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Published: March 28th 2005
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Monday afternoon
Before WW II 3,500,000 Jews lived in Poland. At the end of the war only 300,000 were still alive. Our travel guide says that today only about 2,000 Jews live in Poland.
We visited the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz twice. Our guidebook says that a visitor should take a tram as it is some distance from the historic center of Krakow. We walked. It really isn’t that far. During our wanderings we found two synagogues. For a small fee both can be visited. In one I was told I could take no pictures. In the other an elderly man who collected the small entrance fee encouraged me to take pictures, even of the torah. He seemed especially proud of a beautiful stained glass window that had the menorah.
From what I saw it appears that this section of town is just now being restored. Many of the buildings need a lot of restorative work. My guess is that this section of town will be “discovered” and will be restored in the future. [Nancy-I respectfully disagree with Bill. The very unrestored nature of this section isn't and should not be changed because it shows graphically the destruction
the Nazis brought. To me the derelict buildings are a monument as telling as Auschwitz. I loved the restored worship spaces. That I agree with. But the other buildings with stucco falling off and gaps showing in the walls speaks of people who were jerked out of their homes and sent to a ghetto until they were again dragged to a concentration camp and exterminated. There was no one to come home after WWII and renovate. There will never be any descendants of these people to come and restore grandpa and grandma's house. It tears at your heart and makes you full of anguish at the great loss. This was a thriving city twinned with Prague. They had two distinct names and two different groups of people living in them for years but by the 1930's were definitely one city. In the barely restored synagogue, walls back up and benches inside for worship, half ruined verses from the torah written large on the walls, we saw three films. One film was this area in 1937 with all these people walking and smiling for the camera. Groups of men and boys huddled in discussions. Women selling and buying food for the
day. A REAL live community. It looked poor but very respectable. Then the other film was 1941 and removal to the ghetto. No one even moved these folks in trucks. They carried and pulled little carts from home to who knows where to be resettled and contained. They never returned. Did we tell you what happened in this synagogue after we sat in a small room off the prayer room and watched a film showing the health project sponsored by Americans and Poles to improve the health standards of Jewish children from 1937-1940? It was so full of love and hope and promise. They wer training nurses for babies and children. Home visitors were teaching parents how to raise kids to be strong. Schools were giving exercise lessons and vitamin supplements and extra good food to all. Everyone was working to make these the strongest, healthiest Polish Jews of all the past generations. Then they all died I am quite sure in Auschwitz. It was the saddest thing of all to me. If I told you before, this tale needs to be told again. When we came out of that room, the prayer room was full of young men and
one young woman worshiping and singing and praying and then dancing joyously. It was amazing. God's house was full of God's people. Thought the Jews of this city were exterminated, all were not killed in the world and this sort of renovation is the sort I want to see. A worshiping, living restoration not that of buildings. Poland has many tales to tell and many past sorrows to weep about. Today all Poles are weeping at the loss of John Paul who suffered the loss of his Jewish childhood friends in the Holocaust, who studied in secret during the war, who opposed the communist regime and who helped them become free both religiously and politically. Poland seems a very sad nation but it is also a blooming, hopeful, future nation. Come and visit Poland. You will not be sorry.
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