Germans killed most of them and the synagogue has become a public library.
In Lublin, which during the sixteenth century was a major centre of Jewish learning, the imposing yeshiva with its solid columns is now a medical school. The rabbi who erected it in 1930 had a dream that all over the world Jews should read the same page of the Talmud on the same day, but few of the students who lounge in the spacious lecture hall are aware of its spiritual past. As we drive away, I notice that someone has scrawled the word ‘Jude’ inside a Star of David on the ochrepainted wall.
A plaque on a corner building in town commemorates the site of the first Jewish committee organised by survivors in 1944, and I wonder whether my parents came here when we arrived from Piszczac in 1945. All I remember of Lublin was returning home from preschool wearing a pinafore with a big pocket, in which I kept my uneaten liverwurst sandwich.
A young Polish woman has joined our city tour. Magdalena befriended one member of our group that morning and has come to meet the rest of us. Her interest in Jewish topics, and the fact that she used to work in the Jewish museum, prompts me to ask whether anyone in her family was Jewish. After a momentary but telling hesitation, she says, ‘Actually, I don’t think so. But my grandmother had some Jewish friends.’ Centuries of Jewish blood runs silently and secretly through millions of Polish veins and I’m sure that hers are amongst them.
In town after town we learn about the destruction of the Jews as we visit the unmarked sites where for centuries they prayed, shopped and worked. Waclaw points out marketplaces, kosher stalls, mikvehs and synagogues. Justine has been very quiet until now but suddenly she bursts out, ‘This only happened fifty years ago but it’s like visiting the ruins of some vanished civilisation and being told that once the ancient Babylonians lived here.’
Majdanek concentration camp is a fitting stop on this tour of a vanished people. The ashes of the bodies cindered in its crematoria were intended by the thrifty Nazis as fertiliser to nourish German crops. Under the gigantic dome which crouches like an evil flying saucer over tonnes of human ashes that didn’t reach their destination, a sign says, ‘Let our fate be a warning to you.’ I feel as if I am on a tour of hell.
Next day Justine and I set off for Nowy Sacz in search of information about my great-grandparents, Matus and Rywka Baldinger. Our driver, Stanislaw Stetsko, is a middle-aged man with a ruddy face, knobbly features and a personality which makes the air around him crackle with energy. As we drive past spruce trees whose branches flare out like skirts just above the ground, he wants to know why I am pursuing this family quest. ‘Bravo! Oh, bravo!’ he exclaims in his booming voice, clapping his hands when I tell him that I’m planning to write a book. ‘It’s fantastic that you’re writing about your people. There is no culture like yours. Whatever we have achieved, it’s because of your people. Look at Israel, look what they’ve done with that strip of desert in fifty short years. We’ll never amount to anything in this country unless we learn to think like you.’
This excessive praise makes me feel uncomfortable. It’s stereotyping of a positive kind, but stereotyping just the same. I can’t resist saying, ‘To think like us, you need 2000 years of persecution.’
He drops his voice. ‘You’re right. So many of you have died right in this country. We Poles should bow our heads in shame. We have blood on our hands. Jewish blood. We sold you out for a few coins. It’s not a nice thing to say, dear lady, but what’s true is true.’ With shaking fingers he pulls out a cigarette from his shirt pocket. ‘I’m trying to quit, but I get so upset about these things, I just have to smoke!’
Beside the road, sunflowers tower above a stubbly field, their cheerful faces like good deeds in an evil world. As we pass a village, Stanislaw points to a small house on the curve of the road. ‘There used to be a synagogue there,’ he says. ‘Before the war, Piecz was a typical Jewish town.’ By now this is a familiar refrain. I realise that the Jews were annihilated twice in Poland: once by the Nazis, and the second time by their countrymen who covered up their traces, as if they’d never existed.
As we approach Nowy Sacz, the landscape becomes hilly, and simple wooden huts nestle in the valley carved by the Dunajec River. This is the homeland of the Baldingers. In the rundown cottage which houses the state archives, we find the director, Tadeusz Duda, a thin elderly man with one lank strand of grey hair optimistically combed across his bald head. His manner is brusque but his eyes gleam with the thrill of the hunt when I explain my quest. ‘We have very few Jewish records left, but let me see,’ he barks, and ushers us into a boxlike room which is filled from floor to ceiling with bound records, tomes and population lists, and exudes the sweet, papery smell of old documents. His sharp eyes quickly find what he’s looking for and he pulls out three fraying volumes which contain the Jewish population lists for 1870, 1900 and 1910. My heart is beating fast. Surely one of these will record my great-grandparents.
Hands trembling with excitement, Justine and I start scanning the hand-written lists page by page, but although I feel a surge of anticipation each time I come across a Baldinger, to my disappointment I find no mention of Matus, Rywka or their children in any of them. Before I leave, Mr Duda hands me a booklet he has written about the Jews of Nowy Sacz which gives me some insight into the life my antecedents must have led in this pretty little town. Later, walking around the square, I try to visualise it when Jews baked bread, stored flour, sold fabrics, fitted and turned timber, stitched suits and served beer and vodka in the bustling little shops and crowded workrooms.
Before leaving Nowy Sacz, I visit the tomb of the Sanzer Rebbe. To the end of his life, my grandfather Daniel used to go on pilgrimage to the sage’s grave on the anniversary of his death, setting out from Krakow and crossing the Tatras on foot. At the end of the overgrown cemetery stands the Ohel, a small cement chapel which contains the tomb of the Sanzer Rebbe. It feels exciting to stand in the place where my grandfather and his own father once prayed and left their kvitls, notes requesting the soul of the departed to intercede for them. Standing here, I feel a sense of continuity, but I don’t share their faith, so I don’t leave a kvitl for the Sanzer Rebbe.
Driving away from Nowy Sacz, I feel disheartened that I didn’t find any trace of the Baldingers. Next day we are due to visit Szczakowa, the home of my grandmother Lieba’s parents, the Spiras, and I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s worth going.
My doubts vanish as soon as we arrive in this sleepy township. As we drive along the dusty narrow road that leads to the centre of town, I have a feeling of affinity for this place that I can’t explain. Today our driver is Marek, a young man with a chubby face and gentle manner who is delighted to be part of our search for the past. When we see a fruit stall by the roadside, he asks the vendor, a woman with short bleached hair and a sky-blue crocheted top, for information about the Spira family who lived here before the war. ‘I don’t know anything about them, but Mrs Potocka probably will, she’s over seventy,’ the woman says and leads us into a building whose floor and walls are a dismal beige.
A frail woman with white hair slowly opens the door. Sensing Mrs Potocka’s mistrust, I assure her that we haven’t come to claim anything, all we want is information about our family. We sit around a small table in a room where the matrimonial bed almost fills the room and the walls are covered with large religious pictures.
She remembers a Spira who had a hardware shop in town. I know that this was Herman Spira, one of Lieba’s brothers, who took over the family business from Abraham. Then she holds up a gnarled hand. ‘Wait, there was one
Zhidek…’ At the sound of this offensive word for Jew, I recoil, and feel Marek’s attentive gaze rest on my face.
Then Mrs Potocka says, ‘That Zydoweczka, Milkowa, she’d know something about those people, wouldn’t she?’ Again that contemptuous diminutive, this time referring to a Jewess. ‘This used to be the Jewish area,’ she tells me, ‘there was a dairy across the road and all those houses were Jewish.’ Then she recalls an old rhyme. ‘The Jews used to say, “Wasze ulice, nasze kamienice”, meaning “You own the streets, but we own the buildings.” Well, now the buildings are ours as well!’ she chuckles and her eyes gleam with triumph.
All this is fragmentary and frustrating, and I still haven’t found any trace of my great-grandparents. ‘Why don’t you try Jaworzno?’ suggests the fruit seller who hasn’t left our side. ‘You might find out something in the municipal office there.’
In Jaworzno we are sent from the architecture division to the geo-demographic section and on to the survey department. At each one, the clerks seem keen to help us, but they need time, and each one tells us to come back later in the afternoon. By the time we leave the last office, I’m so confused that I can’t remember where I’m supposed to return, what time, or why. Fortunately Marek has it all under control. He remembers which offices we have to return to, the order in which we need to see them, and what time each of them closes for the day. ‘While we’re waiting, let’s go to the court archives,’ he says. ‘Maybe they’ll have records of some legal transactions.’
I look at him with admiration. This young man, who was assigned to us today by chance because his older brother couldn’t come, hasn’t missed a beat. In his quiet, focused way he has made my quest his own and gone about it with patience and tenacity that exceed mine.
We find the court archives tucked away in an alley beside the small park where clerks and salesgirls are enjoying the sunshine on benches under the trees. The director, in a cream cardigan, white blouse and a businesslike expression, knows exactly where to look. She pulls a thick volume off the shelf in the adjoining room, flicks through the hand-written entries, and pushes it towards me. As I look, the words seem to be jumping off the page. The document concerns my great-grandmother Ryfka Spira who died in a room on Agnieszka Street in Krakow in 1917 after her landlady cast the evil eye on her.
Listed here in painstaking copperplate handwriting are the beneficiaries of her estate, all her sons and daughters, including my grandmother Lieba, who is listed as Leonora Baldinger. As Ryfka’s oldest son, Judah, had died by then, the property was divided between her remaining eleven children and six grandchildren. From a later entry it appears that after the death of my great-grandfather Abraham in 1931, most of the heirs sold their share of the estate to their brother Herman, whose daughters Lola and Sabina eventually inherited the lot.
On my return to Australia, I find out that my father’s cousin Lola Birner, who had migrated to Melbourne after the war, was Herman’s daughter who had inherited the estate. It’s ironic to think that I travelled to the other side of the globe in search of information which I could have obtained simply by going to Melbourne. Unfortunately, by the time I return to Australia, Lola is dead and her son and daughter can’t tell me anything about the house in Szczakowa.
Now it’s time to return to the municipal office and Marek checks his notes to make sure we do the rounds of the offices in the right order. In Room 26, the director of the geo-demographic section beckons us inside with an expression that indicates success. I hold my breath while he tells us Ryfka and Abraham Spira’s old address.
Running up the stairs to the next office, I learn that Abraham Spira owned Lot 269. The clerk scribbles this information on a piece of paper and we rush to the survey office where old maps are kept. This is like hunting for buried treasure, and the possibility that any minute now I will find the house where my great-grandparents used to live makes it hard to stand still. The researcher takes out a frayed old volume, looks up Lot 269, and then unfurls a more recent map and points. I feel like jumping up and down like a child when she says, ‘Here it is!’ and points to 11-13 Parkowa Street.
Clutching my great-grandparents’ address, we rush back to Szczakowa. A parade of houses in Parkowa Street faces a small park. There’s no trace of the pine woods and sand dunes that were once a feature of this little town which still has the leisurely air of forgotten corners where no-one hurries. Number thirteen is still a one-storey building just as it has always been, but it looks dingy with dark green window frames set into a grey cement facade and a small corrugated iron awning over the entrance.
Small boys kicking a ball in the park opposite look curiously in our direction, and an old man stares out of a window. At the back of the house a few women and children are sitting under an overhanging iron roof. As usual, Marek takes the initiative and in his friendly way explains why we are here. The old woman nods. Yes, a family called Spira used to live here. The house is still the same except that it has been divided into four flats. One of the young women toting a baby on her hip invites me inside to have a look.
Beyond the tiny kitchen, a large bright room faces the street. It’s a strange feeling, to stand inside the house where my great-grandparents and their twelve children lived so many years ago, where my grandmother Lieba was born and raised. I feel like the descendant of a noble family visiting the ancestral home and finding that it has been taken over by squatters and allowed to moulder and decay.
Someone mentions that the synagogue used to be around the corner. But as we walk under a canopy of chestnut branches in this leafy street, there’s no sign that a synagogue ever stood here. I’m almost ready to get back into the car and drive away when a tall man with iron-grey hair and military bearing emerges from a house nearby, strides towards us, introduces himself as Tadeusz Dziekonski, and asks what we are looking for.
The synagogue used to be right here, he says, pointing to his own house, a flat-roofed building faced with knobbly aggregate. It’s hard to visualise that this is where my great-grandfather strode that Saturday morning when his son-in-law Daniel was called to the Torah, and where my grandparents Lieba and Daniel stood under the chuppah on their wedding day. While Mr Dziekonski was building his house in 1960, he came across the foundations of the synagogue which had been destroyed during the war, and the plumbing of the ritual bathhouse.
Then he says, ‘Perhaps you can help me. I’ve been looking for the sons of a Jew called Bijumin whom I saw being shot by Ukrainians near Lwow in 1942. If they’re still alive, they’d want to know where their father was killed. I knew the whole family. While the father was hiding from the Germans, he used to come to us for food. Please come inside for a glass of tea, I have so many stories to tell,’ he says and, taking my arm, ushers us inside.
While his wife brings us tea and homemade apricot cake, Tadeusz Dziekonski tells us his story. ‘When they started on the Jews, my father told me to watch and remember what was happening to them, so that I would be a witness. And after they’d finished with the Jews, they started on us Poles,’ he sighs.
Then he picks up a sheaf of papers he has written and begins to read. He recounts atrocities that befell his own family at the hands of Ukrainians, about children butchered with axes and old people burned alive in their homes. My knuckles are white from gripping the table and Marek’s face is the colour of cigarette ash. In his succinct style, Mr Dziekonski describes the outbreak of war in the east in 1939. ‘Sad news from the Polish front. Our army retreats under intense Nazi offensive. General mobilisation. Conscription of horses, equipment for the army. Nazi planes fly overhead. Eastern skies glow red in the evening. Poland is burning. Ukrainian nationalists are shouting at the top of their voices, “Death to the Poles, death to the Poles, death to the Jewish communists.” Tragedy is approaching.
‘In the spring of 1942 they are murdering the Jews of Hoszcza. Some escape to the fields but are caught and killed. We help, we hide some Jewish families. We help a family called Bijumin from Tuczyn. As he was
coming to us for food, he was shot dead near the village of Woskodawa near Czudnica. In our village they killed a Jewish family. An elderly couple, David and his wife, and their daughter, son-in-law, and two small children. They hacked them with axes. The children’s mother, badly injured, got away and hanged herself in despair.
‘In the spring of 1942 the Germans murdered 16 000 Jews in Rowno. That was so terrible that I can’t forget it to this day. The Jews had to dig pits, and then they machine-gunned them. Entire families with their children. Dreadful screams and despair from those poor innocent people. They covered up the pits with all the dead and wounded. People say that long afterwards, the earth heaved, because they’d buried the living along with the dead. I know where this happened. I feel very sorry for the Jewish race and pray for them.
‘In 1943 gangs of Ukrainian nationalists murdered and set fire day and night. Night and day, Wolyn burned. Boleslaw Slowinski and his wife were murdered with axes, while their six children aged from one to twelve were speared on rakes and, amid terrible screaming, thrown into a cart. They drove the injured children past the village of Korosciatyn and set them on fire in a wooden hut. The road on which the cart travelled was soaked in blood.
‘At the end of July 1943 I was approaching our house one evening when I heard shots and saw skeins of smoke. That day Ukrainian murderers killed my father Stanislaw Dziekonski, forty-three, my mother aged thirty-five, my seventeen-year-old brother Stefan, my ten-year-old sister Adela, my grandmother Jadwiga Dziekonska, and her son Jozef, aged fourteen. From his hiding place in the attic, my grandfather could hear my mother’s voice pleading with one of the thugs. “Ivan, we used to be friends, at least spare the children.” But after murdering them, they set fire to our house. My grandmother leapt off the roof not to be burned alive and they shot her. My brother Stefan was hiding in the cellar when it went up in flames, and couldn’t get out. The neighbours heard his screams coming from our burning house. Only my grandfather survived.
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