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The sign warns the observant that the street and sidewalk may cover Jewish graves. |
The interior of the Altschul, now run by the Polish government as a Jewish museum.
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My parents, Jews, were born in Poland in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Each lost virtually their entire family to the Holocaust. I was born in the United States in 1954, one of two children of these survivors. As a young child, I knew my parents were different, but I thought those differences were due to their immigrant status and their European accents. As I grew older, I realized that the more important differences were due to their wartime legacy. I too, was different. My friends had family; grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I had only my parents and my sister. My mother, Ann Dubiner, grew up in the Kazimierz section of Krakow, Poland,which was the Jewish quarter of the City. She was born in 1922. Many of the buildings and streets of this section of Krakow remain today, largely as they did when my mother and her family lived there. Some of the structures date back to the early 15th century. What did not survive were the vast majority of the City's Jewish inhabitants. |
I was given this opportunity to explore the few remains of my mother's past because of a unique program; The March of the Living. This program takes teenagers and adults, over 5600 this year, from all over the world to Poland. Organizers feel that participants should see what remains of the Poland of the 1930s, a former haven for Jewish culture and scholarship, turned into killing fields and a graveyard for millions of innocents. Poland is followed by a week in Israel, whose rebirth was hastened by the Holocaust. It is hoped that participants will become a new generation of witnesses, insuring that this tragedy will never be repeated. Before this project, I knew little of my parents Holocaust experiences and almost nothing about their family life before the war. I wrongly assumed that Kazimierz, and indeed all other remains of Jewish existence in Poland were destroyed during the war. In preparation for this trip, I researched the history of the Jews in Kazimierz and my mother shared with me the story of her life before the war and her nightmarish existence as a slave laborer and concentration camp inmate. |