Jews, Factories, Music and Stuffed Cabbage

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Day 2



Jews, Factories, Music and Stuffed Cabbage



We haven’t reached the start of our POW trail, but already relevant themes are emerging, on our first day in Krakow. We came here more than ten years ago for New Year’s Eve.



The choice of Hotel Kazimierz as our digs was made because it’s in the Jewish Quarter of Krakow, an area that we wished to explore again. It’s just the ticket, providing comfortable accommodation on Ul Miodowaa (Honey Street), next to the highly decorated Tempel. Pre war, it was a thriving business area with markets, shops and workshops.



In 1942 the largely Jewish community here was forced over the river to form a ghetto in Podgorze. Apartments became crammed with extended families. Up to 500 people a day were rounded up off the streets to dig snow, trenches or worse working outside the ghetto. Orthodox Jewish men became targets, their beards being cut off publicly by German soldiers.

We visited two sites important in Podgorze today.

The only gentile business in the ghetto was the pharmacy. Here, on behalf of Jewish friends, the family protected Jewish family heirlooms that would be confiscated, provided shelter and left a back door open as an escape route for the hunted. It is on a square where thousands of Jews were rounded up and transported to death camps marked by a grid of cast bronze chairs signifying the waiting game of the Krakow Jew. The shop is now a small but inventively designed museum bedecked with pharmaceutical paraphernalia on oak shelves. Behind drawer fronts, windows and cupboard doors are testimonies of ordinary folks about life under Nazi rule in paper and digital form. The other site is the Schindler Factory where a German Industrialist employ Jews making ceramics. He established a list of valued workers who gained permission to work in a factory in the now Czech Republic, thus gaining access to freedom away from the Nazi Holocaust . As told in Spielberg’s film, a deal of the footage shot in Kazimierz.



Similarly, my Dad worked as a POW in a Bruntal linen factory where Machold, an industrialist, employed up to 500 Jewesses in comparatively good conditions. Dad refers to his nickname The White Jew, describing the portly manager, the son of the original factory owner who supplied the German army with uniforms and textile supplies.

Hugh, as camp cook, went on occasions to Machold’s house and was offered ersatz coffee and a kind welcome.



Music was always important to Dad. He was never taught piano formally, but learnt to play be ear on his elder sister’s knee. In a camp at Postrelmov (on our itinerary) he furthered his musical skills on a dodgy three quarter piano in the camp. As members of Side Café Orkestar, Marion and I play and hold an interest in Klezmer music. Nomad Jewish music, it returned from exposure Stateside to include Jazz improvisation and an eclectic mix of instrumentation. We spent a happy hour listening to a live quartet in Isssak’s Synagoue: superlative musicianship from fiddle, button accordion, bass and percussion.



Then to Plac Nowa (New Square) where we ate Gefelterfish in a Klezmer house a dozen or so years ago at New Year's time. Sadly it was all booked up, but instead we ate fine food in a neighbouring restaurant, dodging the second thunderstorm of the trip.



Top of my gustatory list for the trip, so far, was wild boar stew with stuffed cabbage. Savoy cabbage leaves enveloped finely chopped vegetables and cracked wheat , topped with soured cream, yum.

leaves enveloped finely chopped vegetables and cracked wheat , topped with soured cream, yum

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