Table of Contents
BOOKS BY EVA HOFFMAN
Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe
Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews
TO
MARIA AND BORIS,
WHO SURVIVED THAT TIME
WITH THE HELP OF OTHERS
AND IN MEMORY OF BORIS,
WHO DIED IN 1995
This book was inspired in part
by Marian Marzynskis documentary Shtetl,
which aired on PBSs Frontline series in April 1996.
Acknowledgments
My first debt of gratitude goes to Marian Marzynski, the director of the film Shtetl, and to Frontline and WGBH in Boston, which coproduced and aired the documentary. The book arose out of the film and to some extent covers the same geographic and thematic territory. I am therefore especially mindful of Mr. Marzynskis considerateness in allowing my text to take its own shape and direction, even if it sometimes departs from his films. He has been generous in sharing information and indispensable primary sources with me, including the Polish translation of the Bransk Yizkor Book. His energy and support have been important in instigating the project and maintaining its momentum. Marrie Campbell at WGBH was also most helpful in the initial stages of the undertaking.
In the course of researching and writing a book like this, one is dependent on the goodwill and openness of many people. My particular thanks go to the present and former inhabitants of Bransk, who gave their time, thoughts, and memories so unstintingly. On the Polish side, the pioneering research of Zbigniew Romaniuk permeates the entire manuscript. The text gives evidence of this, but I would also like to thank him and his wife, Yolanda Romaniuk, for inviting me into their small apartment and treating me with such warmth and hospitality during my stay. The interviews with Irena Jabonowska and Janina Woiska were invaluable; in addition, I would like to mention Mieczyslaw Korzeniewski, who contributed his time and labor to the creation of the Jewish memorial cemetery in Bransk and whose remarks during our talk were genial and informative. In Warsaw, Helena Luczywo and Wanda Rapaczynska put me up and put up with me during my travels; for their sustaining wit and friendship, these are just small thanks.
In Baltimore, Jack Rubin was tireless, at a difficult time, in recounting his story and responding to my many, undoubtedly tiresome questions. His wife, Sonya Rubin, also a former inhabitant of Bransk, was tolerant of my intrusions and contributed informative comments. I profited greatly from conversations with Minnie Shapiro and Bluma Shapiro. My special thanks to Rubin Roy Cobb for his time and willingness to help, especially in gathering important materials. I appreciate the kindness of Evelyn Iteld Silverboard in making available her rare photographs.
I am grateful to Joanna Michlic-Coren, who assisted me at all stages of work on this book. Her knowledge of Polish-Jewish history was a steady resource; her skills in providing pertinent materials and making her way through thickets of information were consistently reliable.
Conversations with many friends have enriched my understanding of my subject. In New York, I have repeatedly sounded out Marta Petrusewicz about various historical issues, in the trust that I would neither wear out her patience nor exhaust her intelligence. In London, I have been edified and entertained by discussions with Felix Scharf, whose amazing powers of recall and eloquence in several languages brought the world of prewar Polish Jewry alive for me. His perceptions and moral sense inform many pages of my book.
I would like to thank Tomasz Winiewski in Biaystok, Dorota Dec at the Czartoryski Museum in Cracow, and Urszula Fuks at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw for their kindness in pursuing illustrations and making them available. Marek Web and Krystyna Fisher at the YIVO Institute in New York were gracious in giving me their time and guidance.
Finally, I want to express more than formal appreciation to Steve Fraser at Houghton Mifflin for his faith in this project and for nurturing it with tact and intelligence in every phase of development. His assistant, Lenora Todaro, was not only helpful but retained her amiability throughout. To Georges Borchardt and his stalwart staff, for their always reliable and sensitive support, my thanks, as ever.
Introduction
Gone now are those little towns where the shoemaker was a poet,
The watchmaker a philosopher, the barber a troubadour.
Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined
Biblical songs with Polish tunes and Slavic rue,
Where old Jews in orchards in the shade of cherry trees
Lamented for the holy walls of Jerusalem.
Gone now are those little towns, though the poetic mists,
The moons, winds, ponds, and stars above them
Have recorded in the blood of centuries the tragic tales,
The histories of the two saddest nations on earth.
Antoni Sonimski, Elegy for the Jewish Villages
WHAT REMAINS of the Jews of Poland? Mostly traces, echoes, and a few monuments; and also sorrow, rage, guilt, and denial. There are a few thousand Jews left in Poland today, but the communities they inhabited, their characteristic culture and society, were all destroyed during World War II. Because the extent of the loss was so great so total the act of remembering the vanished world has become fraught with painful and still acute emotions.
The destruction was nowhere more complete than in the numberless Polish shtetls, those villages and small towns that dotted the Polish landscape and that were sometimes partly, sometimes preponderantly, Jewish. The villages are still there, many of them lovely enough to justify geographic longing; the towns can be found, often transformed into bleakness by postwar poverty and socialist architecture. A few synagogues still stand, some of them crumbling from neglect and disuse, others preserved and restored to their former dignity. Occasionally, outside the borders of a village, there is a small Jewish cemetery, with weeds and vegetation climbing up the crooked headstones. A Polish farmer will point out a copse where the Jews were rounded up by the Nazis and shot; in a few places, modest monuments have been erected to those who perished. Relics, scattered and enigmatic, as of a lost ancient civilization. But the pulsing Jewish world that was here, the small shops and stalls, the bustle of people, carts, horses, the sounds of Yiddish and Hebrew these are no more. The Jews, a Polish poet wrote, were captured in the hot act of life. That life can almost be intuited beyond the curtain of abrupt absence. We think we can almost cross the curtain; but we cannot.
In post-Holocaust memory, Poland holds an exceptional place: that was where most of the worlds Jewish population lived before the war, and that was where the extermination of European Jewry took place. At the beginning of the war, there were three million Jews in Poland; at the end, between 240,000 and 300,000 remained. Most of the Nazi concentration camps were built in Poland, and it is often said that the Nazis counted on the collusion of the Poles in their project of extermination. Such an explanation has been repeatedly and convincingly refuted. It is much more likely that the camps were placed in Poland for logistical reasons: Poland was where most of the people targeted for extermination were located.
