• About
  • The Photo that Started it All

Uncovering Jewish Heritage

Uncovering Jewish Heritage

Monthly Archives: May 2015

Warsaw archive weekend

31 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Marysia Galbraith in Archives, Family, Piwko, Polish-Jewish relations

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Hil Majer Piwko

The first find of the weekend, at the National Library in Warsaw: my great grandfather Hil Majer Piwko’s death notice in Nasz Przegląd, one of the main Polish-language Jewish newspapers in interwar Poland.

DSC06314

Chil Majer Piwko’s death notice in Nasz Przegląd, June 16, 1929.

The text reads:

B. P. [Blessed in memory] Chil Majer Piwko died in Włocławek after brief but heavy suffering on the 12th of June 1929 (4 Siwon), at the age of 75, and was buried the same day.

To everyone who helped him on his final road, lamenting our husband and father, and especially the Funeral Brotherhood with its honorable president at its head. Wishing to express “God bless,” left in deep sadness,

Wife, sons, daughters, daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

The size and placement of the notice indicates my great grandfather held a position of relative prominence in the Jewish community. Also, appearing in Nasz Przegląd as opposed to any of the Yiddish or Hebrew language newspapers indicates that he identified as a Pole as well as a Jew. He was assimilated into the broader society, even though he maintained conservative modes of dress and religious practices.

I’m also struck by the mention of great grandchildren in the death notice. That’s also me, even though I wouldn’t be born for another 35 years

Wyspa pamięci

28 Thursday May 2015

Posted by Marysia Galbraith in Cemeteries, Heritage work, Memory, Piła

≈ 1 Comment

Here is an essay I prepared for the unveiling of a monument commemorating the 17th century jewish cemetery in Piła. It is part of a lecture I will give at the ceremony. Special thanks to Janusz Marciniak for his expert editing.

Monument to Piła Jews who died in World War I. Archival photo. http://www.kirkuty.xip.pl/pila.htm

Monument to Piła Jews who died in World War I. Archival photo. http://www.kirkuty.xip.pl/pila.htm

Co mówią przedmioty, a częściej już tylko fragmenty przedmiotów – okaleczone pamiątki z przeszłości? Jaką wartość mają resztki dawnego świata, materialne okruchy historii, która wydaje się nam coraz bardziej odległa i o której nie myślimy zbyt często z powodu naszych współczesnych trosk? Fragment zniszczonego w czasie wojny cmentarza żydowskiego przypomina nam o czasach pomyślności i harmonijnej koegzystencji mieszkańców Piły i jednocześnie o wydarzeniach, które jeszcze dziś budzą w nas trwogę i sprzeciw. Niepamięć można zrozumieć, bo pamięć bywa bolesna. Łatwiej patrzeć w przyszłość niż w przeszłość. Jednak rzeczywistość nie jest taka prosta. Coś nas łączy z przeszłością, szczególnie z tą tragiczną. Pamięć o niej działa w naszej podświadomości i ma na nas wpływ niezależnie od naszej woli.

One of the few traces remaining today--a fragment of the wall surrounding the Jewish Cemetery wall, Piła

One of the few traces remaining today–a fragment of the wall surrounding the Jewish Cemetery wall, Piła

Pomnik, taki jak ten na ocalonym fragmencie cmentarza żydowskiego w Pile, jest nie tylko wyrazem szacunku dla ludzi pochowanych w tym miejscu, lecz także narzędziem skupiania uwagi na tym, co było kiedyś i co już nie wróci, ale co teraz może służyć jako memento, ostrzeżenie, upomnienie i przestroga. Pomnik może nam pomagać w zachowaniu więzi z przeszłością i także z przyszłością. Nie można myśleć o przyszłości bez myślenia o przeszłości. Pomnik zachęca do poznania historii miasta i jego mieszkańców. Skłania do reflekcji nad fragmentem cmentarnego muru i kilkoma ocalonymi macewami. Prowadzi dialog z tym wszystkim, co pozostało z cmentarza. Także dialog z naturą, a zwłaszcza z najstarszymi drzewami, które są świadkami historii tego miejsca. Pomnik łączy ocalone fragmenty w większą całość i tworzy z nimi wyspę pamięci w centrum miasta. Ta wyspa pamięci uzmysławia nam stan naszej ludzkiej wrażliwości i czyni Piłę piękniejszym miastem, a jej dzisiejszych mieszkańców lepszymi ludźmi. Stojąc na zachowanym fragmencie cmentarza, wspominamy wszystkich mieszkańców dawnej Piły, którzy – tak jak my – mieli swoje troski i marzenia. Pamięć o nich może być źródłem dobra i nadziei.

Foundation of the monument, December 2014

Foundation of the monument, December 2014

Warto poznać i zrozumieć to, co było przed nami, żeby lepiej zrozumieć siebie. Sposób traktowania materialnych i niematerialnych fragmentów przeszłości miasta ma znaczenie dla tych, którzy obcują z nimi na co dzień, i dla tych, którzy patrzą na nie z daleka. Ważną grupą zainteresowanych przeszłością są ci, którzy szukają swojej tożsamości i korzeni.

Postcard with the synagogue on the left. Piła was in the Prussian partition of Poland, and was also known as Schneidemühl.

Postcard with the synagogue on the left. Piła was in the Prussian partition of Poland, and was also known as Schneidemühl.

Book with photo of the synagogue on the cover held to show the approximate location of the  synagogue until it was destroyed in the Kristallnacht in 1938.

Book (History of the Jewish Community of Schneidemuhl– 1641 to the Holocaust by Peter Simonstein Cullman) with photo of the synagogue on the cover held to show the approximate location of the synagogue until it was destroyed in the Kristallnacht in 1938.

Kiedy słuchamy tego, co mówią do nas fragmenty przeszłości, to przeszłość ożywa. Fragmenty mówią do nas niezależnie od tego czy staramy się zapomnieć, czy pamiętać o niej. Czasami cudza niepamięć nas rani i zdarza się, że własna pamięć sprawia nam ból. Jest tak, kiedy zamykamy się przed przeszłością i nie chcemy jej zrozumieć. Dlatego lepiej pamiętać i starać się zrozumieć przeszłość oraz jej wpływ na nas. Tylko tak można leczyć traumę.

Inaczej wygląda i działa miejsce z pomnikiem niż bez pomnika. Pomnik wypełnia pustkę po stracie. Pustka może być interpretowana jako obojętność, brak szacunku, a nawet znak nienawiści. Pomnik zaś inspiruje do pracy pamięci i kontemplacji. Cmentarz wrócił na mapę miasta i do świadomości jego mieszkańców. Jest znowu miejscem skupienia i przeżywania straty, a równocześnie szacunku dla fenomenu życia. Nie jesteśmy sami. Odczuwamy znaczenie pamięci podobnie. Pamięć nas zbliża. Dzięki niej stanowimy wspólnotę, chociaż jesteśmy różni. Pamięć sprawia, że różnice nas nie dzielą, lecz łączą. Pamięć staje się podstawą nowych więzi społecznych.

I will post a photo of the completed monument after the unveiling on Tuesday, June 2.

A crowded field

22 Friday May 2015

Posted by Marysia Galbraith in Anthropology, Polish-Jewish Heritage

≈ 1 Comment

I find myself working here in a very crowded field. At all the commemorative events, concerts, and exhibitions, I’m one of many taking photos, writing notes, and doing interviews. The press is there, along with filmmakers, and even other ethnographers. And more often than not, the organizers of events are doing their own documentation for their websites or promotional materials. All of this is a testament of the widespread interest in Jewish heritage in Poland. It’s also, I think, reflective of our mediated lives. Everything is posted on Facebook or a blog such as this one.

It was very different when I began fieldwork 25 years ago. In the Bieszczady Mountains in particular, local residents sometimes wondered if I was a spy. Why else would I spend so much time in such a remote place asking all kinds of questions? I was the only foreigner and the only anthropologist in the small town of Lesko, where I lived for a year.

I’ve had two interesting experiences in the last week alone. First, I interviewed an Israeli woman who lives in Poland. She works as a Hebrew teacher and she is doing a documentary film about what it means to be a Jew (Żyd) in Poland. Over the course of our conversation, I shared some of my own quest for information about my family. Now she wants to interview me for her film. And then today, while attending an educational event sponsored by the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews and coordinated by a local museum curator and schoolteacher, I met another ethnographer who is traveling with the exhibition and interviewing people involved with Jewish heritage work in each of the places that are part of the tour.

And next week, I will be the guest speaker at the unveiling of a commemorative monument at the site of the Jewish cemetery in Piła.

This all brings home the impossibility of being an invisible, objective observer in the research I am doing. The participant side of participant-observation is far more robust. I am a collaborator, a lecturer, and myself a subject of other peoples’ projects. All I can do is keep writing notes about how intertwined I become in the various projects I witness. In Jewish Poland Revisted, Erica Lehrer made a similar observation about her “postmodern field site” in Kazimierz, Krakow’s former Jewish quarter which she describes as “transnational, increasingly cyber-mediated, tangled up with flows of tourism” and a site for “the confrontation, dialogue, or at times blurring among ethnography and other practices of cultural representation, translation and brokering” (2014:7; she also describes it as a crowded field of endeavor). I can only wonder at how invisible this all was to me until I started asking the right questions and finding people who are seeking their own answers to them.

Difficult memories

10 Sunday May 2015

Posted by Marysia Galbraith in Archives, Memory, Poland, World War II

≈ 4 Comments

I spent two days at the archive of the Institute of National Memory, reading reports about crimes committed during World War II. Witnesses filled out these forms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so they were recalling events that occurred thirty years earlier. Different forms were used to document different offenses: repression of the Jewish population before the creation of the ghettos, persecution and extermination of intelligentsia, repression of the Gypsy people, roundups, arrests, prison and arrest, executions, resettlement, ghettos, camps, looting and destroying cultural goods, and help given by Poles to exterminated and persecuted Polish citizens of Jewish descent and other nationalities as well as citizens of other countries. These categories overlap, so sometimes forced labor is reported on the “resettlement” form, while in other cases the “camp” form is used. There are thousands of pages of these testimonies in the archive. I have only requested the ones from towns I have visited: places like Ustrzyki Dolne and Lesko, Żychlin and Kutno.

This is hard material to take in more than small doses. Page after page outlines the dehumanizing conditions Polish citizens were subjected to. The forms illustrate a certain asymmetry of experience. The ultimate fate of most Jews was death, as described on the forms for repression, execution, and ghettos. Most Jews were murdered because they were Jews. There is also an asymmetry of memory: those murders tend to be documented in large, even numbers—4,000, 6,000, 20,000 Jews passed through the Kutno ghetto on their way to the death camps.

Some records are more specific, including the names of 181 Jews who were taken to the Jewish cemetery in Żychlin on March 2, 1942, the day before the liquidation of the ghetto. Then they were shot and buried in shallow mass graves. The names of the five officers who shot them are also listed. Among the victims, #22 is Lajb Białak, age 38, trader; #59 is Hersz Klinger, age 39, shoemaker; #88-92 are Abram (48), Iojne (44), Rywen (16), Sura (14), and Bajla (12) Borensztajn. They may well have been a family. #159, Estera Rajch (62), trader, has the same last name as my great great grandmother, Liba Rajch who was born in 1829 in nearby Kutno.

In Ustrzyki Dolne, several witnesses report the shooting of 100 Jews rounded up from nearby villages and shot by a single SS officer. Only two Jews survived. Szternbach was a dentist who changed his name to Edward Stańkowski and moved to Szczecin, a city at the other corner of Poland. The other, named Szrecher (did they mean Szprecher?), moved to the United States.

More Poles survived and are named in these records, but the accounts also attest to the inhuman treatment to which they were subjected. Reading page after page of testimony gives me a visceral understanding why it would have been so hard for most to offer help to Jews. It doesn’t justify deliberate acts of prejudice and hatred, but it does help to explain what likely prevented more direct assistance. Poles were ordered to leave their homes with hardly any notice, then moved to poorer quarters on other streets or in different towns. Most of their property was taken from them. All they were allowed to bring with them was a pair of underwear, or a spoon and bowl. The luckier ones were told to pack a few days food or a change of clothes and some bedding. Thousands were transported to forced labor throughout the Third Reich. So many were put to work digging ditches. The pages of testimony don’t specify why but I can only imagine that these were in many cases death pits for murdered Jews. Others worked in gardens, factories, or on railroad tracks.

Poles were usually arrested for specific activities: illegal sale of food, making vodka, killing a pig, taking two ration cards, crossing borders, or avoiding work. Most often these offenses resulted in imprisonment or forced labor but sentences were unpredictable. Jan Tobolczyk, “a teacher and a good Pole,” was beaten for not admitting to being a witness of a Pole beating a German. He was sent to Dachau where he was killed. Poles were imprisoned, hanged, or shot for offenses like conspiracy, hiding arms, hiding people, or sabotage. Those caught hiding Jews were killed. Many of those documented on the “persecution and extermination of intelligentsia” form were arrested simply because they were priests; many were sent to Dachau where they were gassed, though some survived imprisonment.

Three railroad workers, Piotr Sand, Kolikst Perkowski, and Wilhelm Czarnewski, were hung in the Old Market Square in Kutno for transporting food to Warsaw. One witness said they were engaged in “illegal trade,” another said they were “transporting food for soldiers.” This happened on July 12, 1940, or perhaps at the end of May 1941. Many witnesses reported this incident. One explained that residents were forced to come at a designated time to watch the execution. The bodies hung all day, guarded by Germans. They were taken down at night and moved to an unknown location.

The accumulation of cases brings home how little Poles’ lives mattered to the occupier, and how easily and unpredictably they were imprisoned, relocated, or killed. These accounts document the inaccuracy, or at least the incompleteness of the claim that most Poles just stood by while the Holocaust happened. Many were preoccupied with the struggle for their own survival. And years later, many felt compelled to leave a public record of what they witnessed.

Categories

  • Anthropology (32)
    • Archives (13)
    • Fieldwork (7)
    • Research Methodology (7)
  • antisemitism (12)
  • Association of Descendants of Jewish Central Poland (16)
  • Catholicism (8)
  • Conference (1)
  • Discrimination (1)
  • Family (66)
    • Bereda (17)
    • Kolski (13)
    • Piwko (22)
    • Rotblit (3)
    • Walfisz (3)
    • Winawer (7)
  • Genealogy (11)
  • Heritage work (50)
    • Commemoration (18)
  • Identity (17)
  • Israel (5)
  • Jewish Culture (72)
    • Cemeteries (38)
    • Museum (6)
    • Synagogues (29)
  • Jewish immigrants (8)
  • Jewish Religion (1)
  • Memory (59)
  • Names (14)
  • Photographs (6)
  • Pifko-Winawer Circle (5)
  • Poland (105)
    • Baligród (1)
    • Bolimów (1)
    • Brześć Kujawski (5)
    • Buk (1)
    • Dukla (2)
    • Dąbrowice (1)
    • Gdynia (1)
    • Gostynin (1)
    • Gąbin (1)
    • Izbica Kujawska (1)
    • Kazimierz (4)
    • Kowal (1)
    • Koło (1)
    • Krakow (7)
    • Krośniewice (1)
    • Kutno (6)
    • Kłodawa (1)
    • Lesko (8)
    • Leszno (1)
    • Lubień Kujawski (1)
    • Lubraniec (1)
    • Lutowiska (3)
    • Piła (3)
    • Podgórze (2)
    • Poznan (11)
    • Przemyśl (2)
    • Radom (1)
    • Radymno (1)
    • Sanok (1)
    • Skierniewice (5)
    • Sobota (2)
    • Tarnów (2)
    • Warsaw (18)
    • Wielkopolska (1)
    • Wronki (7)
    • Włocławek (18)
    • Zasław (2)
    • Łódź (1)
    • Żychlin (15)
  • Polish Culture (10)
  • Polish-Jewish Heritage (50)
  • Polish-Jewish relations (49)
  • Post-World War II (22)
  • Pre-World War II (18)
  • Reclaimed Property (1)
  • stereotypes (3)
  • Survival (9)
  • Trauma (3)
  • Uncategorized (4)
  • Victims and perpetrators (1)
  • World War II (37)
    • Jewish Ghetto (8)
    • Nazi Camps (3)
    • Polish Underground Army (3)
  • Yiddish (4)

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. Your email address will not be shared.

Archives

  • January 2023 (2)
  • December 2022 (7)
  • November 2022 (2)
  • October 2022 (5)
  • September 2022 (1)
  • January 2022 (1)
  • August 2021 (1)
  • December 2020 (2)
  • July 2020 (1)
  • May 2020 (3)
  • April 2020 (1)
  • March 2020 (1)
  • January 2020 (2)
  • May 2019 (1)
  • February 2019 (1)
  • November 2018 (1)
  • September 2018 (1)
  • August 2018 (3)
  • July 2018 (1)
  • June 2018 (1)
  • May 2018 (1)
  • April 2018 (2)
  • March 2018 (2)
  • February 2018 (2)
  • January 2018 (2)
  • December 2017 (2)
  • November 2017 (2)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • September 2017 (3)
  • August 2017 (3)
  • June 2017 (2)
  • May 2017 (3)
  • April 2017 (1)
  • March 2017 (2)
  • February 2017 (1)
  • January 2017 (2)
  • December 2016 (2)
  • November 2016 (4)
  • October 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (6)
  • August 2016 (2)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • May 2016 (4)
  • April 2016 (2)
  • March 2016 (3)
  • February 2016 (4)
  • January 2016 (3)
  • December 2015 (3)
  • November 2015 (5)
  • October 2015 (5)
  • September 2015 (3)
  • August 2015 (4)
  • July 2015 (3)
  • June 2015 (3)
  • May 2015 (4)
  • April 2015 (9)
  • March 2015 (3)
  • February 2015 (2)
  • January 2015 (5)
  • December 2014 (4)
  • November 2014 (9)
  • October 2014 (2)
  • September 2014 (1)

Copyright Notice

All original text and images are copyright © Marysia Galbraith. Please contact the author before quoting.

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Uncovering Jewish Heritage
    • Join 109 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Uncovering Jewish Heritage
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...