Between my visits to Staszow I had arranged to go to journey with the help of Chris Malczewski and Lucy Lisowska. I met them at the modern an at the modern Hotel Criistal lobby. Chris had been referred to me by Stanley Diamond and Mark Halpern to act as my guide and translator in my travels in the Bialystok area. Chris is Jewish Record Index’s man on the ground in Poland, as well being an independent guide and a true entrepreneurial spirit. One of his sidelines is selling bulk curing barns to Polish tobacco farmers. He is garrulous, very funny and completely fearless. Lucy is one of the four or five Jewish people currently living in Bialystok. She is a Polish language teacher for 10- to 12-year olds in public school, but her passion is the preservation of the Bialystok Jewish cemetery. More about that later. She seems frail and sad and is completely committed to honoring the memory of her Jewish ancestors.
Lucy was able to finagle me a room in the Hotel Branicki, a real feat since there were over two thousand doctors in town for a convention this week and every hotel in town was completely booked. I still don’t quite know how she did it, but she did.
My father’s mother, Anna Novick (Chana Nowinksi) and family emigrated to the United States in 1913 from Sidra (pronounced Chidra and known as Shidza in Yiddish), about an hour’s drive north of Bialystok, so off to Sidra we went. Besides being an excellent guide, Chris is an expert driver of Polish roads, which is no mean feat. If you have not been to Poland yet, you need to go if, for nothing else, then to experience the exhilaration and terror of Polish roads. What can compare with an eighteen-wheeler attempting to pass a line of eight or nine cars with your car closing from the opposite direction at ninety kmph?
First, some background on Sidra. In 1931, the Sokolskiego district had a population of almost 85% ethnic Poles, 9% Jews, 6% Bielorussians and .2% Tatars. In Sidra, one of many towns and villages in the district, of the 1,000 souls, 374 were Jewish. The percentage had been much higher, nearly 60% at the turn of the century, but the infamous Bialystok pogroms of 1906 and general economic depression spurred many area Jews to flee Poland and Sidra, like so many communities, was drained. My grandmother recounted how she and her sister had been protected by her well-muscled and determined older brothers when Cossacks attempted to harm them when she was a girl.
The town square still exists, and it is a shadow of its former self. Instead of a vibrant community hub, it is a quiet park where local high school students hang out during their lunch break. The only sign of commercial activity, past or present was a vacant pub/restaurant. The former Jewish community center was in good shape and is now a private residence. Homes and stores (it seems that these were fairly interchangeable) formerly occupied by Jews still stood. From an American standard, they were quite shabby. But, this is not the place to be applying American standards. The stone foundation of a Calvinist church was easily discernible and had been memorialized. The modest Catholic church stands at the far corner of the square and is in excellent repair. A nearby building owned by the local parish tells a familiar tale. Prior to the war, the large two-story structure had been used by the parish for storage and, perhaps, meetings. The local communist government took it over after the war and turned it into a cultural center with a cinema and coffee house, enlarging it to its current size. When communism collapsed, the parish petitioned to have it returned, which was accomplished. However, the large building is expensive to maintain, the coffers are low, so now it sits vacant and gradually being eaten away by the elements.
When we arrived in Sidra, Chris announced that we should go visit the mayor; it will probably be the highlight of the year for the fellow. Unfortunately, His Honor was not in, so we went into the town library, where we met Margaret, the town librarian, who sat us down at the large table in the middle of the room and began producing a variety of documents. So many things that I take for granted in my work researching tax and title records in the United States, are simply non-existent in this place of shifting boundaries and countless wars. For example, there was no map of the town as it existed before World War II. However, she did have access to a number of interesting bits of information. I found the Sidra section of the 1929 Annuaire De La Pologne, a national listing of businesses, extraordinarily interesting. As was the case in so many Polish communities, the core of business owners were Jews. A good number of familiar Jewish names were listed – Farber, Frydman and Lewicki – among them. Please note that the last name would be pronounced as “Levitski”. H. Lewicki was a carpenter, as was I in an earlier career.
However, I was on the trail of Nowinski, my grandmother’s surname. My grandfather, Abraham Levit, was born in Odessa, so I doubt of any links between him and the carpenter in Sidra. Since he was born in the Ukraine, the English spelling of his last name was more likely to have been Lewicky. In any event, we needed to press on.
Our next stop was at the home of Maria Kondrat, the mother-in-law of the town social services administrator. Mrs. Kondrat is a spry and vivacious woman well into her eighties. I asked her if she had had any Jewish friends. She guffawed and said, “We were all friends.” When many of the Jews’ homes were burned in the early stages of the Nazi occupation, her parents took in a Jewish family. She said that even though they only had one cow, that cow helped to feed the eight people that lived in that house for one year. At the end of the year, the Jews were rounded up and liquidated, either on the spot or at Treblinka. She could remember a few names, but Nowinski was not one that rang a bell for her. Mrs. Kondrat also maintained that there had been not one, but two shuls; one for men and one for women. As we left her, Lucy muttered to me that there was no way that there could have been this arrangement. Perhaps, the old lady had mistaken the mikvah for a synagogue.
Our next stop was to the local grammar school, where we met with the principal, a burly, energetic fellow, a Mr. Romanovich. He showed us the only pre-war records that he had, a thick sheaf of old of papers. While Chris and I leafed through the files of students enrolled in the academic year 1939-1940, Lucy engaged Mr. Romanovich in conversation, identifying herself as a fellow educator and someone who is actively working in the field of indexing such records. And, because Lucy is Lucy, the principal, without asking, suggested that she take these precious sixty-five year old files back to Bialystok with her for copying. I could not believe that three unannounced strangers could be welcomed with such trust. Lucy gathered them up and held them as though they were a precious infant.
Mr. Romanovich escorted us out of the school building, being bid “Good day” by the students who were hurrying over from the junior high to his school for lunch. The gymnasium, apparently, does not have its own lunch facilities. He showed us the remains of the town’s castle, though he said it would hardly qualify as a castle, on the highest point in town, directly adjacent to the school. This and the entire region had, at one time, been the property of the Radziwill family, Jackie Kennedy's ancestsors. An area, about twenty by twenty and covered by a tin roof, showed the shambles of a thick wall made of large bricks. We also met one of the junior high teachers, who was also hurrying to lunch, a youngish man whose master’s thesis on early- to mid-twentieth century Sidra Chris had perused earlier in the library and from which the earlier mentioned statistical data had been gathered.
As we left the school grounds heading for our next stop, I asked Chris if this work wasn’t basically that of a detective. He enthusiastically affirmed and added that the key is to gain the comfort of people, who are normally reserved and not terribly trusting. In short, in order to succeed in this work one must be a schmoozer, a diplomat and, above all, keenly interested in what these people have to say about their lives. Your interests can be advanced only at the appropriate time.
We paused on our mission to look at the well-kept three story apartment building that now stands on the site of the synagogue. The wooden building, so typical of this area, had been destroyed by the Nazis in 1941. There was no indication that this spot had once been the religious center of the town's Jewish population.
The family of one Jan Kucsinzki, born 1912, welcomed us into their home. Mr. Kucsinzki hobbled in, his blue eyes sparkling, and sat down with us. In keeping with Chris’ dicta on conducting such interviews, the old man told us how he had fought with the Polish Second Corps under General Anders in Iraq, Iran and Palestine. He and his regiment mates had ended the war in England and a number had stayed behind. He returned to Sidra where he continued to work on the farm that was his sole family inheritance. Recalling his experiences in Poland and abroad in the 1940’s he remarked, “The nature of a man changes during war”.
Though the school records had revealed a Jewish/Gentile ratio of about 40/60, he said that he had had only a few Jewish schoolmates and that he could not recall any names. With a beaming smile, he said he could remember some of the Jewish girls and how beautiful they were. As Mrs. Kondrat had claimed, he remembered two synagogues, too. Later in my journey, I learned that Sidra had had two small prayer houses, in addition to the synagogue. On the north side of town, where Mr. Kucsinzki now resided, Jews and Christians had lived side-by-side in apparent harmony. He recalled that the main trade shop in town was owned by a Kramski and had been quite large. It had been destroyed, no doubt, during the war since all the existing buildings still on the square, with the exception of the former Jewish community center, were all small, certainly none larger than a thousand square feet or so. He also remembered his Jewish neighbors celebrating Sukkoth and how they ate and prayed in their huts for a week.
Another family member, perhaps the elderly man’s daughter-in-law, came in and sat down. In the course of the conversation she invited Lucy to come back as she had over two hundred old photos of Sidra, many of them featuring Jewish life. As usual, Lucy engaged the woman with her usual charm and the old man’s relation had an astonishing story to tell. In the two reference sources on the cemetery that Chris and I both had, it was stated that the metzuvot (headstones) had been taken from the cemetery and used to pave the road to an adjoining town during the Nazi occupation. The woman stated that when she came to the town in 1952 there were still a good number of headstones in the cemetery and that over the years townspeople had taken them and used them for construction projects. My heart fell to my stomach. This place of apparently good relations had, at the very least, descended into the casual barbarism of cultural ignorance.
We headed off to the cemetery and had some difficulty finding it, though we had been told that it was just beyond the river and that a memorial had been installed. Chris pulled over and, as he is wont to do, asked a young woman pushing a baby in a stroller if she knew where the old Jewish cemetery was. She said that she did and that she would show us; it was just ahead.
We pulled over in the shade and Lucy said, “I’m getting out. I smell metzuvot”, and proceeded to prowl over a grassy field. The young women caught up with us and Chris, charming as usual, took the stroller from her and pushed the baby for 20 or 30 yards. Sure enough, Lucy had found the cemetery on her own. We entered the sacred ground and took a beeline to what appeared to be an absolutely pristine headstone. The extraordinarily helpful woman, whose name unfortunately I forget, told us that road crews had found it when repairing the road and had brought it here and installed it. I asked if they had got any permission from anybody for this job, and she shrugged and said no. Upon a quick inspection, it was clearly not a headstone, but the memorial that we had been told about earlier. She was quite familiar with the spot; her husband is an environmental engineer and her brother a forester and all three have a strong interest in historical and environmental matters. For all that, she said that she lived in a Jewish house built in 1905. I asked if that was special to her in any way. No, not really - a house is a house. She also mentioned that hunks of headstone had been incorporated into the foundation of one of her neighbor’s homes, thus backing up the content of our previous conversation.
She also told us a story she had heard repeated when she was young. Before the war several young men used to brag about going out to the Jewish cemetery and urinating on the graves. To a man, they all came back from the war disabled or disfigured in some way. Other townspeople pointed out that their blasphemous behavior had been repaid.
While Chris continued his conversation with our historian, I asked Lucy to accompany me to one of the few barely distinguishable headstones. Rounded and moss-covered one could easily walk by them and not have a second thought. Yet, on closer examination the faintest traces of Hebrew lettering was unmistakable. We said Kaddish together under the beautiful blue, autumn Polish sky hard by the pines where one hundred Jews had been shot.
I left Sidra feeling that this work was just beginning in many ways. The indexing project had gotten a nice gift and, perhaps, Lucy’s return visit will yield some photographic treasures, as well. Chris said that there really is no end to this work. Once you peel back one layer, there is another to greet you. More than the materials acquired, I was struck by the emotional load that my psyche had taken on. How do I reconcile the disparate themes that I had encountered? The twinkle in the old man's eye as he recalled the pretty Jewish girls. The pissed-on graves. Mr. Romanovich's trust and generosity. The thievery of headstones to be used for building material. And the biggest one: hundreds of my ancestors and their fellows were murdered or had fled this town and now there were none. None. That loss was fading from memory as our conversation with Maria and Jan had demonstrated. A few were well aware of that absence and the effect that it had on the soul of Sidra. As we walked across the town square with Margaret's husband, he gestured at the emptiness, "After the Jews were gone, this place has become nothing."
