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Going back to my grandmother’s Galician town • By JONATHAN FELDSTEIN
Complicated feelings arise when I consider going back to my grandmother’s Galician town
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.
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 now 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.
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.
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.”
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 Jewfree). 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.
The following is an excerpt from the memoirs of Kanczuga native Yehuda Erlich, The Days of My Distress. Yehuda Erlich is one of the last survivors from Kanczuga who lived through and witnessed when Jewish life thrived and ended there, including the pogrom in 1945 after the war.
He is also the father of David Erlich, founder of Jerusalem’s landmark Tmol Shilshom, who died suddenly in March. May the Erlich family know no more sorrow and distress.
Seder night 1945
Pesach was approaching, and the survivors who remained in Kanczuga decided to make the Seder together. This Seder is one of my most painful memories. We gathered in the Kramberg’s house, 15 men and a single woman. Each one remembering his family, and the Seders they had shared together in the past. Now we were merged in a kind of strange new family.
One of the men in our group was saved by a Polish woman who hid him. Moshe Rosenholtz, was 60. Before the war, he was a wealthy man. He had a business exporting eggs, and a beautiful family. All six of his children were tall and handsome, a family of beautiful giants. How it happened that, from the whole family, only the father survived, I do not know.
A few days after my release and return to Kanczuga, someone came and told us that Moshe Rosenholtz was sitting alone at the edge of the town, waiting for someone to come and take him to where we were all staying in those first days. We were told that he had trouble walking and needed help. I went with my friend Yankele. When I saw him, I was horrified. The man I remembered as the head of the “family of beautiful giants” stood before me looking shockingly shabby. His hair had grown wild, he did not wear a shirt, but a vest. He was the picture of a poor and miserable man.
All my possessions in the world were 10 zloty. We took him to a barber who cut his hair and shaved him for this amount. Over the next few weeks, he recovered and gained human form again. On the night of the Seder, dressed in fine clothes, he sat at the head of the table as the eldest among us. How he managed to survive those few months, I do not know. His recovery was a miraculous wonder.
This Seder was different than those celebrated by our families in the past. One of the survivors, Azriel Raizfeld, knew how to play the violin. We all enjoyed his music that night, bringing many to tears. I often recall this Seder as one of a kind.
Murder of survivors
I came to the Seder from Pszeworsk. The next day I returned to my office (with the police). That night I went to sleep early, but soon the deputy commander woke me with terrible news: the Jews of Kanczuga had been murdered. I didn’t know how many were murdered. I didn’t know who, or how. It was a terrible night for me.
I prepared to go to back to Kanczuga in the morning, armed. I did not feel any support from the commander of the police, nor from any others. In the morning I called the police chief in Kanczuga and told him I was coming with a group of policemen and asked for his help.
I took a weapon, and a few officers from our squad, and set out to Kanczuga. I discovered that six Jews, who had been staying in two houses, had been killed that night. Kanczuga suddenly filled with swarms of Poles, arriving from the surrounding villages, filling the town square. I don’t know why they came, perhaps purely out of curiosity. However I felt no empathy from them.
Then, we were faced with the matter of burial. According to Jewish law, we needed to bury our neighbors in a Jewish cemetery. However the Jewish cemetery was about two kilometers away. We were hesitant because we had heard rumors and feared that there were plans to attack us en route.
The sight in both places of the murder was terrible. Things were scattered all over the floor next to the victims. Everything was destroyed. It was like a scene from a pogrom against the Jews, pictures of which appeared in the papers in the past. There were two detectives from the Investigations Department of some government agency, but they were not sympathetic at all. Their report was very technical, referring to the form of murder, the entry and exit points of the bullets from the bodies. They prohibited me from photographing the victims and the horrible scenes.
After much consideration, we decided to bury the six victims in the Krieger Family’s grove, where three of our friends were killed, including two daughters, and last survivors of the
Krieger family. We dug a big pit and buried the dead in the communal grave. Afterward, my clothes were soaked in blood.
Later, one of our officers told me that they had a suspect. I do not remember what the premise for this man’s involvement in the murder was, however, the officer told me of a well-known Pole from the town, who was one of the suspected murderers. While in town, I spotted the man in a crowd in the market and decided to arrest him. It must have been a strange sight; me, a small Jewish boy, leading this large Polish man by gunpoint, with hundreds of Poles surrounding us, watching. Where I got the courage to do this, I do not know.
It was clear that we could not leave a single Jew in Kanczuga. It was no longer safe. And so we all left; the remaining Jews, the police officers, and the prisoner. We left Kanczuga by wagon and made our way to Pszeworsk. After arriving in Pszeworsk I helped the survivors settle into to the rooms of my fellow officers in the (police) building.
The next day the family of the murder suspect arrived, and attempted to pressure me into releasing him. Among them was the suspect’s cousin, who happened to be a police officer in a nearby town. The family had engaged him to help pressure to release his cousin. He sat before me with a gun in his hand, clearly intended as a threat towards me. I stood my ground and did not allow them to affect me, but unfortunately it was pointless. My commander released the suspect, after the later signed a form committing to cooperate with the government, quite a common method in those times.
We never discovered the true identity of the murderers. I believe that it was Poles who had stolen Jewish property and claimed it as their own. Having Jewish survivors living close by threatened them, and their newly claimed property. However, this is only my assumption, one that I cannot prove.