In Jonathan Safran Foer’s acclaimed book and movie Everything is illuminated, a small Odessa travel agency, a family-run company operating with one trabant undertakes the task of leading American Jews, searching for their Galician roots, to the former shtetls of their grandparents. The trabant, starting at the Lviv train station, soon turns off the highway onto a dirt road. From then on, a series of absurd misadventures follow one another until we reach the place where everything is illuminated.
The movie (directed by Liev Schreiber, 2005, see here) has always been a paradigm for the travels of río Wang, during which we leave behind the beaten path and seek encounters with the marvels of the East, the hidden small towns, the forgotten stories. But this is the first time we organize a journey in the same region where the film takes place, the former Jewish shtetls of the Ukraine. For many years we have roamed about this region, many times we have written about it, and we have organized a few tours to its western half, Polish Galicia. Now it is time to open up the Jewish world of Eastern Galicia, the “deep Galicia”, the birthplace of Joseph Roth, Bruno Schulz, Agnon and Paul Celan. Perhaps for the first time ever in this still recently isolated and less known country.
The film also has something more to teach. Due to our cultural conventions, we distinguish between sublime and tragic ruins. We consider the vanishing sites of past life either as messengers of a rich history, or of a tragedy. At the sight of the former, like Roman monuments, we think about the life that once took place there. At the latter, of the tragedy that brought an end to this life. The surviving relics of Eastern European Jewish shtetls, the cemeteries, the synagogues, the Jewish streets are clearly allotted in the latter group. Nevertheless, much more important than their destruction is the life which thrived here for centuries, which lives on in many forms, of which we are heirs. And which can be revived. Just as the film’s Trachimbrod is not only the stone erected in place of the destroyed shtetl, but also the house where all its memories are collected and where the former life vividly lives on. By traveling around the shtetls of Eastern Galicia, we also want to make this life visible again.
Ukraine is a large country, almost inconceivably large to us. The settlements are far apart, we will travel long hours in the gently rolling landscape, between endless wheat fields and forests, and along large rivers, just like in the film. This journey from shtetl to shtetl is part of the experiencing. It helps to understand the importance the small inhabited places in an uninhabited region, the weight of the distances, which the merchant and the traveler had to cover, when carrying wood from Verkhovina to Czernowitz or wine from Tokaj to Bolechów. Along the way, we will only stop at some prominent places, where enough sights have been preserved. However, all along the journey we will also hear stories about the other shtetls, where there is nothing to see any more, but which once were living links in the large net of Jewish settlements stretching from Pskov to Sighetu Marmației.
The tour lasts from 20 to 26 August, Saturday to Thursady. The participation fee is 400 euro, which includes accommodation (the half of a double room, with breakfast), the bus and the guide. You can register at wang@studiolum.com.
Paul Cantelon: Odessa Medley The travel motif of the movie Az Everything is illuminated (2005)
Day 1. Budapest – Yasinia
In the afternoon we arrive to Yasinia, the ancient border of the Hungarian Kingdom, in whose railway station in July and August 1941, seventy-five years ago, the Hungarian authorities handed over twenty thousand “stateless” Jews to the German authorities in the frames of an immigration procedure. Along the way, we will visit the still working synagogue of Hust, will have at the center of Europe, and will travel along the Beregovo-Yasinia railway line, which has been dead for half a century. That day or the next morning we will walk up in the hills abov the town, to the Jewish cemetery.
“Kőrösmező [Yasinia]. Rafter’s prayer on the arrival of dam water”, from here
Day 2. Yasinia – Czernowitz
After crossing the Yablonka Pass, we travel through Verkhovina, the land of the Hutsuls, whose central town, Kolomea was once a major city of the Galician Jews. At the border between Galicia and Bukovina, we stop at the beautiful cemeteries of Kuty and Vizhnitsa – important Hasidic communities –, and then reach Czernowitz, the “Jerusalem along the Prut”, the most Jewish city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We walk aroun the city, and go out to Sadagóra, to the palace of the Tsaddik of Ruzhin.
“Reb Burech drinks toast” on the stage of the Jewish theater of Czernowitz, from here
Day 3. Czernowitz – Tarnopol
Along a winding road, through many important shtetls we reach Tarnopol, the other center of the Galician Jews. We stop, among others, in Czortków, the cradle of the Hasidim of Teleki tér in Budapest, in Buczacz, the birthplace of Nobel Prize winner Agnon, and the Freud family, in Halich, with a still existing Galician Karaite population, and in Rohatyn, the birthplace of the wife of Great Suleiman, Roxana.
Klezmer musicians of Rohatyn, mainly the Faust family, 1912
Day 4. Tarnopol – Lemberg
We travel to the north, parallel to the eastern border of Galicia and the Monarchy. We stop in Brody, one of the most important trading cities and the Galician center of Jewish Enlightenment, from where Joseph Roth and the Bródy family of important Hungarian writers come. Here we turn back to the west, in the direction of Lemberg. In addition to the shtetls, we visit Podkamień, one of the most important Polish pilgrimage monasteries, and to the royal castle of Olesko as well. In the afternoon we have a walk in the center of Lemberg.
The border of the Monarchy and Russia at Brody, 1910
Day 5. Lemberg
A full-day sightseeing in Lemberg: Jewish and Armenian neighborhoods, Renaissance main square, Art Nouveau suburb, the “Krakauer Vorstadt”, the Jewish slum. This day begins the Lviv summer music festival, which previously was a Klezmer festival, but from this year is extended into a world music festival.
On the market of Lemberg, 1910
Day 6. Lemberg – Budapest
Along the way home, we stop in Drohobycz, Bruno Schulz’s birthplace, which at the turn of the century became a beautiful Art Nouveau small town from the wealth of the Galician oil fields, as well as in Bolechów, the Galician centre of Tokaj wine trade. Here, in the beautiful Hasidic cemetery lays Rabbi Ber Dov of Bolechów, who in the 18th century was one of the most important links between the Jews of Galicia and Hungary. Our Galician shtetl tour ends with the visit of his grave.
Hasidic rabbi and his followers in the Carlsbad spa, 1930’s
The beginnings of aerial photography. Kolomea, Galicia, 1916. Los inicios de la fotografía aérea. Kolomea, Galizia, 1916.
The beginnings of aerial bombardment. Kolomea, Galicia, 1916
The First World War as the first technical revolution of the twentieth century. “The war that started with horses and ended with tanks,” as they say. In fact, with airplanes, if you look at the continuation, where the pilots of Trieste joining the Poles stopped Budyonny’s Red Cavalry.
La Primera Guerra Mundial como primera revolución técnica del siglo veinte. «La guerra que empezó con caballos y acabó con tanques», se dice. De hecho, con aviones, si se atiende a la continuación, cuando los pilotos de Trieste junto con los polacos detuvieron a la Caballería Roja de Budyonny.
A double-decker, with bellows camera, hand-released bomb. Kolomea, the chief town of the Hutsul land, 1916. From the Cтapi фoтo Cтaниcлaвoвa site. Who knows more about it?
Un biplano, con cámara de fuelle, bomba de lanzamiento manual. Kolomea, principal ciudad del territorio hutsul, 1916. De Cтapi фoтo Cтaниcлaвoвa site. ¿Alguien sabe más de estas imágenes?
The pious maysele says that when Rabbi Elimelech of Leżajsk, the greatest tsaddik of his age, was asked by his Hasidic followers whether the Messiah to come would be Hasidic or mitnaged, the opponent of Hasidism, the Rabbi, after a brief hesitation, said that he would be an opponent. But Rabbi, how can the Eternal One afford this? asked the startled believers. Well, said the Rabbi, if he were a Hasid, the opponents would not believe in him. But the faith of the Hasids is so infinitely large, that they will believe in him anyway, whoever he may be.
Leżajsk, at the tomb of Rabbi Elimelech. Photo by Adam Krzykwa
The Hasidim have long since disappeared from Poland. But the memory of their infinitely large faith is still kept alive in two places, by two small neighboring towns, which we will visit as the cradle of Galician Hasidism during our tour next year: Leżajsk and Łańcut.
Leżajsk, at the tomb of Rabbi Elimelech. Photo by Adam Krzykwa
When Baal Shem Tov, may his memory be blessed, returned his soul to his Creator in the Podolian Mezhibozh, where his tomb is still revered, the heir of his teachings, Maggid Dov Ber transferred his seat to Mezerich, in the northern part of present-day Ukraine. Here he founded the “holy company” of his disciples, whose task it was to establish the teachings of Hasidism in the western part of Poland, later Galicia, also.
Leżajsk, tomb of Rabbi Elimelech
The greatest of the disciples, Elimelech, after the death of his master, settled in the little town of Leżajsk – in Yiddish, Lizhensk –, to the south of Lublin, with the result being that this shtetl became the first major center of Hasidism in Poland. A number of institutions, which are today inextricably linked to Hasidism, have their origin here. Here, the Rabbi wrote his Torah commentary entitled Noam Elimelech, which was the first to explain the task of the tsaddik as a spiritual leader who elevates his community to God and guides it in this world. Here he founded the first “tsaddik court”, maintained by the gifts of his followers. Here emerged the custom of the kvitli enclosed with the donations, the slip of paper listing the physical and spiritual problems of the believers, who awaited their resolution from the rabbi. These slips are still today placed by the Hasidim, full of hope, on the tombs of the great tsaddiks. And here is still revered the grave of Elimelech, to which thousands of people make pilgrimage from all over the world, not just on the anniversary of his death, on the 21th day of the month Adar, but every day of the year, offering their kvitlis with “infinitely large faith” to the benevolence of the tsaddik.
Photos by Adam Krzykwa
The disciple of Elimelech, Rabbi Jacob, the other major early tsaddik, the future “Seer of Lublin”, started his activity next to his master, in the neighboring town of Łańcut. In the late 18th century, the Hasidic community of Łańcut lived its heyday under the protection of the Lubomirski Princes, with whose permission and support they built, right next to the Ducal Palace, one of the most beautiful synagogues of Poland. The synagogue belongs to that Baroque building type often called the “Polish synagogue”, whose examples also exist outside of Poland – e.g. in the Slovakian Bártfa/Bardejov, the Hungarian Mád, or the Moravian Nikolsburg/Mikulov –, and whose ceiling is divided by the four massive stone colums of the central bima into nine vaulted sections, thus giving a spacious and majestic impression even in a relatively small space.
But the specialty and stunning effect of the synagogue of Łańcut comes not only from this, but primarily from the fact, that the images of the naive and folkloric world of the medieval Jewish manuscripts and Baroque Hasidic tombstones move into the building and take possession of the entire interior of the synagogue. The walls, the façade of the bima, and the ceiling are entwined with a lavish, lush vitality by the stucco ornamentation, painted in vivid colors, in whose open fields deers, lions, birds, wonderful fish-bodied and deer-headed creatures, biblical scenes and symbols, stars and the signs of the zodiac make the building mystic and broaden its universal dimensions, fascinating the simple Hasid with the impression of such richness, that he had never met in his life.
It is said, that when Rabbi Elimelech stood before the Heavenly Judge, he said with humbly bowed head: “I did not pray and did not study the Torah”. So the judgment said: “Well, then to hell with you.” But the angels raised Elimelech, and took him to heaven, according to his merits. When Elimelech lifted his eyes, he exclaimed: “How merciful is the Eternal One, and how beautiful heaven can be, if already hell is like this!” This is what the simple Hasid might have felt, when upon entering into the synagogue of Łańcut, lifting his eyes.
In the first edition of Rabbi Elimelech’s main work Noam Elimelech, small stars can be seen above certain words, which, according to the commentators, suggest some hidden meaning. But according to the Rebbe of Klausenburg, Yekutiel Yehudah, the situation is reversed, and “the stars of the sky are the comments to the stars of Noam Elimelech”. And you can see this in the synagogue of Łańcut.
In 1935, when Stalin sarcastically inquired of Pierre Laval how many divisions the Pope had, he apparently did not much estimate “those legions”, as Churchill puts it in his coverage of the event, “who are not always visible on parade”. True, in 1941 he revised his position, when, after the German offensive, he made an alliance with the hitherto oppressed Russian Orthodox Church, in the hope of using the divisions it mobilized.
Nicholas II, however, from the outset had a wider horizon than the Red Tsar, and he knew well that the world war is fought not only on land, on water and in the air, but also on a transcendental level. It is therefore not surprising, that – as Pesti Napló reported exactly a hundred years ago, on 20 September 1914 – he considered it necessary to monopolize for the purposes of the Russian army the metaphysical resources of occupied Galicia:
“The oppressed Russian Jews, afflicted with so many pogroms, are today quite courted in the Tsar’s country. The government embraces the beloved Russian Jews. As to how sincere this hug is, is demonstrated by the Russian decree sent from Petrograd to the Russian governorships before the great Jewish feasts. The ukase strictly instructed the governorships to control the prayers of the Jews in the synagogues. The governorship authorities send functionaries to each Jewish temple and prayer house, and they pay careful attention that on the two major holidays the believers pray for the Tsar and the victory of the Russian army. The governorships already ordered the prayer books of the Jewish subjects to be presented for revision, and the Jewish communities made sure that the representatives of the authority will receive prestigious seats in the temples.”
The two major holidays, Rosh Hashanah, “the head of the year”, that is, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, fell on 20 and 29 September in 1914. It is reassuring to know, that on these days the functionaries and representatives of the Russian authorities certainly fulfilled their religious obligations, if they were Jews, and if not, then spent the holy days in the best place, which hopefully had a good effect on the growth of their personal piety.
However, war is war, and military movements require rapid responses. On the same day the Tolnai világlapja published a short report, which demonstrates not only with mere words, but also with an objective and irrefutable photographic recording, that the Galician Jews unambiguously pray for the victory of our weapons.
“They, who pray for our victory. Nobody desires more the downfall of the Russian army than the Galician Jews. They know well the fate that would await them if they fell under the yoke of Russian despotism and religious bigotry. In every community of Galicia, the religious Jews fast and daily call upon God to help the Hungarian-Austrian and German weapons to victory. These religious Jews counterbalance the nefarious machinations of the spies bought with Russian money, and also in all other respects they favored our valiant army.”
“Your co-religionists have suffered a great deal because of their patriotism under Russian rule. The Jewish population is very patriotic. We will never forget it. Speech of Charles IV in Czernowitz.” Visual commentary of the Kötődések / The Ties research project to our post.
However, the Lord of Hosts is unbiased, and His intentions are unfathomable. The land of the shtetls was reoccupied in the following spring from the Russians by the Austrians, then by the Ukrainian Republic, then by the Red Cavalry, then by the Poles, the Soviets, the Wehrmacht, Bander, and the Red Army. So that one thing became sure, exactly the one which was sworn by the Lord of Hosts to the ears of Isaiah:
“These houses will collapse, all will be desolate, the palaces will remain without inhabitant.”
Galician Jewish and Hutsul family. Early 20th-c. photos by city photographer Edward Janusz on the wall of the café established in his former studio on the main square, Rzeszów, Galicia
Along the way back home on the bus, when we traditionally summarize our most important impressions of the tour, this time almost everyone mentioned something he or she did not see. Something that does not exist. An absence. That something was there, of which we have heard stories, whose traces are still palpable, and which is clearly now missing. A mosaic of languages and cultures living side by side, shtetls and villages, churches and synagogues, whose places are now covered with concrete or overgrown by the woods. Neighborhoods, whose current residents do not know who lived there two generations ago. Whole regions where nobody speaks the languages which half a century ago were the most spoken there. Galicia, this beautiful province now divided between two countries, once must have been incredibly rich if so many things could perish there.
Bełżec, the emblematic place of destruction. The camp, first set up for Polish forced laborers to strengthen the Nazi-Soviet border established in 1939, then became the extermination camp for the Galician Jews, the Eastern Auschwitz. The territory, not so large, is encircled with iron letters, the place names in alphabetical order, for whose inhabitants this was the last landscape they saw from Galicia. An encyclopedia of destruction. I walk along them, I read them, I know almost all of them. But I am reminded by them of what was left. Bolechów, the beautiful carvings of the Hasidic cemetery, and the Rusyn farmer, Zenon, who is “rich enough to keep it in order at his own cost”. Brody, the Jewish high school and the Brody synagogue in Odessa, the springboard of the Haskalah, the enlightenment in Russia. Buczacz, the house where the Nobel laureate Agnon was born, the Ukrainian librarian who proudly shows me the Agnon collection of the local library, the black tombstones marching along the dusty white road, including the tomb of the Freud family, and the Polish lawyer who took me up there, and whose parents had not dared to teach him his own mother tongue. An encyclopedia of memory. A network of sites which can be rambled again, their stories heard, their history learned. A world, which can be made alive again. This is what we try to do with these tours and this blog.
Studiolum
Arva beata
a brief summary for Tamás Sajó
I expected a study tour, and I walked into a deep sleep. Because we looked at what there is no longer, looking through what is already there, and this led to draped and layered visual experiences. We had to blink. What does it mean, to see? I did not really pay attention to the postmodern/postcapitalistic – obviously well-to-do – Poland, I mean, what I perceived of it was not disturbing, I could see through it into the past, even into the most remote past. We had to look, or almost stumble, into the invisible, following the instructions of our guide.
For me, the dream trip started at the fortress of Árva/Orava, under heavy clouds, which we could almost feel on our bare shoulders. And yes, this perceptibility was the key to this special journey. In fact, knowledge is just dead letter, but if sometime, somewhere a spark lights up in it – a kind of a sensus, synesthesia –, then it wakes up, and this is how the special phenomenon of the twilight, which makes visible the invisible, will come to life. This is more than just an experience. It excites you more, it stimulates you to further digging and dream work.
History is inside the present. Usually it is not that visible, it is covered by the familiar billboards, the sound barriers, the housing estates. In representative buildings and monuments it does not appear even upon special request, and you cannot easily call it forth from photos, either. Now I do not speak about “cultural memory”, and the learning of historical facts, but about another kind of cognition, to which this journey brought us. In such occasions, a “communicating vessel” opens up in you, and tiny springs of history will arise in you. For example, when such city squares, as those of Sandomierz or Zamość, unfold before you, then a dizzying moment may come when you will be greeted by the idea of the Renaissance “ideal town”. (By the way, we have already no idea about the ideas.) Or when the rough pairing of clods of tufa and curved iron bars tells you in the desert, what a terrible negative miracle is the destruction in a concentration camp, and asks you what it feels to be a slag heap.
They reached every place – I repeat this obsessively after Kazimierz. In Tarnów this dream idea, this vision of the kind of a probably very calculated deluge became quite clear. This is what the little angels sitting on the top of the City Hotel of Tarnów trumpet to the world, while cute brats play footbal around the ruins of the synagogue. The preserved one, I have to insert the adjective, because this is already a keyword, perhaps in Poland, it is.
There are other kind of beings beyond the humans, elves, angels, demons, real, ugly devils. The guardians of the synagogues of Lańcut and Bártfa/Bardejov must belong to a class of the angels. As much evil is trapped in the tufa soil, so much lightness is freed by the colors and melodies of the old Hasidic piety. A balance oscillated during this journey, in one pan there was the tufa (I cannot escape it), and in the other, the beetrot soup in the gilt-edged bowl, the deer-mermaid and the relaxing little cows…
In the first photo I took, the castle of Árva/Orava looms, and I was amused when, already at home, I read the black pun of King Matthias: “Arva fuisti, arva eris et in Arva morieris” (you were árva [stupid], you are árva, and in Árva you will die), he thundered supposedly against the archbishop of Kalocsa, when having him locked up. My last photo shows, interestingly, a stone angel in Kassa/Košice, turning its back to us.
Each time we entered a church or a synagogue, I told myself: stop! You are just a tourist grazing her eyes, and must know that other people were present here fearing and worshiping God. The difference is unfathomable.
Back home, my first trip led to the public cemetery of Kőbánya, in the industrial outskirts of Budapest. My husband is buried there. The grave is an unbearable site: the arva beata (the site of the blessed) is not what you dig in a public cemetery, planting pansies on it. We have now been to so many cemeteries, in beautiful places, in wonderful places. I do not know how this transformation is done, I do not attribute it to time. It must have another secret, perhaps the original peace of these Hasidic cemeteries, and the reign of the vegetation. The fear of God? I do not know. The moss, the fern, the clover in the cemetery of Lesko competes with the stones, and this fills the wooded hillside with a special tension in the bosom of peace.
Returning to the beginning – as we had a round trip –: the little naive cemetery statue is pondering, scratching his head in front of the elaborate cross, it can withstand the acid rain for long, in Galicia all is resplendent in green.
Viktória Radics
Galicia, Poland
I did not intend to write a travelogue, I only have a few notes, mainly about the hustle and bustle of the feast of Our Lady in Zamość, children taking communion, sky-blue Virgins decorated with ribbons, the parade of the brand new Polish tanks, into whose narrow cabins little children were crawling; the obvious accessories of a renewed fear of the Russians. In Zamość we also found the birthplace of Rosa Luxemburg under the arches, while touching the thick Renaissance walls. Now, when I got home, I pulled out the book of Stanisław Vincenz, Encounters with Hasids. I wanted to follow a few Hasidic biographies, from West to East, from the plains towards Podolia, then up to the Carpathians, through the territory of present-day Ukraine. Instead, I am at the shores of the Danube, coming from Belz to Verőce, a village along the river, just like Vincenz during the war:
“When we lived as refugees in Hungary, I met a Hungarian-born young Hasid, who studied for a few years in Poland at the famous Rabbi Rokach in Belz. We met in very different circumstances, first when I twice crossed the border, and then a few years later, in 1944, when the Germans invaded Hungary. At that time my acquaintance already had no house, because the greatest part of his family had been deported to Auschwitz, and he was hiding in Budapest as a Polish refugee, this is how he survived the war. (…) He did not lose his naive confidence in the spiritual hierarchy, he believed that spiritual forces control the world, and that this is also well known “on the other side”. When I told him, as an objection, that “on the other side” they also have – for now at least – something to say, he smiled with a discreet irony, slightly embarrassed, and I read a forgiving knowledge on his face.” (Eches and remembrances)
Dom Stanisława Vincenza w Bystrecu pod Czarnohorą (druga od prawej Irena Vincenz) – 1939 rok – foto T. Wilczyński // Stanislaw Vincenz in Bystrec under Mount Czarnahora (the second from right is Irena Vincenz) – 1939 – photo by T. Wilczynski
I am looking at photos of cemeteries, my eyes are scanning the trees of a dense stone forest. Bent backs of people, stones huddling together from fear in the shade. Its mysterious message is a living memory, as the moss patches take shape on the tombstones, but the eternal life of the stone is also an imprint of eternal death. I am arrangling them like the pieces of a puzzle: I join one from the Sephardic synagogue of Lesko to another from Bártfa/Bardejov. A stork, reeds, fringes and knots. A hand, fingers, a candle holder, Torah sounds, a murmur. I spread the Hasidic hilltop cemetery of Lesko on the screen. I add another one: the portraits from the cemetery of Czernowitz, where I was for the first time ten years ago. Then the cemetery in Kozma Street, Budapest, where we were looking for the grave of Zsuzsa Beney. Finally, a gravedigger showed it to us, we had lost our way among so many parcels covered with ivy and vines. Zsuzsa died in Leányfalu in a summer storm. Vincenz survived the war in the neighboring Verőce, along the Danube. He arrived in 1939 from Galicia to this “idyllic, quiet, secret landscape”, escaping across Mount Czarnahora, and he never returned home. He wrote surprisingly kind and warm descriptions about the Danube, he considered it a “state-founding” river, a peculiar natural accessory to civilization. He appreciated the landscape of the Danube bend, but he also called it an awesome military foothold, the background of Eastern European genocides. How much a beautiful landscape can kill, I add. And killing cannot be just erased later, in vain they blow, they burn things down, they build industry, factories, labor colonies, they convert synagogues into cinemas and mikves into paint shops. The stronger the effort to erase it, the more visible the past remains.
When the cemeteries come together in my head, I stand at the Danube again. In Tahitótfalu, we went to the tombs with the children last fall, on a September day. We found a small wooden gate, some wire, we did not have to particularly force it. In Lesko, a yellow-mustached smoking Pole let us in, who angrily scolded the tourist coming behind us, probably he did not want to pay in advance for the sight. Now I string the memories together, Galicia, Bukovina, Hasids and the gravel sediment of the Danube, the brown, muddy water and the lush aspen trees … graves, stones, the moss-green inertia of bending and submerging human figures, playful, cheerful, gentle lions (lovely, naive decorations), the reserved, tense and grim calmness of the cemetery. This is the nothing, the naive tale of what there was and what there is not: the disappearing of the nobody. It is strange, when a cemetery has such a clean aesthetic, and no reality. But in such cases reality usually bites more roughly and harder.
Noémi Kiss
Polin
The Ukrainian Harmonia Quartet (here with only three members) plays Mozart’s Turkish March.
Natalie
Galícia
When I heard “Galicia”, I imagined a dark, poor, backward countryside.
When now I hear “Galicia”, I see bright green pastures, forests, cultivated lands, beautiful gardens – in places without fences! –, mountains and valleys, rushing mountain rivers and enchanting cities. With the main square in the middle, which is also a marketplace, small fabulous Renaissance palaces around, some narrow alleys, a Catholic church, a synagogue, Catholic cemetery, Hasid cemetery – all is clean, well-kept, idyllic.
And behind the idyll, there is also the darkest hell. In Bełżec, in Lublin, the Lemko ghost village, everywhere in Galicia I felt with Mihály Vörösmarty, that “man is painful to the earth… the human race is sowing the dragon’s teeth… there is no hope, no hope.”
If I nevertheless want to hold on to something, I can recall some just people – the Slovak uncle in Bártfa/Bardejov, who proudly says that “I’m the only Lutheran Jew in the world”, and he does not just preserve the keys of the synagogues entrusted to him, but he also tries to resurrect the disappeared world. The Polish man who accompanies the 86-year old uncle coming home every year from New York, helps him, supports him, and writes his story instead of him, how he was deported as a young boy, and how he survived together with only a few other boys in Theresienstadt. And Bartosz, the young Polish man, who guided us in the alternative theater of Lublin, and told us about the fantastic work, with which they attempt the impossible – to resurrect a city which was canceled from the face of the earth and its inhabitants, and to reconcile the people.
Dorka
Green and black
Lloyd Dunn
Poland is beautiful
Galicia, recalled as an old, battered opaque black-and-white photo, is a colorful and living landscape in Central Europe.
“Poland is beautiful.” Poster and film of the Bogaczewicz agency
This trip, which touched so many historical sites which recalled destruction and horrors, to me, as a historian, nevertheless spoke about life and the encounter with good people. This beautiful land, which in these few days only partly showed us its gray and muddy countrysides, was dominated by the sunlight, the harsh colors of blue, green and yellow. The magnificent castles, old towns and fortresses, which, due to the Turkish invasion, are almost completely missing in Hungary, followed each other in a beautiful harmony.
Southern Poland is fascinating. The beautiful Polish girls, the superb cuisine, the excellent beer refresh the body and the mind, and offer perfect relaxation. We have experienced all the signs of the traditional Polish-Hungarian friendship: the eyes light up, the smiles are sincerely kind, when they hear the name of Hungary. Memories of Budapest and Balaton pop up, and they repeat with cheerful energy: “Hungarian and Polish, two friends, kerek sepen egy pohar sert [a glass of beer, please!]”
The kindness and the smile becomes more reserved, and in some places missing, only to the East, along the Ukrainian border. I do not know whether this has always been so and would always remain so, or if it is only caused by the dark storm clouds gathering beyond the border now, in the summer of 2014. In any case, these clouds are a reminder, which is considered not the past, but a dangerous present in this region. In Przemyśl there is even a building recalling this.
A piece of the Molotov fortification system next to Hotel Academia
The encounters are joyful, unforgettable. We can see Wojtek again for a few seconds, who works even on the feast of the Assumption, leading a group in Zamość.
Bartosz, the guide of the Teatr NN in Lublin, who does us what Timothy Snyder calls the basic task of the historian: to make human again those who were degraded into numbers by the Nazis.
Henryk Żytomierski, the disappeared little boy in Lublin. He is still remembered, and they regularly send letters to him.
The painter Mirosław, the double of Robin Williams, restorer, guide and multifunctional all-rounder of the synagogue of Lańcut impresses us with his Hebrew and beautiful Polish speech, makes us stay longer in the wonderful synagogue.
Uncle Cyril, the polyhistor of the synagogue of Bártfa/Bardejov tells us in his ornate Slovak and erratic, but still very friendly Hungarian a lot of simple, and incredibly adventurous stories. He, the “Lutheran Jew”, who was once “more famous than the American President”, is a living example of how much can be done and preserved even by one single person, because a great love of things and persons diminishes and makes any effort easier.
I repeat, Galicia in many ways lives in the public imagination as the region of destruction, greyness and poverty. However, I think that this might be right only for the misguided twentieth century. After all, it is not possible, that when the Jews in Bobowa started to bury their dead in the cemetery on the hilltop, they would have been reminded of death and destruction by the wonderful sight unfolding in front of them – much more, of life.
Tamás Deák
Poland
Anna & József
Remembering Galicia
Lublin, view of the castle from the Gródzka Gate, with the Jewish quarter in the foreground. Photo by Jan Bułhak (1876–1950) from the 1920-30s (for the article of Teatr NN on Bułhak, see here)
Lublin, view of the castle from the Gródzka Gate today
Andy Statman & David Grisman: Shomer Yisrael. From the album Songs of Our Fathers (1995)
A garland of Renaissance main squares from Kraków to Nowy Sącz, with the traces of another world in between them. Along the way, one term comes to mind again and again, which was coined by the French historiography in the 1980s, and which then gave birth to a whole trend (but this is absolutely not important now): lieux de mémoire, the sites of memory. Not as if this would not fit to our earlier trips, or to the greatest part of río Wang in general, but the former Galicia seems to be one of the main concentrations of the sites of memory, where 20th-century history is in a specially sharp contrast to the beautiful landscape. The ghost signs in Kraków, the Jewish cemeteries of Bobowa and Lesko (with tombstones in the path, some of them barely sticks out of the mud). The repetitive chain of place names, like a prayer, running around the monument of Bełżec, starting and ending with the properly chosen biblical verse, which is at the same time general, and, knowing the history of this place, very specific: “Earth, do not cover my blood…” (Job 16:18). The emptiness of the parking lot in Lublin (with the lantern at its entrance) and the NN theater-museum established at the Gródzka Gate – the term nomen nescio will never mean the same again.
A densely thicket of trees, not far from the road, somewhere in the Low Beskids, only one or two kilometers from the village. In the surrounding fields and in the houses across the stream, life quietly goes on. Moving closer, a building emerges from the trees: a church, a bell tower, less than a dozen tombstones – that’s all that’s left of the Lemko village of Królik Wołoski, emptied by the soldiers of the Polish People’s Army in 1947, during Operation Vistula. Today the situation is perhaps somewhat more encouraging: the former inhabitants or their descendants apparently try to preserve the memory of Lemkivshchyna:music groups,their own radio broadcasts, and several great websites reflect the survival of the Lemko traditions. The former villages partly became pilgrimage places, and the church of Królik Wołoski received a new door and some new windows only last year. An information board nailed on a tree tells about the history of the former village – all are signs that someone cares about the place.
Królik Wołoski in a video made last spring, still without a church door. The information board, however, when compared to this video of November 2011 (?), seems to incessantly change places. A beautiful spherical panoramic image on the interior of the now closed church can be seen here.
Lublin, Bełżec, Lesko (and of course the Lemko ghost village) both separately and together, not only recalled the past and reminded us, forced us to remember it, but also made present and palpable the non-existing, the missing, the absence. It was not the past in itself, which was essential, but our relationship to it, or more precisely: that we were forced to have a relationship to it. The plural first person includes also today’s Polish environment, which is important, I mean, that they also want to remember and to feel the absence. (Let us have no illusions, this is probably only a small part of society there, too).
The NN Theater in Lublin: the empathy of the sympathetic young man in his thirties, free from all pathos, as he tells us how they discovered a world also for themselves, about which they did not know anything, and which from that moment on became a part of their real life. It became filled with houses, objects, and most importantly with people. With people who were reduced to ashes – and now they are living. Mystery.
Bełżec: I agree with Zsolt, you had to roam about it alone. I managed to do it, because while the group was listening to the explanation of Tamás, I set out alone on the corridor leading always deeper between the towering walls. The sight of the stones and clods burnt gray and porous, with the metal pieces burnt into them in some places, as well as the pressure of the rising walls, in itself has an impression on the visitor, but there was something else: my footsteps rang. The void, the loneliness. (When I came back, there were already more people on the corridor, and nothing was heard.) The pebbles of the remembering mourning on a few stones, and the first plants here and there among the clods – life.
The Hasidic cemetery of Lesko: some incredible beauty and solace – and, strangely, a sense of security: the harmony of the landscape, of the past, of remembrance. In the center, me, who experience all this.
András
Galician roots
Here is the portrait of our great-grandfather Avraham Moshe Schwarz, born in 1864, and died in 1944 in Haifa. He had a liquor store in Przemyśl. The photo was taken by his son David, who was a professional photographer.
Our trip in the wake of the Galician shtetls was a great experience. Still there swirl in my head the images of the revamped, harmonious little towns, the landscapes surrounded by pine forests and cared-for meadows, the amazing Renaissance synagogues, the cemeteries! And to all this, the unique, broad knowledge, with which you spoiled us, Tamás! Thank you.
Edit
Apologies
Dear Tamás,
I have seen with happiness the creations of the fellow travelers. They wrote beautiful things, took good photos. Of course, this was not fun, or it was not only fun. And one more thing, the reason why I have written nothing and have published no photos. I received this trip as a personal gift, as work, a job to accomplish. Something I should continue, look for, or see once more, read about. I feel like a chosen person, who was entrusted a germ to grow something out of it. I just peeped instead of meditating. I peeked, I looked, but I saw very little to grasp or to guess something from the quintessence of all the things I have seen. I was overrun by moods and absences. It was kind of timeless, and inhumane, in the sense that I have hardly seen the living people, the local people. Only that horrible and perhaps dead, perhaps living history. I miss all that is there in your head and in your eyes, and what you handed over with an amazing force and yet ease. A gift and a task. You were right. It was much more than what fits into five days, and much less than I could write something high-flown about. A great, pretentious absence. With honest and benevolent envy and admiration, best:
Judit Faragó
“I say what is on my mind”
(Weekly column, Radio Q, 21 August 2014)
Column title deleted. I do not say what is on my mind. I say what there is not. The absence. And I cannot determine to whom the absence belongs.
I was on a tour in Galicia, in the wake of Jewish memories.
A magnificent tour, a unique organization, Tamás himself is the embodiment of zeal and care, and an unfathomable pile of knowledge, the group is great, with some friends and good acquaintances in it, everyone is sympathetic. Bonus: some wonderful Polish Renaissance towns, about which I have never heard, and some others, about which I have only heard, Krakow and Lublin, and a dozen unknown ones.
Now a fresh report should follow, as it is fitting to an easy-flowing summer radio program. But it won’t follow. It can’t follow. (Sorry, boss!)
I should explain that above mentioned “there is not”. This was successfully done only by Péter Nádas, and, in an inverse manner, by Imre Kertész, who set up a very peculiar “there is” against the “there is not”, the destruction.
So the above mentioned tourist phrase, “in the wake of Jewish memories”, is not true. In Poland there are no Jews. Not even one. The last survivors left in 1968. The memories belong to the deceased and to them. They come on pilgrimage to the land of the Hasids from far away lands. To some surviving synagogues, ruins or merely to the place where they once stood. Which they save and preserve and restore, if possible, but usually it is not. Because they are not. There is a museum in Lublin, with documents, lists of names, photos, a poignant exhibition … no, rather black rooms, just because an alternative theater came to know in which building they were operating. Films and photos about a neighborhood, people, traffic, shops, which we could see from the windows of this little theater, if only there were not a huge parking lot there. But now there is a huge parking lot, indeed. The people who once lived there, and now who do not, make up a pile, together with the inhabitants of other Jewish neighborhoods, in nearby Bełżec, in the Eastern Auschwitz, where industrial-scale destruction was tested on a million human beings. The machine was not yet flawless, for the lack of crematoria, a hill was built up with heavy additional works from the ground-up bones, a hill, which was then formed with concrete and black tufa and a couple of place names by the preservers of the “there is not” for the posterity.
No adjectives can exist here, unlike in the few cemeteries which survived by the whim of history. They are beautiful preys of natural decay, but they are still there. A few 15th-century tombstones, strange inscriptions defended by the moss, later also carved images, to know who was a rabbi, a scholar, a man of books, a woman. They are standing, leaning, sometimes already lying down, above an astonishing valley, on the top of their savior, a hill, where the enemy had no time and wish to go up to destroy them. Because otherwise, of course, the cemeteries are also not there.
Galicia is a beautiful landscape, with beautiful cities, well-tended villages, and a terrible history. The Monarchy, the Russians, the Poles, the Germans, the Slovaks, the Ukrainians, and the Jews, who are not there any more.
We travel in a comfortable tourist bus, without a passport. If we had it with us, we could go over to the other half of Galicia, where it is peace which there is not, just in order to say another absence.
Judit Faragó
Impressions
When we asked Dorka whether we were in Poland already, she said that it was unbelievable how the borders have vanished! Once you had to go through various stages of bureaucracy and anxiety to cross a border.
Looking out of the bus window, the scenery remains the same.
Our families during the 19th and 20th c. whether from Czernowitz or Saľa changed countries while staying in the same place. In Israel, we cannot drive to our neighbouring country and be abroad.
In Israel, there is a very common practice of travelling to concentration camps in Poland, as a part of the high school curriculum. Both of us firmly reject this warped ʻraison d’être’ that is drummed into our kids’ brain at school. Travelling in such homogenous groups makes them self-righteous and blind.
Some very close family members of ours were murdered in Auschwitz. We are curious to learn about what lives they led and less how they perished.
Galicia’s Jews suggest to the Israeli mind, the most inferior ʻOstjuden’ typecast, everything that Zionism tried to educate us against. Against the prevalent image of the Diaspora Ashkenazi Jew, money-grabbing, foreign looking – an anti-Semitic typecast that we adopted.
We were very surprised to see charming renaissance small towns, with a long history of Jews who contributed a lot to local culture and prosperity. What wonderful buildings and synagogues! These relics that remain evoked in us a deep and palpable connection to our Jewish heritage.
Former Meir hotel in Tarnów
Headstone in the Lesko Jewish cemetery: “here lies Ester daughter of Mordechai” (my future gravestone)
The Bardejov Bikur Cholim Synagogue, has left us aghast. So authentic and alive, as if someone has just switched on the light and you experience 1941. The cheder in particular, with its books, lanterns and a map of Palestine, touched us deeply.
For our first group trip, we were a little intimidated by the idea of a bus load of Hungarians. However, the people in the bus were very friendly – we had some very interesting conversations. Tamás’ commentary complemented the sites and gave them a multi-dimensional significance. Tamás’ artistic orchestration, phenomenal knowledge, storytelling talent, untiring energies and humour – made the trip unforgettable.
Galician Jewish family, 1930’s 
In Jonathan Safran Foer’s acclaimed book and movie Everything is illuminated, a small Odessa travel agency, a family-run company operating with one trabant undertakes the task of leading American Jews, searching for their Galician roots, to the former shtetls of their grandparents. The trabant, starting at the Lviv train station, soon turns off the highway onto a dirt road. From then on, a series of absurd misadventures follow one another until we reach the place where everything is illuminated.
“Kőrösmező [Yasinia]. Rafter’s prayer on the arrival of dam water”, from here
“Reb Burech drinks toast” on the stage of the Jewish theater of Czernowitz, from here
Klezmer musicians of Rohatyn, mainly the Faust family, 1912
The border of the Monarchy and Russia at Brody, 1910
On the market of Lemberg, 1910
Hasidic rabbi and his followers in the Carlsbad spa, 1930’s
The First World War as the first technical revolution of the twentieth century. “The war that started with horses and ended with tanks,” as they say. In fact, with airplanes, if you look at the continuation, where the pilots of Trieste joining the Poles stopped Budyonny’s Red Cavalry.
Come with us to…
Atlantis
Bestiary
Bohemia+Prague
Books, exhibitions, music, film
Brave old world
Caucasus
Cemeteries
Crimea
Get to know the
Images of the East
Lightwriting
Lwów/Lemberg
Mallorca
Message on the wall
Odessa
Paper Museum
Persian letters
