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  • What Happened to Tarnów's Jews?
  • Adam Bartosz (bio)
    Translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger

The question must seem designed to provoke. After all, any resident of Tarnów knows what happened to Tarnów's Jews. The process of the destruction of Tarnów's Jewish community, which merely repeated a scenario the Germans used in successive cities and towns in the territories they occupied, can be described fairly accurately. Yet the more deeply the subject is probed, the more questions and gaps appear. It is extraordinarily hard to summon the socio-psychological context in which this drama played out. For years, I have been nagged by questions: How did their Christian neighbours feel watching the annihilation of thousands of Tarnów residents? How did they later perceive their absence? What trace (if any) did the killing of the non-Christian half of the town leave in the memories of Tarnów's remaining residents? I soon discovered that attempts to delve into the subject, to turn conversations to the feelings experienced at the time, attempts to solicit commentaries on the reflections of witnesses to the Holocaust of the Jewish half of the town, often meet with an impatient resistance, not to say reluctance. I have tried to understand the context of the war and the occupation, the universal terror and fear of the time, the anxiety for their own loved ones obscuring the image of their neighbours' tragic fate. For those who recall those times, they appear as a state of danger for everyone, whether Jew or Christian. Living in a state of danger, one does not think of others or compare one's own sufferings to those of others. There is no room for the observation that those next door are in even more danger, suffering even more.

Before the Holocaust, however, both communities had lived side by side for several centuries. Today's Tarnów residents seldom wonder what their town looked like before the war, before the Holocaust. Generally speaking, such reflections are saved for anniversary occasions, and, given that living eyewitnesses of those times are steadily decreasing in number and those times are becoming increasingly remote, the younger generation sees it as part of the abstract past. Just like the partitions of Poland, past wars, the communist period, or even the Swedish 'Deluge'.

Those who described Tarnów for posterity as witnesses of the time before the Holocaust can be counted on the fingers of one hand. One very interesting memoir, the saga of the Jewish Szancer family, full of diverse scenes from pre-war Tarnów mainly concerning the elite of Tarnów's Jews, was written by Roman [End Page 405] Szydłowski.1 Among non-Jewish authors, pride of place goes to Jan Bielatowicz and his Little Book,2 the enormous value of which is that it was written almost 'as it happened': Bielatowicz wrote his memoirs of Tarnów as an émigré in England immediately after the war. He recalled the Tarnów Jews, but rather anecdotally. Tarnów doctor Adam Wisz wrote his memoirs many decades after the war, from the perspective of much later experiences.3 He was raised in a Jewish house, spent his entire youth among progressive Jews, and had many Jewish friends. He recalls their destruction in a few sentences. Other works which provide a glimpse into pre-war Tarnów were written by authors born immediately after the war, based on various historical sources.4 Paradoxically, many memoirs from the time were published by Tarnów's Jews—mainly, of course, in the context of the Holocaust and surviving it.5 In particular, the memoirs of Professor Zvi Ankori are a fascinating description of the Tarnów of his day.6

This was a town of two nations, two religions, or—properly speaking—two cultures. A significant number of the Jews felt Polish and were not particularly religious. There were families of converts, and many families sat on the fence between the two cultures. But it was generally known who was a Jew, and who was a Pole or a Catholic. Today's Tarnów resident struggles to imagine a town...

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