Their culture and their families are gone, but the streets where they strolled and played and almost all of the buildings that sheltered their homes, schools, sports clubs, cafes, and organizations are still standing. We walk those sidewalks and pass through those doorways today. 
 

The Sense of Identity

None of them came from Kazimierz, “the Jewish district.” Since the mid-19th century, people had been moving out to more attractive quarters of town. Kazimierz remained poor, largely Hassidic, Yiddish-speaking, and exotic. Many local Jews hardly ever went there. 

In Henryk Vogler’s early childhood, his family lived on ul. Florianska in the heart of the old town shopping district. The Grosses resided on what is now ulica Sarego between the old town and Kazimierz. Both Vogler and Gross have faint memories of grandparents in Kazimierz, with Vogler’s the more evocative. 

Kazimierz held ambivalent associations for Vogler. While his mother’s family owned property and did business in other parts of Cracow, his father “came from the deepest back alleys of late-19th-century Cracow ghetto poverty. We knew very little about our grandparents on his side, and it seemed to be a touchy subject.” The memoirist visited the rundown tenement on ul. Gazowa as a child. “I remember a sort of wooden verandah, one dark room cluttered with junk, an odor of decay, and among this [sat] my old grandmother and two of my father’s sisters, the elder of whom was heavyset and quarrelsome, and the other as shriveled as if she were tubercular, with sickly, glaring eyes and florid lips…” The artistically sensitive youth perceived something “almost, I would say, indecent” about his father’s family. Vogler’s memoirs are Proustian in their depth and attention to nuance, facing up to every aspect of his youth; he therefore notes how the younger of the two Kazimierz aunts once covertly handed him, with a throaty giggle, a book during the reading of which (it was a scene involving a beautiful gypsy girl and a young aristocrat) he first experienced the pleasure of involuntary physical excitement. Elsewhere, he notes the sensory overload caused by the smell of pickled fish and other exotic foodstuffs in the shops in Kazimierz. For him, the district represented something that was almost off-limits, but was also highly sensuous: a heady, intoxicating mixture. 

In the less intimidating setting of his maternal grandparents’ apartment, Vogler experienced the magical beauty of the Seder dinner. Nevertheless, he writes, “from my earliest years the charm of Polishness was far more, in fact magnetically, attractive.” The Polish history he learned in school seemed closer and more “suggestive”; he dreamed about it at night. He fantasized about  the popular portrayals of the Polish 19th-century insurrections and the recovery of independence that took place when he was seven. Highly-colored accounts of these events dominated the educational system and the media and must have seemed more heroic to a young boy than the Biblical events that his grandparents (themselves full of Polish patriotism, no doubt) celebrated in the sometimes baffling Holy Day observances. Even the colorful Polish folk festivals and processions that Vogler and his mother watched from the window of their apartment were exotically “pagan.” Vogler had an ambiguous relationship to his ethnic heritage. He felt irrevocably a part of it, but notes that its "positive attributes" were “attenuated” in him. 

Natan Gross writes that Yiddish “grated” on his ears, and that he “did not approve of” traditional dress. Yet when he was a child and fairy tales or folk legends made up his sense of local identity, the repertoire of fables also included some special ones. After recounting the familiar legends of the Wawel dragon, Princess Wanda, and the Tatar arrow that cut short the hejnal trumpet call, Gross goes on to note specifically Jewish local legends. Some of these tales, such as a clearly anachronistic one about the Simchat Torah procession at the Old Synagogue being interrupted by the marauding Tatars in the same way as the hejnal, clearly exemplify “the invention of tradition.” This kind of invention may well embody a desire by a minority group to form local traditions of its own, in order to stand on an equal footing within a multi-cultural urban tradition. 

For Hela Schuepper, who came from an observant family and lived on what was very much a “Jewish street” in ethnically mixed Podgorze, Kazimierz was “across the river.” It still contained her community’s principal denominational institutions, but it was a place to go on holidays, not every day. Yet, as far as balancing her own group’s identity with that of the city-at-large to which she also belonged, Schuepper seems to have struck the best balance of any of our four memoirists. Her origins, family, and the places where she lived in Podgorze were every bit as Jewish as those of Henryk Zimmermann’s shtetl. She grew up amidst holiday rituals and outdoor celebrations, some traditional and some connected, for example, with the Zionist pioneer movement, when so many people turned out that the streetcars stopped running. Descended on both sides from Hassidic Torah scribes, she got a scolding from her grandmother when she dared to return a book to the library on the Sabbath. Yet she also repeatedly points out how she absorbed the manners of her Catholic classmates, including the way they spoke. At second hand, she absorbed the rhythm of their religious observances. “These  prayers and songs stuck in my memory, and thus I grew up in two cultures: on the one hand, in a Polish, patriotic Catholic one with its historical narratives of partitions, of the fight for freedom, and of uprisings, with its patriotic songs; and, on the other, I was surrounded by Jewish culture, the pious and traditional family home and the atmosphere of streets where the residents were generally Jewish.” 

Henryk Zimmermann, who came to Cracow from the very farthest southeastern reaches of Poland (now part of Ukraine), spent more time in Kazimierz than any of the native Cracow memoirists represented here. Long before he checked in at the Jewish community’s student dormitory on ulica Przemyska, he had formed an unshakeable and self-confident identity, compounded of religious observance, a drive for learning and self-improvement, and the riches of Yiddish lore and song. He was proud of it. Like other first-year students from the East, he adopted a Polish name—Henryk—while resolving to always remain the Yiddish Hershele at heart. Finding themselves in a new city, Zimmermann and his friends naturally headed for the synagogue to begin learning the ropes and meeting members of the local community. 
 

What Cracow Meant to Them 

Zimmermann had never seen a town bigger than Tarnopol, so Cracow overwhelmed him: all the synagogues, Jews who generally spoke good Polish, and the formidable figure of the leader of the city’s Zionists and the rabbi of the Tempel, Dr. Osjasz Thon. Zimmermann notes that “Cracovians of Jewish descent were more polite and behaved far more winningly than the Jews of Eastern Galicia. However, they were also more wrapped up in their own affairs and sometimes lacked a bit of that human warmth so characteristic of small-town Jews. They were more interested in themselves and their relatives, and less interested in others. Such were my subjective impressions, and, as it turned out, not mine alone. . . .” 

Raised in an observant home, Hela Schuepper grew up in and loved the same Cracow as her Catholic schoolmates. On market days, peasants brought wagonloads of farm produce to sell at the focal point of her district, Rynek Podgorski, and then shopped for household utensils and fabrics at the predominantly Jewish-owned shops around the marketplace. A parish church loomed over the square, and the girls Hela walked to school with crossed themselves as they passed that church. Hela and those same girls had class outings in the beautiful park above the square. Their teacher taught them the names of trees and flowers as they strolled there. When Hela became a young Zionist, her organization’s pioneer farms were part of the suburban truck-farming landscape, and the tragic, final Zionist camp that she attended in August 1939 was set in the same Tatra mountains that Cracovians of all stripes favored in the summer. 

Henryk Vogler’s Cracow is a boy’s own city. Its key topographical points include that vast commons or urban meadow, the Blonia. The birthplace of local football (the game also known as soccer), it was surrounded by the grounds where three of the city’s four main clubs played (“Catholic” Wisla, secular Cracovia, and Jewish-socialist Jutrzenka; the Zionist Makkabi had their stadium by the river at the foot of Wawel castle). Park Krakowski was the “park for adults.” Prominent local figures played tennis at the AZS courts there; Vogler notes that Bill Tilden, as well, had once graced that clay. The park also featured horseback riding and there were rowboats for rent in the dirty pond that became a skating rink in the winter (although Vogler preferred to skate at the Sokol rink on Pilsudskiego). Without doubt, however, the great attraction in Park Krakowski was the swimming pool, separated by a wooden fence from the nearby traffic. This was the scene of the “joyous, pagan festival of liberation” from the clothing that emblemized repression and carried the stigma of social class. The pool also hosted serious sporting competitions, right up to national championships in swimming, diving, and water polo, all of which featured Jewish stars. Vogler’s younger sister Rena had an early rivalry for supremacy in the backstroke with the future champion Krysia Nowak (daughter of a professor of medicine and former prime minister). 

The Planty park, around the Old Town, meant different things to Vogler at different times in his life, but he always loved it. The first thing he notes is that the statues there refer to literature and not military or political history. As he grew older, the Planty served as the backdrop for innocent dates, earnest teenage disputations, and, later still, long ideological sessions with communist students and frenzied trysting with “small, poor, filthy” suburban girls. Other  "girls" strolled the Planty who took money for their favors, usually 5 zloty – a significant sum for a student, and more than an increasingly poor one like Vogler could afford even to think about spending. Part of his street smarts in 30s Cracow was a sense of sex being diabolical, a matter of Jekyll and Hyde or, within the context of Polish literature, Zeromski’s History of a Sin. Despite all that he did or witnessed hanging out in the Planty, Vogler notes how he feared even to touch the  “respectable” female students he dated. 

Natan Gross only graduated from the Hebrew high school in 1939, yet he also had an extensive acquaintance with the good life as Cracow offered it. His family ate out often, not necessarily at the showiest restaurants, but at the ones with the best food, like Weisbrodts’ two establishments on ulica Starowislna. He also knew where to find the best lunches around the Rynek at the places where shop clerks and students ate, and describes the sausages at the “Dawn” restaurant on Sienna in Homeric terms. 

He would often go to his parents’ store on the Rynek after school and later accompany his mother home as she stopped along the way for produce on the Maly Rynek and bread and other articles at small specialty shops. His mother was a respected, substantial woman. The grocers, Catholic or Jewish, spread out their merchandise  while regaling her with their best gossip about other prominent customers. At home, Gross had a back garden, complete with a sort of gazebo where he and his friends could play table tennis. The wall of that garden abutted on the grounds of the Ursuline Sisters’ school for girls. Vogler and the other boys would climb the wall and try to reach the succulent pears growing on the nuns’ trees. Later, they flirted across the wall with the uniformed schoolgirls. In those years, Wislawa Szymborska attended the Ursuline school, and it is not impossible that the whisperings of Natan Gross, the future Polish-language journalist and poet in Israel, may have reached the ears of the future winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. 
 

Putting Bread on the Table

The years 1926-29, after the Polish currency reform, were a period of prosperity. Vogler’s father’s shop, “Au bonheur des dames,” with the latest fashions imported from Vienna and occupying the first two floors of the building at ulica Florianska 10, prospered. Grandfather Berwald owned the building. The Voglers lived above the shop in two rooms with kitchen, bath, and a rather primitive toilet on the wooden back gangway. When times were good, Father collected paintings by local artists; Mama bought crystal, china, Persian rugs, and a grand piano. Yet Vogler knew that his mother’s prosperous family, rather than any commercial talent on the part of his father, underlay this affluence, which turned out to be transient as the Great Depression set in. The family had to move to less salubrious addresses. The store shrank from two stories to one and then went out of business, replaced by a butcher who bought the building and put pork and sausage up for sale where the frocks had hung. Vogler’s father ended up working part-time as a sales clerk in other people’s shops. 

While Vogler learned early how a business fails, Gross saw how one succeeds. He loved his parents’ two shops on the Rynek, one at the corner of Szewska and the other at the corner of Grodzka, and came there after school to run the cash register. He knew the whole staff and many of the customers; the clientele was a cross section of prosperous Cracow. He remembers the store as a work of art, and details with special satisfaction his father’s advertising and marketing strategies, which seem to have been ahead of their time—enough so, at least, to give him a leg up on his Cracow competitors. Gross even relishes explaining how his father raised the bar for himself by maintaining two grand retail outlets on the Main Square, when a less showy cut-price or wholesale business somewhere down towards Kazimierz might well have been more profitable. The enterprise was a multi-ethnic one, which makes all the more striking Gross’s brief note that his parents did not maintain social ties with Catholics. 
 

Discrimination 

In 1919 or 1920, leaning out beside his mother from the window of their apartment at ulica Florianska 10, Vogler observed a minor pogrom. General Haller’s Polish soldiers (the majority of whom had been recruited in the United States) stopped the no. 1 tram that ran along Florianska, pulled Jewish passengers out, and beat them. That sort of violence was something novel in modern Cracow, and did not bode well for the newly independent state. 

The Gross firm sold china and crystal to Cracow’s elite in the 1930s, and even outfitted the kitchen of the Polish president. This did not prevent a right-wing mob from smashing in the beautiful display windows on at least one occasion, although Gross suggests that this might have been as much due to his father’s support for Pilsudski (he often included portraits of the Marshall in holiday displays) as to his ethnic background. 

At the university, discrimination and violence blotted pre-war life. In the first place, through a demographically-based system of preferment that could, at a stretch, be considered a sort of pro-Catholic affirmative action, the university restricted the number of Jewish students admitted to various faculties. In a negative way, this numerus clausus determined the course of studies that both Henryk Vogler and Henryk Zimmermann pursued at the university. They chose law, which placed the fewest barriers in their way. 

Once they enrolled, Jewish students faced outright hostility from “corporations” or fraternities associated with the far-right National Democratic party (popular among young hotheads, even though it never made much of an impact on Cracow electoral politics). Vogler asserts that these fraternities were originally class based and consisted to a large degree of the sons of the gentry and the landowners in the 1920s. After Hitler came to power in 1933, things got much worse. The fraternities became outright proponents of “racial” anti-Semitism. 

These anti-Semitic groups attempted to enforce “ghetto benches” in the lecture halls. Some professors turned a blind eye while others tried, usually ineffectively, to intervene. Some faculty members shepherded their Jewish students out at the end of a lecture, because the nationalists were not above trying to shove their classmates down the long stone stairways inside Collegium Novum. The worst period was the “autumn maneuvers” at the start of each new academic year. The right-wingers carried walking sticks that they used as clubs; their opponents fought back, and running skirmishes took place around the Planty. 

The victims of this thuggery had defenders among the Catholic students. Both Vogler and Zimmermann mention tall, blond Jozef Cyrankiewicz (later prime minister of communist-era Poland), already well known as an activist and budding actor when he attended Jaworski’s private gimnazjum at the corner of Grodzka and Rynek Glowny. He and his friend Maksymilian Boruchowicz (Michal borwicz), a Jewish student in the Polish department (with whom Cyrankiewicz had appeared in a school production of Wyspianski’s quintessential Cracow drama, The Wedding), frequently addressed rallies condemning the violence. Ksawery Pruszynski and his brother Mieczyslaw were two other students who did the same. 

During the fevered years after Hitler’s rise, anti-Semitism spread through almost every area of public life in impoverished, militarily threatened Poland. Hela Schuepper experienced bitter disappointment in the Women’s Military Training organization that she had enthusiastically joined, when its national commander came to give a talk on women in politics. As an example, the leader from Warsaw extolled a notorious member of parliament, Madame Pristor, who was leading a “humanitarian” drive to outlaw ritual slaughter—a campaign with blatant anti-Semitic goals. After hearing these remarks, Schuepper resigned from the WMT and, as friends had long been urging her to do, joined the Akiba Zionist youth organization. 

Schuepper recalls the 1938 German expulsion of “Polish” Jews, whom they dumped on the western Polish border (where the Polish government was willing to let them spend the winter in makeshift camps while deciding what to do with them). This had a powerful impact on the Jewish community, and on almost every family. Schuepper’s Uncle Sussman and two cousins came to stay with them. These well-dressed German speakers seemed lost at first but soon got back on their feet. 

The Anschluss was a tragedy for Vogler’s in-laws (Vogler had by then married a girl from a Viennese family that had settled in Cracow), because, being Austrian citizens, they instantly became Germans.  Vogler tells how, in a riposte to the German expulsion of “Polish” Jews, the Polish police rounded up all the “German” Jews in Poland—including his parents-in-law—and placed them on trains, but thought better of things at the last moment and allowed them to return home. 
 

Social and Political Activism 

As did a number of young people from good bourgeois families, Vogler drifted towards communism during the Great Depression. Most of the names he mentions in this context sound Jewish. Sensitive to the incendiary nature in 20th century Poland of the conflation of communism and Jewishness, he makes three points about this: (1) the communists he mentions are the ones he knew personally; (2) since there were 50,000 Jews in Cracow in 1930, it should come as no surprise that some of them were communist; and (3) according to Vogler, the Jews "possessed inborn dialectical flexibility, treated economic laws like the rules of chess, and became fascinated in the abstract with class issues even though they knew no proletarians." 

Communism’s real attraction, of course, was that it promised a comprehensive solution to the problems of the 1930s: the poverty and unemployment; the anti-Semitism that hung over Europe like a poisonous cloud; and the fact that, throughout most of the 1930s, only the Soviet Union stood up to Hitler’s belligerent raving (until the very last days before the war, when the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact left Poland in the dubious position of being the first to take up arms against Hitler while simultaneously suffering a "humanitarian" Soviet invasion "to protect the ethnic minorities"). 

Zimmermann and Schuepper both belonged to Zionist organizations, which seemed to open the doors to a larger world and provided a route for someone like Zimmermann to overcome the social stigma attached to his “Asian,” i.e. Eastern Galician, origins. The first organization that Zimmermann joined, Kadimah,  was (like Zionism itself--Herzl had been a member) similar in its organization and even much of its terminology to a 19th century German students’ confederation. The members learned dueling. Zimmermann describes sessions with the fencing master, and avers that the members were so good at defending Jewish honor that non-Jews finally gave up challenging them. Later in his student career, he joined a larger Zionist student organization and won election to its board, noting that this was unprecedented for an “Asian.” He spent the last summer before the war in charge of a Zionist camp at the Polish seaside. 

By the winter of 1938, Schuepper had graduated from the commercial school and was working at a dry cleaner’s. She could not bring herself to inform her aunt ahead of time that she was going to the Akiba winter camp, and she got a dressing down when she returned home; even the 60-year-old uncle who had recently been expelled from Berlin warned her that coeducational camps were not for girls from good homes. Protests that she had neither been baptized nor renounced her faith failed to mollify her family. So she moved out to a rented room. She was seventeen. It was a big step but she expected, as the leader of her Akiba platoon assured her, that the whole unit would be in Eretz Israel within the year. 
 

The Final Peacetime Summer 

In 1938 and 1939, Henryk Zimmermann had a summer job running camps for students and their families under the auspices of the Ognisko (“Campfire”) organization. Ognisko owned a holiday villa in Zakopane and also held camps in the mountain resort of Krynica (where Zimmermann vacations to this day) and on the Hel peninsula at the Baltic shore, where the president of Poland also had his summer residence. Zimmermann was in charge of the seaside camp. In 1939, officials informed Ognisko that they could not use the Hel campsite out of consideration for president’s privacy, but Zimmermann suspected that the real reason had to do with military preparations. The head of the Jewish community in Danzig (Gdansk) arranged for an alternative site at Orlowo, a short way down the coast. 

Zimmermann invited relatives from Eastern Poland to the resort, along with friends from Cracow, and they enjoyed a period of shared relaxation. August, however, brought harbingers of the catastrophe. “First of all, our landlord, a naval officer, stopped appearing at the villa. We surmised that he had been mobilized. German aircraft could be heard more and more frequently as they flew over at night. They were violating sovereign Polish airspace by setting their course across the corridor that Germany wanted to annex. Rumors that paper money was losing all its value spread, and people began frantically spending all their banknotes. They wanted only silver coins, which quickly disappeared from circulation. Vacationers were packing up and leaving hastily in larger and larger numbers.” Zimmermann saw his relatives off on the return journey eastwards, but had to remain at the villa until all the other guests had gone. He finally traveled back to Cracow with his friends; there was such a crowd of people at the platform attempting to board the train that they had to climb through the windows in order to reach their reserved seats. 

In August 1939, Schuepper traveled to an Akiba camp in the Tatra mountains above Zakopane. The weather was foul and as soon as the rains let up for a moment, on August 15, they set out in three groups to climb nearby peaks. A storm hit and Scuepper’s group had to turn back; they arrived at the camp laughing at how they were all soaked to the skin. Then they learned that one of the other groups had been struck by lightning high up in the mountains, and had come back without four of their members. They broke up their camp and headed back home to Cracow, where they found that the tragedy was headline news. They feared that their parents would force them to renounce their membership, but soon the newspapers were concentrating on more ominous developments, announcing mobilization for war. 

To Vogler, life still seemed normal in the summer of 1939, but there was a sort of dull drumbeat, “like an accelerated throbbing in the human breast,” beneath the normality. “We were still living—with all the contradictions of our homeland, with the irritating nationalistic buffoonery, the love of church processions, uhlan lances, and romantic slogans on the one hand, and on the other the horrific filthy poverty and backwardness of the proletarian slums and the village huts sinking into the mud—in a shared, familiar, cozy interior that was ours, and that was as disheveled as the bedclothes after a good night’s sleep.” His generation had known nothing but peace, and the only way they could react to the approach of war was to thrust it out of mind. “…We went to the movies, to the theatre, to symphony concerts, and in those months we zealously frequented nightclubs where they were particularly enthusiastic about the most fashionable dance, the Lambeth Walk, a line dance with strutting steps but complicated gestures and poses that ends with a collective, triumphant, almost guttural cry accompanied by the raising of the right thumb in something like a victory salute.” 

By August, Vogler and his wife felt the need to get away from everything. They rented rooms in a guest house in Lanckorona, in the mountains just south of Cracow, and decided to abstain from the radio, newspapers, and making new acquaintances during their stay. They took hikes when the weather was sunny, wading among raspberry and currant bushes heavy with berries, and losing track of the days. 

Yet they could not help noticing how, at a certain moment, the other guests were whispering among themselves and packing feverishly. Vogler’s vow to abstain from the media broke down and he ran to buy a newspaper. General mobilization had been declared. They caught the Zakopane-Cracow train; it was running late and packed with vacationing families hurrying home. 

Readers' Comment

An interesting piece. It would be fascinating to know what happened to these people later once the war began.
- Greg, USA
In some cases, as indicated, you can read the books in English - ed.
 
 

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