In 1914 a teenager from a small stetl in the Ukrainian region of the Austro-Hungarian empire came to Tarnow to stay with a married sister while awaiting notification of space in the steerage compartment of some ship that would take him to a new life in America. During those brief few weeks he met Eva Dickstein. One day, exactly, before he was to leave to claim that long-awaited space, World War I broke out. From that point onwards the life of Munya Blauer and Eva Dickstein took on the qualities of a soap opera, an all-too-real melodrama.

With the Czarist army bearing down on Tarnow, Munya joined other youths fleeing westward. Eva stayed. Nine months later he returned from Vienna where he and other pre-draft aged tradesmen had found employment replacing the adult males called to the army. Their romance resumed and, in one of those daring adventures that could only have taken place in the topsy turvy world of WWI, Eva ultimately managed to convince her parents to allow her to go to follow him to Vienna, find work of her own and there share ten months of excitement and romance that was all the more special and glowed ever brighter because it, like old Vienna itself, was surrounded by danger and could not last.

In 1915, seventeen year old Munya was drafted into the army where his ability to read and write plus a profound naivety led him to become a machine gunner on the Italian front, (predicted life span once in action: ten minutes), while Eva returned to Spitalnya Street.

It was now a much changed Spitalnya Street. Russian occupation and the war in general left it dull and dreary, literally falling into ruin, bereft of its young men save for those poor souls who turned up in the old hospital, and desperately struggling to survive. Motele, having stood up for his community in the face of very real threats from the occupying Russian army, had enhanced his position as community leader - but his actions did little to aid the daily struggle for bread.


While he and the other men left behind did what they could to keep the basic structure of the community in tact, it was the women who kept it fed. For her part, Eva - still something of the street urchin who had once distributed illicit cherries from a spot not to far from where pale, dispirited soldiers often without limbs or worse, now sat staring with unseeing eyes - hit on the obviously illegal, very dangerous and not a little audacious idea of smuggling saccharine from the Bohemian town of Freistadt, two or three hours away by train into the old market place at the other end of Spitalnya Street. There it brought a handsome profit and kept the Dickstein family fed.

When, at the end of 1920, the twice wounded, malaria-ridden Munya returned from an Italian POW camp to “The Street”, he found a woman where there had once been a teenager. Together they rediscovered their romance. Weeks later, and only steps ahead of the military police that were determined to take him back to war - this time as member of the new Polish army fighting Bolsheviks, they vowed to carry out the plan two kids had hatched almost seven years earlier.

This time a patched up “Street” struggling its way into the twentieth century witnessed another Dickstein celebration presided over by Motele. In front of family and as many friends could squeeze into the house at number 36, Munya and Eva signed a “Tnoyem”. Two days later Munya was gone, fleeing across Europe. Eva was left waiting and .... wondering. Were these the last few months she would spend on “The Street” or would she, like so many before her, be betrayed?

Blauers may be naive and trouble prone but they are also stubborn. In November 1921 came a money order for an engagement ring, and tickets to a new life in Canada.

After her marriage, Eva thought of “The Street” often but the dreamed about “visit home” never seemed possible. In the twenties, her and Munya worked hard to get themselves established and began to raise a family. In 1930 her father, Motele, died. An enormous funeral was held and thousands turned out to usher him to the next world via the old cemetery that held so many of his ancestors and neighbours. But Eva was pregnant with her third child and the family delayed telling her that he was even sick. Then came the Great Depression, financial difficulties and the often-planned visit home was postponed time and again.

Meanwhile, ominous changes were occurring all over the old world. In 1939, Dickstein siblings and their families came back to “The Street” from the homes they had established across Europe. To no avail. With the arrival of the Nazis, they and almost one hundred thousand Jews from Tarnow and the surrounding district were crowded into the old Ghetto around Spitalnya Street. In June 1942 a teenaged granddaughter of 83 year old Freda Dickstein, immobilized with a broken hip that, untended, had been left to heal, painfully, on its own, tried desperately to hide her in a garden shed.


Ever efficient German troopers found the old lady and rather than waste a bullet, wrapped her in the old blanket with which her granddaughter had covered her and dragged her screaming over the cobble stones of “The Street” to the open grave being dug at the far end where the beautiful young factory girl, cum rabbitzin, cum mother and grandmother was buried - alive.

From then on “The Street” and the world it represented resided only in my mother’s memory and, later, in stories carefully imparted to her youngest who could not truly imagine or completely understand. Sometimes the old street was filled with good Shabbes smells, or people rushing from the shortest services in town. Sometimes it stood in solemn solidarity as Motele bid farewell to his father. Sometimes its cobble stones could barely be felt beneath the feet of two teenagers who found love and dreamed of an impossible life together in America. Sometimes it was covered in blood.

Above all, it was always somewhere else. Now I know it will be there, real. Belonging more to the past than the present, it is an object of research - research that tells me it will be there. The old Jewish hospital, apparently given some meaningless bureaucratic name, will be there, demoted to the status of a neighbourhood clinic but, still there. Should I manage the emotional strength, guide books promise that I will see headstones in the old cemetery covered in weeds and leaning this way and that as if seeking each other’s help in avoiding the final fall onto the once holy ground. The iron fencing around the old cemetery is reduced to fragments, like the debris after some prolonged, hopeless battle. It will be there. Its gates will not. Now they rest alone, somewhat incongruous, as an artifact in the New York city Museum of the Holocaust. For all of that, “The Street” will still be there - under the feet of Eva Dickstein Blauer’s youngest, born only months before Freda was dragged across its stones.

What else will I find?

“The Street” Part III: Going Back (for October GM)