After a week of touring the magic of Prague it was time to head for Poland, to head back in time, and deep inside. The trip would take most of the day - leaving a lot of time for preparation, for thought and for a horde of memories and not a little anxiety to fill my being - Cathy silently watching, offering quiet and much needed support. I scrunched into the corner of the seat and the window and watched the countryside pass by with unseeing eyes. After four or five hours and just short of the border, we stopped at a little station whose sign read “Karvina”. Here we awaited a new locomotive and permission to cross into a country from which my father had escaped - swearing never to return, and from which, in some sense, my mother never left. (Karvina is the name given to the village of Freistadt when it became part of the Republic of Czechoslovakia following World War I.) Staring at the sign, my mind returned to World War I and saccharine smuggling but, having no idea how long the stop would be and seeing no one about, I pushed the stories out of my mind and returned to deeper thoughts. Polish border guards boarded the train, demanded our passports their piercing stares and attempts to intimidate causing some some very Canadian anger to rise within me with their piercing stares and intimidating manner. Those tactics brought back memories of the smuggling tales a second time but, with a little effort, I brushed both sentiments aside and prepared for what lay ahead. Soon the train continued on its way, a host of village stations with too many consonants in ther names flashing by. Then, without warning, one appeared bearing the sign “Oswiecim”. I pointed , Cathy nodded her acknowledgement, gave my knee a re-assuring squeeze and we both grew impatient. Krakow came in due course. We hurried from the station, decided to walk to our B & B with Cathy leading, street map in hand, and me trailing pulling our suitcase - my mind wandering in many directions. “Aha, I know exactly where we are” Cathy announced, looking at a street sign and then pointing to her map, “Szpitalna” - and headed off. “Szpitalna?” I hesitated, then hurried to catch up - a sense of increasing dismay growing in my stomach. It was a modern, commercial street; nothing at all like “The Street” that had been described to me so often. “Maybe”, I thought, “this was the ‘other’ end of a long street whose character changed” and I began searching addresses. As I did, my heart sank further - 50, 46, 44, 42 . There was no ‘other’ end, this was it. At # 36 I stopped, disappointment tearing at every part of me. In plain view stood a modern department store. There was nothing, nothing at all of the Dickstein family here. “Look what they’ve done!” I cried. Cathy turned to look at me, her face filled with confusion and, almost immediately thereafter, pity. “Marvin, this is Szpitalna - but we’re in Krakow, not Tarnow!” We were both stunned, the emotional depth of what we were about suddenly becoming readily apparent. The morning train to Tarnow crept along at a snail’s pace as if inching its way back in time. The long series of suburbs passing outside the window gradually changed into genuinely rural villages. Most of the buildings were disappointingly modern, bright pastel colour walls surmounted by new clay roofs. And then, just as I began to wonder if the train and I were headed in different directions, modernity would give way and we would pass some old, hip-roofed cottage with weathered siding, surrounded by a rickety picket fence and, invariably, a peasant woman, face heavily wrinkled, babushka and apron blowing gently in the breeze, leaning against a hoe or a spade and staring passively as we went by. We had not deviated from our assigned route. The large letters spelling out T A R N O W seemed to be blaring at me and I hesitated, nodded my acknowledgement of their message?, warning? and, with determination, turned away and followed Cathy through the station to a cab and the Tarnow Regional Museum. As we came up to the second floor, the door of the Director’s office swung open and we walked in to a dark, oak panelled room whose walls appeared to be completely covered with photographs of Jews in traditional settings - rabbis, Hassidim, children in Cheder. Even a Polish poster advertising the museum was written in a Hebraic script. Standing patiently to one side with a welcoming smile on his face stood Adam Bartosz, Director of the Tarnow Regional Museum and Chair of the Committee for the Preservation of Monuments of Jewish Culture of Tarnow. Following my eyes to the walls, he laughed and said: “I know, I don’t look Polish. Some of these people could be my cousins.” After agreeing to discuss the Committee’s work at another time and posing for a picture, Bartosz introduced us to his young assistant, Janusz, who stood ready to take us on our tour. Sensing my impatience Janusz shortened and then completely omitted his descriptions of the various sites were passing and headed for Szpitalna Street. He had still not said whether # 36 was still standing. If it was, would its occupants allow us to go inside? If they did, what was I looking for, what could I hope to find? The buildings lining both sides of the street were a mixture of new and old, set, one immediately against the other, they were mostly residential and maddingly ordinary, banal. Once again I subconsciously, I began to check addresses: 78, 66, 60. Still nothing. Reading my thoughts Janusz called back: “Pay no attention. The addresses were all re-done after the war. These are completely different from what would have been the case in your grandfather’s time.” At that moment we came to an intersection, on the other side of which stood what was obviously a modern hospital dating, I estimated, from the 1950's. “New hospital”, said Janusz looking back at me and then quickly turning and continuing down the street, stopping suddenly just beyond the hospital. There, on what had been a street of attached buildings with no lawns or even sidewalk boulevards, stood what appeared to be an empty lot or, more accurately, grass and shrubs gone slightly to seed. On the far side of this open space stood a very tall, narrow dwelling. Painted a drab brown and boarded up it was completely lifeless, forlorn, silent. If not for its odd shape and the open space in front it would have been all but invisible. As it was, it stood out like a grain elevator in the middle of Times Square. “Number 36 Szpitalna”, said Janusz - taking a step back and standing absolutely still in the middle of the street. “Are you sure?” “Absolutely, I checked the old street plans in the archives. That is it.” It was truncated, totally cut off and separate from anything else - cut off, I thought - the way my family, had been cut off from me, the way their whole world, once alive and vibrant, had been cut off and left lifeless. Standing there I didn’t know what I felt. For a moment the rest of our surroundings faded away leaving this tall, silent giant looking down and me looking up. Why, after all the changes that had clearly taken place on this street in the 80 odd years since my mother had left to come to Canada, was this one building still there? We continued to look at each other. It was as if this old building was waiting for me; waiting for me to return before it too, crumbled and disappeared. I looked behind the building. Nothing, a parking lot. The little island of green and this one building ended as abruptly as it had appeared. On the other side of the parking lot there was an old, institutional building. The hospital! It was clearly still in use. People in white lab coats came and went out a side door shuttling between the two hospitals, by passing # 36 as they did so. A small lawn separated the hospital from the street and trees, (none of which appeared to be cherry, I noted), grew along side its front. Skirting the low wall enclosing the lawn I hurried to the entrance. There was a wrought iron arch but empty hinges indicated that the gate and other parts were missing. I looked up - no name, no symbols, nothing. I walked through the arch to the front door. Still no signs. There is something strange, vaguely sinister about a hospital without a name, a sign. As I turned back toward Cathy and Janusz I noticed that there were pieces of wrought iron, an inch or two long, sticking out of the low wall at regular intervals. Clearly there had been a fence along the top of that wall which had been deliberately snipped off. Had it contained a name? some symbol indicating its origins? Speaking slowly, Janusz explained. There probably had been a fence and some sort of sign. But, after all Jews had been removed from Tarnow, the Nazis had eradicated any trace of their 600 year presence in the town. And, what the Nazis had overlooked was destroyed by right wing Polish nationalist groups after the war. Then he hesitated. “The directors of the ‘new hospital’ have been given control over the old and now they are urging that the old house be destroyed so that the two can be connected. It’s a matter of...” The rest of his explanation was lost to me. Is this why the house was waiting for me? Is this why I am here? I said nothing and after the obligatory pictures were taken, Janusz ushered Cathy and I across a modern thoroughfare that now sliced through the street on the far side of the old hospital to the Jewish cemetery which stood, alone, on the other side and unlocked the gate. Inside we were engulfed in a jumble of headstones. Some, standing in neat rows away from the graves, had clearly been recently “resurrected”. Others stood, mournfully leaning this way and that, where they had been placed sixty, one hundred, three hundred years ago. The cemetery was quiet and the unusually hot, dry summer had caused some leaves to fall prematurely giving the scene something of a calm, autumn air. Ignoring the cars and trucks speeding along the new road that separated the cemetery from the remainder of Szpitalnat, I noticed the wall separating the two worlds. It was the same as that in front of the old hospital - except it was surmounted by a wrought iron fence with Mogen Davids at regularly spaced intervals. “We had drawings of the fence so we built a replica”, explained Janusz. More pictures and then we re-locked the gates and spent the next three or four hours strolling the streets and alleys of the old town. “That is a brick bimah from the ‘Old synagogue’” (... built in the seventeenth century on the site of a much older synagogue built in 1581. Set on fire, along with all the other synagogues and prayer houses, this is the only part of it that remains....”) “The building housing that group of shops was the Mikva built in 1904. (To this building on June 13, 1940 753 men, including many prominent Jews were dragged and locked up. .... The following morning they were chased to the freight station and taken to Auschiwitz. Of the 728 who reached the camp were called: “the Tarnovians” and were tattoed with the numbers 31 to 758 signifying the beginning of the camp....Almost 200 survived.....none of them Jews.....) “The corner house with the balcony is the residence of one of the few Jews to return to Tarnow after the war” (He died in 1993. He was the last Jew to live in Tarnow......”) With evening coming on, Cathy, Janusz and I found some comfortable chairs in a sidewalk bistro in front of the museum and, gazing at the charming buildings which surrounded the square, we chatted about normal things, inquired about Janusz’s future, promised to stay in touch. Inside, I was completely bereft of feeling. The emptiness brought a sense of guilt I could not suppress. Finally, the three of us finished our lemonades and headed for the station. Still upset at my own detachment as we stood on the platform awaiting our train, I noticed a date carved into the wall - 1910. Instantly, feeling returned. Some sense of why I had come began to take shape. It was on this platform, perhaps on this very spot that my mother took her last look at the city that had been her home, had been the home of her family for generations, perhaps centuries. In nine months she and my father would be wed in Montreal and the family I knew would begin. Nine years later, Motele Dickstein would die peacefully - and his casket, accompanied by a huge throng would proceed to the end of Szpitalna where he would be buried, with dignity, amid the graves of his ancestors. Nine years after that, the Nazis would march into Tarnow. Two years later and 5,000 miles away, his youngest grandchild would be born in Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital and be named after him. One year later, his 83 year old, widow, screaming in pain, would be dragged to her death over the stones of Szpitalna and most of his family, young and old alike, shipped off to be destroyed in the ovens of Auschwitz. After another sixty years and his grandson would stand on Szpitalna Street, looking up at an old building and, in some sense, close a door that had been left ajar banging in the wind and trying, trying very hard, to understand the world that lay behind it. Prologue After touring Krakow, my wife and I headed back to Prague. Nothing forgotten, there was still a sense of relief, of having done what we came to do. Before we knew it, the train crossed the border and stopped at the station marked Karvina. Once all passports had been duly stamped and officialdom had stomped its way down the corridor, I stepped out of our car and hailed a young woman in a Czech railway uniform standing opposite us outside the station. “Tell me, this is Karvina right? Do you still make saccharine here?” “Yes, of course,” she laughed. “And yes, we still make saccharine.” When we returned home I sent my application to join the Committee for the Preservation of Monuments to the Jewish Culture of Tarnow to Adam Bartosz and we began the struggle to save #36 Szpitalna. Note: Any readers with connections to the Jewish community of Tarnow or those of the surrounding district who would like to contact those who are struggling to guard its memory should contact: Adam Bartosz Director, Regional Museum of Tarnow Chairman, Committee for the Preservation of Monuments of Jewish Culture of Tarnow Rynek 20-21 33-100 Tarnow, Poland email:
