Today we set out with our long time guide, Paulina and our very capable bus driver, Marek, to the mountain regions in southern Poland. Paulina spoke to the students as we were driving to Rabka about how this region ties in with the historical narrative of Poland, giving them a context for our visit today.
Our first stop was Rabka with our dear friend Narcyz Listkowski. We started coming to Rabka in 2010 when we were stuck in Poland due to the volcano in Iceland and the Polish plane crashing in Russia on the way to an important commemoration of Katyn. We came to this region because Mr. Barmore had suggested during our extra time in Krakow (he and made it home to Israel before the shutting down of the airport) that we go to Rabka and Zakopane. After a few years, we started adding this region to our itinerary. In 2015 we contacted the mayor who put us in touch with Narcyz as he was the town’s historian on the Jewish history of the region. Narcyz is an electrician by profession who became interested in the history of the Jewish community in Rabka about fifteen years ago. He had grown up and still lives in a house that had been owned by Jews in what was a Jewish neighborhood of Rabka. He said that since his early childhood, people had spoken about his house and other homes on the street as also previously owned by Jews. Many residents of these houses felt that if the Jews returned they would be expelled from their homes, so Narcyz said he was raised with a feeling of anxiousness. He also said he had never seen a Jew in his childhood. In 2008 a book had been published, Dark Secrets of Tereski Villa, and in that book he saw a photograph of his home and first learned that it had been the building which house the ritual mikvah and that during the period of 1941-1942 Jewish workers had been brought there and disinfected. He then began to do more research about Jewish history in Rabka in his free time.
Narcyz took part of the day off to meet us and taking us on a three hour tour of the community and this year he brought his daughter along to be with us. He first took us to what once was the Jewish Quarter. He showed us a building that made up the marketplace and even pointed out steps that were once belonging to the home of a Jewish family – remnants of Jewish history embedded in modern structures. As we walked through this section of town, Narcyz pointed out homes and businesses and showed us historic photos to verify their existence. He knows every single place in Rabka that is associated with its Jewish history and the people who lived there. As we stood on a bridge with a picturesque view of the stream running through Rabka, Narcyz mentioned that survivors and witnesses told him that on that bridge is where the local Jews would celebrate Sukkot and often Shabbat. We stood there in awe of how visible and central these celebrations were in this community.
At the end of our walk we arrived at the Rabka Synagogue steps that Narcyz had dug up himself – another remnant visible today because he is truly a righteous person. He does this work for no other reason than to shed light on a Jewish community that once was in his hometown.
We then drove up the hill to the area of the now convent and former site of the interrogation center during the Nazi period. He told us that the building before us was the School of St. Theresa, established in 1995 and run by an order of nuns. It is a school for children who are blind or partially sighted, as well as children with physical or developmental disabilities. Today Rabka has a population of 16,000 but no Jews. The first mention of Jews in Rabka was in an 1830 church document which mentioned one Jewish family. Ten years later there were 35 Jews and the Jewish population continued to grow after a spa was established here in 1874. By the end of the 19th century under the Austro-Hungarian Empire there were 280 Jews.
He showed us a map of homes in the area and on the map he had highlighted the homes owned by Jews. He said that there were 7,000 people before the war in six villages which were incorporated into Rabska. Rabka itself has about 3,000 people and 400 Jews. The building we stood before before the war had been a sanitorium or hospital for Jewish children. More than 3,500 Jewish children had been treated here for lung ailments or tuberculosis, which even today is a specialty of Rabka. From 1936 the building was a girls’ junior high school, and then started its tragic history. On September 3, 1939 German military units entered the area – many of the people had escaped east. About 20 kilometers from Rabka the Germans had met strong resistance and more than 50 tanks had been destroyed so the Germans entered the area furious. In one town 60% of the buildings were burned to the ground and townspeople were randomly killed. Christians and Jews had fled the area but soon returned because the Soviets had entered from the east. Jewish families that lived in the east behind the Soviet line, for the most part survived, but 90% of the Jews who fell under German control were murdered.
The Germans established in 1939 a school for training security police in Zakopane, but quickly the area became popular with Germans for its leisure activities and it proved not conducive to having the training school in such a popular area, so in 1940 the school was moved to this building, replacing the girls’ junior high school, under the command of Wilhelm Rosenbaum. Steps to the school were created with headstones from local Jewish cemeteries. There was no Jewish cemetery in Rabka. After the war, they were removed, but not immediately. Narcyz showed us a photo of the building in 1962 and the stairs were still there. In this school Germans were trained in this process. This building for bureaucratic training showed the tentacles of Nazi ideology and how they infiltrated even the smallest of towns.
The registration of all Jews in the area took place here, where we were standing. They had a table and officers and the Jews arrived to be categorized into who could work and who could not. 695 Jews, including about 160 children, gathered here in May 1942, and were classified. After registration the people went home, but the Nazis had all of their names and personal information. Then the Judenrat created lists. People were told they were going to be resettled. They came back here when called, but were locked in the cellar of the school or taken to nearby stables. When it was dark they were taken to the forest. Jewish workers had already prepared mass graves. Then there were scheduled executions: May 20, May 25, June 28, June 29 and July 17. An estimated 204 people were murdered from Rabka in this fashion. Narcyz was not aware of the number of Jews from other towns who were in the three villas, who might have similarly been executed. On the list of Jews from Rabka, names of those executed had been scratched out with the date of execution noted.
On August 13, 1942, Narcyz said that the remaining Jews of Rabka, along with about two thousand Jews from neighboring towns, were brought to the train station where a train which had been picking up Jews from various communities arrived. They were loaded onto the train and it proceeded to another town, ultimately arriving in Belzec where all of the passengers were murdered.
We walked down the path to the Jewish cemetery. A few years ago the winter storms had done a lot of damage in the cemetery and several trees had been uprooted. That had all been cleared and the cemetery was well manicured. A new memorial had been erected which had inscriptions in Polish, Hebrew and Yiddish. In part it said “In memory of the Jewish victims who were killed and interred here….May God avenge them. They’re our memory.” The memorial had been funded by Leo Gaterer from Dobrej.
Narcycz also pointed out that in the memorial there are a few new gravestones that he had pulled out of the local stream. He said there are surely more gravestones there that had been repurposed and discarded in the river during the Holocaust years and after. Once again, we kept thinking about the erasure of Jewish life and the continuous voids we see on this trip.
As we walked out of the Jewish cemetery I could hear the students talking about the efforts of the nuns and they wondered about the nuns that live there today. They also were speaking amongst each other about the juxtaposition of the horror of this history and the beauty of the surroundings.
Our last stop was visiting the nearby mountain region of Zakopane for lunch and more fresh mountain air!
