The future has begun

The airship. A musical comedy, New York, 1898

We have already seen that late 19th-century publishers, inspired by the dizzying technical development, competed with each other to present the beautiful new future in postcards, ads and magazines. Resourceful entrepreneurs, like Károly Divald and his Austrian, German or American colleagues, published entire series with views of a hundred years later from all the cities of their countries, so that it could be tangibly felt even in the smallest places: yes, this dazzling future, the crazily racing bicycles, the automobile, the tram, the funicular railway and the zeppelin will arrive exactly this way onto their small town’s main streets as well.

Arpad Schmidhammer (the illustrator of those wartime children’s books):
A street in Munich in the 20th century. Münchener Bilderbogen, 1898

Mallorca had no Károly Divald to produce a postcard with a view of Palma one century later. However, she had her Mario Verdaguer who, in his essay collection La ciudad desvanecida, “The vanished city”, published in 1953 at the twilight of his life, beautifully and sensitively evoked how this dazzling future arrived in the first years of the century on the main street of Palma, which at that time was also a little town.

Up to the main street in the port of Palma from the La Riba lighthouse, at the turn of the century

Mario Verdaguer (1885-1963) was born in Menorca, but he spent his youth in Palma. He studied law in Barcelona, and he became involved as a journalist and a translator of Thomas Mann in the lively intellectual life of pre-war Barcelona. The civil war and the subsequent repression broke his career just like that of many others. He returned to the island, where he worked for local newspapers until his death. Already before the war he wrote two books on Mallorca – La isla de oro, “The golden island”, and Un verano en Mallorca, “A summer in Mallorca” –, but it is the work he did as an old man, The vanished city, with which he definitely wrote himself into the memory of the city. This is a book that is not given to every city. It is a rare occurrence if once a while someone is able to so carefully and sensitively capture the essence of a city, like Gyula Krúdy, Iván Mándy or Endre Lábass did in Budapest (and we would be extremely curious to know who were the ones in your city), and to present the city with her own portrait. “If there is a book that talks about the eternal femininity of a city”, writes José Carlos Llop, “then this is it, the book of Mario Verdaguer, one of the most sensitive, brilliant and sophisticated spirits who has ever lived in our city.”

Invitation to the premiere of the new edition of La ciudad desvanecida, 16 Dec 2013.
“So, in this city of Palma, which counts one hundred thousand souls, a distinct
city falls on each soul. This is one hundred thousand cities altogether.”

Verdaguer’s book, although it was originally written in Spanish, was added to the bookshelf of every Palma family in the Catalan translation of another sensitive Mallorcan author, Nina Moll. The original Spanish text was published again just now, on the sixtieth anniversary of its appearance, completed with Verdaguer’s other writings on the city. The premiere of the book was a few weeks ago, and we have just received the first copy. The few chapters we will publish from it in the next days are the first translations ever made of it apart from the two languages of Mallorca.

March 1968. The cathedral of Mallorca, in front of it the Almudaina, the former palace
of the Arab caliphs, and in front of it the place of the recently demolished quarter,
which hosted the Hotel Alhambra, the Teatro Lírico, and Gaspar’s velodrome.
We will write about all these later. In their place you can now visit
the King’s Garden. Foto Archivo Josep Planas i Montanyà.

The velodrome of Gaspar

Behind this old wooden theater, the Teatro Lírico, was the velodrome of Gaspar, who was the first to ride a velocipede in all Mallorca.

Señor Gaspar brought from Barcelona the great novelty of the velocipede, and he appeared in the afternoons on the Passage of the Borne, mounted on his machine. That is, atop a huge wheel, in the center of which they directly attached the pedals, and carrying behind, as a trailer, another tiny little wheel, like the rudder of the tall engine.

The people who saw him perched on that height, were holding their breath and waiting for the fatal, inevitable, and certainly mortal fall, since it was inexplicable to all what would keep upright such a great wheel.


But Gaspar swiftly moved his legs, and he proceeded at a speed which seemed dazzling at that time.

And more than one elderly gentlemen, imbued with the naive spirit of the previous century, exclaimed in a shock to see him pass:

“What a shame to appear in such a ridiculous position before the public!”

Because, indeed, according to the rules of civility of that time, for a mature man to shake his legs like that was a complete lack of dignity.

Nowadays these devices called velocipedes, which were soon followed by the bicycle, can only be seen in some retrospective museums or in ancient lithographs. Then, however, when we ran along the narrow alley behind the wooden theater, and left behind the wall that seemed to hold the Almudaina Palace, in the adjoining esplanade we found the velodrome of Gaspar who, in a shirt with blue and white stripes and baggy pants, was riding up and down with his machine, followed by his pupils, each sitting on a similar giant wheel.

All this seemed a miracle. We felt that Gaspar and his students were revolving with the speed of the wind.

Gaspar and his velodrome. Drawing by Mario Verdaguer

When I recall this scene, I feel like looking at one of those shining colored lithographs included in the chocolate boxes of Matías López. That revolving in that small velodrome seems so distant and so absurd, that I feel it impossible, that only a half century has passed since then, and not much, much more.

And yet, Gaspar and his velocipedists, passing over the Borne, moving their legs like nervous monkeys, and wearing their shirts with blue and white stripes, are a real lithographed emblem of the first, somewhat ridiculous, somewhat sentimental, effort of my generation to adapt ourselves to the great speed which would be soon reached by mankind, and which we foresaw in some way.

Because it is clear that our generation had to readjust itself at a rapid pace and ceaselessly to the dizzying advancement of science and to the change in the material conditions of human life. For we finished elementary school in the light of a kerosene lamp, we prepared ourselves for the baccalaureate at the gas mantle, and only the dawn of our career was enlightened by electricity.

The world was transformed very quickly, and we had to swiftly move our legs and proceed speedily, like Gaspar and the velocipedists, in order to keep pace with the time, which was just running, running and running.

For centuries, man was born, lived and died at the light of the oil lamp, which I have, in fact, seen in the form of the lamp hanging in our old kitchen.

From that lamp to the airplane trip, that is, in just half of a century, have been realized all the dreams which people considered as absurd, and with whose impossible promise Jules Verne made us tremble, when in the long winter evenings, around the family table lighted with the gas mantle, we read his charming fantasies.

Velocipedist on the beach of Palma, more or less in the period described by Verdaguer,
and just a few hundred meters from the velodrome of Gaspar

Encounters

The Jews of Kolomea (Galicia) welcome Charles, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary visiting the Eastern Front on 4 August 1917

More than a year ago Andrea Deák asked us to help to interpret a postcard from a Hungarian collector of WWI Jewish relics, Gábor Izsák, on which Galician Jews greet with their Torah scroll the commander in chief of the Austro-Hungarian army. The date – 9 November 1915 – was found out by Deák Tamás on the basis of contemporary press; the historical background was provided in part by the KehilaLinks, who then also quoted us back; and the Hebraist Két Sheng, an expert of the role played by the Jews in WWI, sent us some similar photos from Erwin A. Schmiedl’s Juden in der K. (u.) K. Armee, 1788-1918 (Eisenstadt: Österreisches Jüdisches Museum, 1989). And today Kálmán Dániel drew our attention to the above photo published by Yvette Métral – another of our long-time readers – on the Yiddish Florilège, one more, hitherto unknown Galician example of the welcoming of a commander in chief with a Torah scroll. Just on this day, when – on the request of Héjoká – we have written about Kolomea concerning a very different matter. We also commented on the Florilège, which was then looked at by many of our readers. Then we asked Deák Tamás, who within a few minutes, figured out that the festive event took place on 4 August 1917. Well, río Wang is fed by such sources. Thank you all.

Update: Paweł, as if he just wanted to illustrate our closing sentence, has sent an extremely interesting addition to this photo: “I have found on the web the memoirs of some Polish families from the Kresy, among others that of the Chanias from Kolomea. Pages 23-24 have the following passage:

“In the summer of 1917 the Russian front collapsed again, and the Austrians returned to Kolomea. Before the war, in 1911-1912 Archduke Charles of Austria lived with his wife in Kolomea, serving there in the same regiment of dragoons as dr. Chania, he as a lieutenant, and Dr. Chania as a lieutenant-doctor. The two lieutenants were friends. With the return of the Austrians, Charles also came to Kolomea, this time already as an emperor. In the summer of 1917, Emperor Charles on entering Kolomea was welcomed by a delegation of the inhabitants in front of the town hall. When Krysia Chania [a daughter of the mentioned dr. Józef Chania; my comment] greeted the emperor in beautiful German, handing him over a bouquet of roses, the emperor kept this bouquet, while he put the other bouquets aside. He thanked her, and endowed her with the imperial brooch with the letter “K”. Dr. Józef gave Charles welcome in his home. The emperor spent there the evening and one night”.

Illustration of the Polish memoir: Archduke Charles as a captain of dragoons in front of his house in Kolomea, 1911-1912.

San José, Galizia

Esta foto nos la envió Héjoká por si alguno de nuestros lectores pudiera reconocer los rostros que aparecen en ella. La difundió originalmente en Facebook Szabolcs Szilágyi, de Varsovia, con el siguiente texto:

«Esta foto, que retrata a dos soldados húngaros de paisano, me la hizo llegar un investigador de la historia local polaco. Provenía del pueblo de Galizia Święty Józef (hoy pertenece a los Cárpatos ucranianos). En otoño de 1944 un destacamento de húngaros movilizados en Nyíregyháza fue estacionado allí. Dejaron esta foto de recuerdo a la familia polaca con la que se alojaron, en una casa en ulica Warszawska. Hoy nadie recuerda sus nombres. […] Por favor, háganme saber si reconocen a los jóvenes húngaros de esta foto que ya cuenta con casi 70 años».

Nosotros quisimos colaborar en la tarea añadiendo aquí un mapa de aquel pueblo, pero resultó difícil. Es más, no existe en toda Galizia ningún asentamiento llamado Święty Józef (o, en español, San José).

Si uno busca en la red polaca, pronto averigua por qué. Durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial el pueblo todavía existía, en Pokutia, región perteneciente a Polonia desde 1325 y desde 1945 a la la Ucrania soviética, una zona rodeada por las faldas de los Cárpatos al oeste, la frontera con Rumania al sur y Ucrania Bukovina al este. Las rápidas aguas del Cheremosh fluyen a través de ella desde los Cárpatos hasta el pueblo de Kuty, que dio nombre a la región y que en septiembre de 1939, durante la retirada del ejército polaco, llegó a ser capital de Polonia durante unos días. Su centro, sin embargo, es Kolomea, en otro tiempo una populosa ciudad judía y polaca, ahora una ciudad ucraniana pura.


Święty Józef se ubicaba a unos veinte kilómetros al oeste de Kolomea, como mostramos en el mapa de Google modificado abajo (proveniente de aquí). El río que corre hacia Kolomea siguiendo la carretera amarilla inferior es el Prut. Los lugares marcados desde A hasta E también fueron aldeas polacas: Św. Stanisław, Siedliska, Mołodyłów, Chorosno, Tłumaczyk.



En el mapa de Google actual Święty Józef está totalmente ausente, al igual que las otras antiguas aldeas polacas. La carretera marcada en rojo que un día cruzó el pueblo hacia la vieja Hołosków también ha desaparecido, pues ya nadie necesita de ella. Un enorme campo vacío bosteza en el lugar de la aldea, como si la tierra se la hubiera tragado. ¿Qué fue lo que pasó?

Las aldeas polacas de Pokutia, al igual que casi todos los pueblos polacos del antiguo este de Polonia, desde Volhynia al norte hasta la frontera con Rumania en el sur, estuvieron bajo constante asedio desde el inicio de la ocupación alemana. El Ejército Insurgente Ucraniano (UPA), que se constituyó originalmente como aliado de la Wehrmacht, exterminó sistemáticamente a judíos y polacos de aquellas poblaciones a fin de crear un fait accompli que ayudara a proclamar un estado ucraniano étnicamente puro. Hacia el final de la guerra habían asesinado a varios cientos de miles de judíos y polacos en el territorio de la actual Ucrania occidental. Algunas fotos hirientes sobre el genocidio pueden verse en la web y preferimos no reproducirlas aquí. En 2007 el comandante en jefe del UPA, Roman Shukevich fue declarado Héroe de Ucrania por el Presidente del país, y en el pub de la plaza principal de Lwów la nostalgia militar de aquel ejército aún goza de notable predicamento.

Actos de genocidio de la UPA en los pueblos polacos del distrito de Kolomea, 1939-1946
(el diámetro este-oeste del área es de ca. 40 km.). Los puntos negros señalan los
escenarios del genocidio, mientras que de los puntos blancos no tenemos datos.
Fuente: la página de Kolomea del sitio Ludobójstwo, que también da el
número de víctimas de cada pueblo. Abajo: la antigua iglesia católica
de Święty Józef y la cruz repuesta en su lugar tras la destrucción.

El genocidio se recrudeció a finales de 1943, cuando la UPA rompió con las fuerzas de ocupación alemanas y puso en marcha por su cuenta una guerra de liberación nacional. Esta es la razón por la que las aldeas polacas dieron una cálida bienvenida a todos los batallones húngaros llegados aquí durante el invierno de 1943-1944 para construir una frente de defensa contra el Ejército Rojo que se aproximaba a lo largo –más o menos– de la línea roja indicada en el primer mapa.

«Nuestro alojamiento es muy bueno. El doctor y yo estamos viviendo con una amable familia polaca. Nuestra anfitriona casi parece que nos lee el pensamiento y de inmediato trae la leche. Esto ya se ha convertido en fenómeno habitual, y muy agradable para nosotros; y a menudo nos preguntamos por qué la población local se comporta de un modo tan amable y atento. Hubo un pequeño pueblo donde yo tan solo estaba buscando una casa para alojarme y una anciana salió a darme una taza de leche, y no me soltó hasta que hube tomado unas cuantas tazas bien llenas. En otro lugar ya estábamos saciados de leche, mantequilla y huevos y aún cuando se despedían con lágrimas en los ojos, la niñera corría tras de mí con un tazón de cuajada».

Esto escribía el capitán húngaro Andor Salgó en su diario del 22 de abril de 1944 en Iwanowce, a orillas del Prut, a solo cinco kilómetros al sur de Święty Józef (ver el mapa de Google, arriba). Como miembro del batallón 21/I de Kassa (hoy Košice ) defendió este frente desde la primavera hasta el verano de 1944 en contra de la inicial retirada y posterior ataque de los soviéticos. Su diario es también una fuente única de información sobre los últimos meses de los pueblos polacos de esta zona.

Según Szabolcs Szilágyi el tramo frente al norte de Iwanowce, es decir, alrededor de Święty Józef, fue defendido por un cuerpo movilizado en Nyíregyháza. Según la edición de 25 de noviembre de 2013 del diario Blikk –única fuente online con información sobre este apasionante episodio de la microhistoria–, este cuerpo pertenecía al regimiento de infantería número 12 de Nyíregyháza. Dicho informe también menciona que, de acuerdo con el Departamento de Defensa, 199 soldados húngaros fueron enterrados en el cementerio militar local –y casi el mismo número aparece en el diario de Andor Salgó–. El cementerio, sin embargo, fue arrasado por el ejército soviético sin dejar ni rastro.

«Pasado Delatyn el camino ya me es familiar, pues con frecuencia he marchado por aquí desde 1941. La única diferencia es que en lugar de aquellos lugares pacíficos de entonces ahora me recibían aldeas incendiadas o profundamente devastadas, destruidas por los soviéticos al retirarse. A menudo nos encontramos con tumbas de soldados de no más de 2 o 3 días. Grandes batallas de tanques se habían librado aquí días atrás y ninguna de ellas sin muchos muertos». (Andor Salgó)

Una gran parte de los habitantes de Święty Józef y de los asentamientos polacos circundantes abandonó sus centenarias residencias junto con las tropas húngaras en retirada. Quienes quedaron iban a ser desterrados por las autoridades soviéticas en 1945, junto con la población polaca completa de la Kresy, es decir, de Polonia oriental (desde entonces: Ucrania occidental y Bielorrusia occidental). Al llegar a una Polonia mutilada tuvieron que compartir durante años el problemático destino de los otros refugiados de la Kresy, hasta que se establecieron en la Silesia alemana –otorgada por las grandes potencias a Polonia a cambio de la Kresy–. Los dos millones de habitantes alemanes de Silesia fueron, a su vez, exiliados a una mutilada Alemania donde compartieron durante años el complicado destino de los catorce millones de refugiados de los antiguos territorios orientales. Los habitantes de Święty Józef anduvieron dispersos por varios lugares pero la mayoría se estableció luego en Olbrachcice Wielkie, el antiguo Groß-Olbersdorf alemán, setenta kilómetros al sur de Wrocław, la antigua Breslau, que ahora acoge a las familias polacas exiliadas de Lwów. Y es aquí donde sus descendientes podrían haber conservado la foto entregada a sus antepasados por unos soldados húngaros de Nyíregyháza en San José de Galizia, antes de abandonar el pueblo.

Los descendientes de los antiguos habitantes de Święty Józef –al igual que los de Lwów– aún conservan bien vivo el recuerdo de su tierra natal, y publican una serie de libros y blogs. El de mejor información es Historia pamięcią pisana, «memorias de San José de Pokutia», con una serie de documentos, reconstrucciones y relatos de viajes. Las pocas familias que ahora viven en un par de casas rurales en el territorio que ocupó la antigua aldea muestran con entusiasmo a los visitantes polacos lo poco que sigue siendo visible.

La antigua calle Varsovia, mirando al norte

La antigua calle Varsovia, mirando al sur, hacia los Cárpatos

En la antigua calle Varsovia donde vivieron los anfitriones de los dos soldados de Nyíregyháza, entre el grupito de árboles a la derecha de la foto de arriba, le muestran dos cruces al autor del blog.

«Más abajo de la calle Varsovia, hacia al sur, cerca de la antigua calle de la escuela, hay algunos árboles en la acera derecha de la calle. [El ucraniano] Lubomir señala dos cruces allí en medio. Yo no sé quiénes pueden ser, dice, es poco probable que fueran polacos: ¿es posible que fueran colonos anteriores, de antes de los polacos? Las cruces fueron visitadas al parecer recientemente por alguien. Vamos más cerca. Las cruces están hechas de metal y en una de ellas hay una corona hecha de piñas y una cinta tricolor. Estos tres colores me sonaban extrañamente familiares de algún sitio. Después de un tiempo dimos con la clave: son los colores de la bandera húngara. Una de las tumbas tiene una placa que también confirma nuestra hipótesis: József Názárovics, 1921-1944, y el número del batallón: dfz. sz. 4212. 21. 0037. Estas son pues las tumbas de aquellos soldados húngaros –madziary, como mi abuelo solía decir– que durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial se estacionaron en el pueblo por un tiempo. De las historias de mi abuelo me acuerdo que cuando el frente estaba al lado de la aldea, los madziary le pidieron que llevara comida al frente. La otra tumba está sin marcas».

No sabemos si los soldados húngaros de estas tumbas tienen relación con los jóvenes de la foto, ni por qué los enterraron aquí en vez de en el cementerio militar húngaro, que estaba en algún lugar más al sur. Pero el pueblo destruido mantuvo y ha conservado hasta ahora sus tumbas, al igual que la antigua familia de la calle Varsovia guardó la foto, y que los exiliados custodian aún los recuerdos del pueblo. Toda la historia de Ucrania anterior a 1945 debe reconstruirse con estos fragmentos. Mientras todavía existan.

Una selección de fotos del desaparecido pueblo de Święty Józef tomada de los blogs Historia pamięcią pisana y Opowieści Babci Kasi, así como de la página de Facebook dedicada a la historia del lugar.

St. Joseph, Galicia

This photo was sent to us by Héjoká, to see if any of our readers would recognize the persons on it. The picture was originally shared on Facebook by Szabolcs Szilágyi from Warsaw with the following text:

“This photo, which represents two Hungarian soldiers in civilian clothes, was sent to me by a Polish researcher of local history. He received it from the Galician (today Carpathian Ukrainian) village of Święty Józef. In the autumn of 1944 a troop of Hungarians mobilized in Nyíregyháza was stationed there. They left this photo as a souvenir with the Polish family where they were quartered, in a house on ulica Warszawska. They do not know their names. … Please let me know if you recognize the two Hungarian young men in this almost 70-year-old photo.”

I wanted to promote the recognition by including a map here, but it is not so easy. In fact, no settlement called Święty Józef, that is, St. Joseph, exists in Galicia.

By searching over the Polish net, you will soon discover why. During the Second World War the village still existed in the Galician Pokutia, the region belonging since 1325 to Poland and since 1945 to the Soviet Ukraine, which is bordered by the Carpathian Mountains to the west, the Romanian border to the south, and Ukrainian Bukovina to the east. The swift water of the Cheremosh flows through it from the Carpathians to the town of Kuty, which gave name to the region, and which in September 1939, during the retreat of the Polish army, was even the capital of Poland for a few days. Its center, however, is Kolomea, once a large Jewish and Polish, now a pure Ukrainian town.


Święty Józef lay some twenty kilometers to the west of Kolomea, as it is shown on the reconstructed Google map below (from here). The river running towards Kolomea along the lower yellow road is the Prut. The places labeled with A to E were also Polish villages: Św. Stanisław, Siedliska, Mołodyłów, Chorosno, Tłumaczyk.



On today’s Google, Święty Józef is completely absent, just like the other former Polish villages. The red road once leading through it and the former Hołosków is also gone, since there is no longer a need for it. A large, empty field yawns on the site of the village, as if the earth had swallowed it. What happened to it?

The Polish villages of Pokutia, just like almost all Polish villages in the former Eastern Poland, from Volhynia in the north to the Romanian border in the south, were under continuous attack since the beginning of the German occupation. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which was originally formed as an ally of the Wehrmacht, systematically exterminated the Jews and Poles in the villages in order to to create a fait accompli for the proclamation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state. By the end of the war they had killed several hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles in the territory of today’s Western Ukraine. Several poignant photos about the genocide can be found on the web, which we prefer not to reproduce here. In 2007 the UPA’s commander in chief, Roman Shukevich was declared Hero of Ukraine by the Ukrainian President, and the army’s military nostalgia pub on the main square of Lwów still enjoys great popularity.

Acts of genocide by the UPA in the Polish villages of the Kolomea district, 1939-1946
(the east-west diameter of the area is ca. 40 km). The black dots show the scenes
of genocide, while from the villages marked in white we have no reports
of genocide. Source: the Kolomean page of the Ludobójstwo site,
which also indicates the number of victims by village. Below:
the former Catholic church of Święty Józef, and the
cross set up on its place after the destruction.

The genocide became especially bitter from late 1943, when the UPA broke with the German occupation forces, and launched on its own a war of national liberation. This is why the Polish villages gave an especially warm welcome to the Hungarian battalions arriving here during the winter of 1943-44 to build out a defense line – roughly along the red route indicated on the first map – against the approaching Red Army.

“Our accommodation is very good. The doctor and I are hosted by a gentle Polish family. Our hostess almost reads our thoughts, and immediately brings the milk. This is already an usual and very pleasant phenomenon to us, and we are often surprised why the local population is so kind and thoughtful towards us. There was a small village where I was only looking into a house in search of accommodation, and the old lady already gave me the milk mug, and did not let me go until I drank one or two full mugs. In another place we were stuffed with milk, butter and eggs, and when they said good-bye to us in tears, the nanny even ran after me with a bowl of curds.”

This was written by the Hungarian captain Andor Salgó in his diary on 22 April 1944 in Iwanowce, on the bank of the Prut, just five kilometers south of Święty Józef (see on the above Google map). As a member of the 21/I battalion of Kassa (now Košice), they defended this front from the spring until the summer of 1944 against the earlier retreating and then attacking Soviets. His diary is also a unique source concerning the last months of the local Polish villages.

According to Szabolcs Szilágyi, the front stretch to the north of Iwanowce, that is, around Święty Józef, was defended by a corps mobilized in Nyíregyháza. According to the 25 November 2013 edition of the daily Blikk – the single online source that has information on this interesting document of microhistory –, this corps belonged to the 12th infantry regiment of Nyíregyháza. This report also mentions that, according to the Department of Defense, 199 Hungarian soldiers were buried in the local military cemetery, and nearly the same number is mentioned in the diary of Andor Salgó. The cemetery, however, was destroyed by the Soviet army without a trace.

“After Delatyn the road is already familiar, as I have often marched here from 1941 on. The only difference is that instead of the then peaceful villages now I was received by largely devastated and burned villages, destroyed by the retreating Soviets. We often met 2- or 3-day-old soldiers’ graves. Large tank battles were fought here a few days ago, and it was never without many dead.” (Andor Salgó)

A large part of the inhabitants of Święty Józef and the surrounding Polish settlements left their centuries-old residences together with the retreating Hungarian troops. The remainder was exiled by the Soviet authorities in 1945 together with the complete Polish population of the Kresy, that is, Eastern Poland (since then: Western Ukraine and Western Belarus). Arriving in a truncated Poland, they shared for years the troubled fate of the other refugees from the Kresy, until they were settled down in German Silesia, which was awarded by the great powers to Poland in return for the Kresy. The two million German inhabitants of Silesia were, in their turn, exiled to the truncated Germany, where they shared for years the troubled fate of the fourteen million refugees of the former Eastern territories. The inhabitants of Święty Józef were scattered in several places, but most of them settled down in Olbrachcice Wielkie, the former German Groß-Olbersdorf, seventy kilometers south of Wrocław, the former Breslau, which now hosts the exiled Polish inhabitants of Lwów. Here their descendants may have preserved the photo given to their ancestors by the Hungarian soldiers of Nyíregyháza in the Galician St. Joseph, before the village was abandoned.

The descendants of the former residents of Święty Józef – just like those of Lwów – still preserve a vivid memory of their native land, and publish a number of books and blogs about it. The most informative one is Historia pamięcią pisana, “the memoirs of St. Joseph in Pokutia”, with a list of documents, reconstructions and travel reports. The few families now living in a couple of farmhouses in the territory of the former village eagerly show to the Polish visitors whatever is still visible.

The former Warsaw Street looking north

The former Warsaw Street looking south, towards the Carpathians

On the former Warsaw Street, where the hosts of the two soldiers of Nyíregyháza lived, at the group of trees to the right in the above photo two crosses are shown to the author of the blog.

“Further down Warsaw Street to the south, near the former School Street, some trees stand at the right side of the street. [The Ukrainian] Lubomir points two crosses between them. I don’t know who they may be, he says, it is unlikely that Poles: is it possible, that they were earlier settlers, before the Poles? The crosses were apparently recently visited by someone. We go closer. The crosses are made of metal, and on one of them, a wreath made of pinecones and a tricolor ribbon. These three colors are strangely familiar from somewhere. After a while, we recall the key of the mystery: these are the colors of the Hungarian flag. One grave also has a plaque which confirms our assumption: József Názárovics, 1921-1944, and the number of the battalion: dfz. sz. 4212. 21. 0037. These are then the graves of those Hungarian – as my grandfather used to say, madziary – soldiers, who during WWII were stationed in the village for some time. From the stories of my grandfather I remember that when the front was next to the village, the madziary asked him to bring food to the front. The other grave is unmarked.”

According to the book of György Dupka on the retaliations of the Soviet NKVD against the Hungarians and Germans in Subcarpathia from 1944 to 1946, József Názárovics came from the Hungarian Aknaszlatina (today Solotvino, Ukraine). So we do not know whether the Hungarian soldiers buried here are in any connection with the young men in the photo, nor do we know why they were buried here instead of in the Hungarian military cemetery which lay somewhere further south. But the destroyed village kept their graves, just like the former Warsaw Street family and the photo, and the exiled persons in the memories of the village. The whole pre-1945 history of the Ukraine must be reconstructed from such fragments. As long as they still exist.

A selection from the photos of the former village of Święty Józef, from the blogs Historia pamięcią pisana and Opowieści Babci Kasi, as well as the Facebook page dedicated to the history of the village

Viewer

As people dealing with images, we have always wanted to illustrate the posts of río Wang with plenty of images. However, it was not easy to figure out how we could do this the best. Our old readers may recall how the initial modest number of two or three illustrations slowly increased into galleries of forty or fifty pictures. These, however, slowed down the display and made difficult the overview of the post.

We have gradually developed that characteristic solution of río Wang, where dozens of images were composed into one mosaic, and the pictures appeared in pop-up windows when moving the mouse over the mosaic tiles. There are many reasons why we have loved this solution. We could illustrate the post with a large number of pictures – the record holder, I think, was the Jewish cemetery of Lesko with its nearly three hundred photos – without significantly slowing the download. The images held together in one mosaic did not push apart the paragraphs to a great extent, making it more pleasant to follow along. You could browse at your discretion among the images, and discover the connections. But we loved it most because in the mosaic tiles we could emphasize such meaningful details, which were often overshadowed in the original images. Thus we could create interesting connections between the expectations formed on the basis of the details and the full image displayed in the pop-up window, which have also affected the interpretation of the images. And last but not least, the richness and context of the mosaic composition often made excusable even the weaker images.

It was due to the technical problems of the pop-up windows – occasional flickering, poor positioning – and to the requests of our readers that we began to experiment with new solutions. This was doubly the merit of Lloyd who, first as a linguist reads also the commentaries of the Hungarian version of the blog, and thus found Gábor’s request to convert the mosaic into a scrollable gallery, and second as an informatician undertook to realize it. And also the merit of our readers, who with their commentaries helped the development of the final version.

From now on, if you move the mouse over the mosaic, the usual small images are displayed in pop-up windows, and if you click on it, you can scroll through a gallery of large images. This version retains the advantages of the previous solution, but corrects its technical problems. At the same time it enables you to view the images enlarged to full screen when leafing through the gallery. In this case, the pictures download a bit slowly, the reason for which is that we always upload them in their original size (at least our own photos), so that everyone can freely use them according to the Creative Commons (BY-NC) rules. A serious drawback of this solution is that in this large size the imperfections of our photos are more conspicuous as well. On this problem we are still working :)

The Day After

(At Gábor’s request we have used in this post a new way of display images, developed by Lloyd. Now the images appear by clicking on the mosaic tiles, and you can browse through the gallery by clicking on the left-right arrows, or simply on the images. We are looking forward to your opinion on which method you prefer, this, or the hitherto used one, which you can see for example in yesterday’s post.)