VISIT OF HARRY KRANZ TO PILZNO, POLAND

SEPTEMBER 10-11, 1985

As part of a sight-seeing tour of Eastern Europe (principally Budapest, Prague and Warsaw) during the first two weeks of Sept., 1985, we decided to visit the two small towns in southeastern Poland in which my father (Abraham Louis Kranz, Pilzno) and mother (Anna Zimmerman Kranz, Dzikow) had been born. At the time when they were born (1893-1900), both towns, only about 75 miles apart, were in the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After World War I, Galicia was divided among Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, etc. Today Pilzno and Dzikow are in Poland, due east of Cracow.

Before departing in August; 1985, I had contacted the current president of the Pilzno Society in New York (William Seiden); a cousin in New Jersey (Anna Bochner) who had come from Pilzno before World War II; and the man they both referred me to, Abraham Einspruch of Brooklyn, N.Y., who had emigrated to the United States from Pilzno/ Tarnov in 1954, when he was 50 years old. He was the last U.S. resident to have visited Pilzno, but he had kept in touch by mail with a 70-year-old woman, Eleanora Micek, whose daughter, Maria, writes Einspruch periodically. He gave us the Micek address.

Uncle George Kranz had written me several years ago that my grandmother Chaya had re-married after her first husband died a few months before my father was born in 1893. it turned out that she had remarried twice, the last time to Abraham Einspruch's father!

On Tuesday morning, Sept. 10, 1985, my wife Shirley and I left Warsaw by plane to Cracow (also Krakow). In the Cracow airport, we were met by an English-speaking Orbis (Polish travel agency) "greeter" and our driver, Jan Swiba, who could not speak English. Since Orbis had been unable to get an interpreter for us, we accepted the offer of an English-speaking young man standing nearby who volunteered to guide us for two days. He was Romuald Kazmierszak of Warsaw, a flight engineer for the Polish Lot airline, who had flown to Cracow on a 5-day holiday, intending to mountain climb, but found the weather turning rainy.

After lunch in the "big city" of Tarnow, we arrived in the main square of Pilzno around 2 PM. We parked next to a taxi stand on Rynek Street, on which the Micek family lived at No. 28. There was no 28 visible from the street, but there was a 29, which housed a bar downstairs and apartments upstairs. Going through a hallway at 29, we came out in a rear courtyard, where there was a somewhat ramshackle small house with the number 28.

I knocked on the door and Mrs. Eleanora Micek came to the door. After some explanations by our guide, she invited us in. She had not received my letter of Aug. 28, 1985, indicating that we would be visiting on Sept. 10. When I mentioned Abraham Einspruch's name, however, her eyes lit up. She picked up a red phone, dialed the store on the town square where her daughter worked and told Maria to come home immediately, which Maria did.

We met Maria's son, Przomystarv Szewcryic, 8, and then Maria. Our interpreter read her my carbon copy of the letter I had sent, asking for her help when we arrived. Maria said she would be happy to take us around, but first had to return to the store to tell them she was taking off from work.

While awaiting Maria's return from the store, I took some photos of the town square; bought some picture postcards of Pilzno at a newsstand; visited one of the two churches in town, which was undergoing renovation; and passed by the combination Town Hall/School House in the central square as school was letting out.

Buses and taxis were crowded around the square, which also contained at least two bars and a bakery on the Rynek Street side. (Our driver, Jan, speculated the taxis were needed to drive workers home after they got done drinking, or to drive shoppers who lived on farms outside town and did not own cars.)

About 4 PM, as the children poured out of school to take regular city buses home adults lined up and jammed inside the bakery shop to buy loaves of freshly-baked white bread. It reminded me that in this town my father served his first apprenticeship as a baker at a very young age.

When Maria arrived, we all climbed in our rented car and drove about a half mile outside the center of town--up pebbly roads to a farm' where we parked the car and walked down a dirt road toward a farmhouse about 400 feet away. We were about to visit the remains of the Pilzno Jewish Cemetery and the Nazi "killing field." A farmer, carrying a rake over his shoulder, came toward us. Maria introduced him-- Franciszek Szymaszek, and later his wife, Janina.

Maria and the farmer pointed out the old pre-war Jewish cemetery remains on our right, just off the dirt road. Most of the grave stones still there were lying on their sides, partially and some totally covered with dirt. A few still showed above ground, but we never found grandmother's grave. As a boy of 11 in 1939--and before he was sent to Germany by the Germans to work in 1943--the farmer had witnessed the shooting of the Pilzno Jews here on this "killing field" by the Nazis. There was a small house here then, and the murdered Jews were ritually bathed and buried in mass graves by other Jews. Later, the death house was also destroyed.

There were two memorial stones visible on the cemetery grounds. The largest, about 10 feet tall, is under a tree, which is gradually covering and encircling it. I was told the large memorial was erected in 1945, when the bodies of the murdered Jews were exhumed (by Chilowicz and Bochner) and re-buried there, and the monument was reconstructed in 1970. It contains the names of about 43 Pilzno Jews killed by the Germans. I recognized the last names of such friends of my father as Rosenbaum, Bochner and Chilowicz, but since I was told that Mr. Einspruch has a list of all the names, I did not bother copying them.

The small memorial at the far end of the cemetery near the farm house bore the name Sara Storch, and I was told it had been erected in 1945-47 in memory of a one-legged man whom it took the Germans 7 bullets to kill. I was never quite sure who had built the two memorials (local Christians, local Jews or Jewish visitors), but hope to pin it down in further communication with Abraham Einspruch.

I felt a strong emotional pull in trying unsuccessfully to find grave stones with names of my father's mother Chaya and his father, Abraham Lieb Kranz. The ancient graves were desecrated, stones broken and covered with dirt, and only a few words could be made out here and there on the graves. Weeds were everywhere around and on the graves.

I asked the farmer, "Who owns the cemetery land now?" The Town Council, he replied. The cemetery was right next to his farm and had no barriers around it. He said the Town Council had been promising for several years to have a barbed-wire fence erected around the cemetery (the remains of an ancient fence and wall were visible on the ground), but had not gotten around to it yet.

From a short distance away (where we parked the car, for example), all you can see are farm fields off the road, and you have to look closely to find the fallen stones and the still-standing two memorial stones at the end of the cemetery near the farm house.

When we drove back to the center of town, I asked to see the site of the synagogue and my grandmother's home, formerly at 3 Maja Street (now re-named First of May Street). Maria went searching for an older man who would know the locale and came back with 76-vear-old Wladystaw Micek, a cousin who also lives on the town square at 4 Rynek, near City Hall.

With Maria and Wladystaw, we all walked across the square and down First of May Street. He showed us what is now a large hedge bordering the road, covering a fence, behind which is a shed and small factory, now privately owned. These buildings have replaced the synagogue and my grandmother's house, which were burned to the ground by the Nazis in September, 1939. Wladystaw said he knew my grandmother, Chaya, who died in 1933, and was buried in Pilzno.

Wladystaw said he worked with "Chilowicz" and when the Germans burned the synagogue, Chilowicz refused to come out of it and was burned to death inside. The rest of the Chilowicz family was killed in the Jewish ghetto, except for one brother who went to the USA.

Wiadystaw also said he was a friend of Abraham Einspruch and administered his properties in Pilzno. Wladystaw was arrested on the street one day by the Nazis (for no apparent reason) and spent two years in Dachau concentration camp. He has a 90-year-old sister living in Chicago. We distributed ball point pens from the U.S., kissed Maria good-bye and left. We spent the night in a Polish hotel in Rzeszow, half way to my mother's home-town of Dzikow.

(Visit to) OLESZYCE

On Sept. 11 we left Rzeszow and drove about 48 miles east and northeast to Oleszyce, the town near my mother's birthplace of Dzikow Stary (Old Dzikow) where she said Jews were buried, since Dzikow, about 5 miles away, did not have a Jewish cemetery.

In Oleszyce, our interpreter inquired in the Town Hall, where a clerk told him where we could find the Jewish Cemetery. It was only about 5 minutes away and just off the main road near the center of town. It was raining lightly--on and off--when we got there.

Unlike Pilzno, there was a fairly new wire fence completely around the cemetery, replacing one which lay on the ground in disrepair. There were two breaks in the new fence, one for people to walk through and the other wide enough for a horse and wagon to drive through. The cemetery was about a city block square, and within it we could see about 300 gravestones, mostly tilted over in a 60-degree angle, as if a strong wind had blown them half over. Some were lying on the ground or buried under dirt.

Besides the toppled and tilted gravestones, the outstanding feature of the cemetery was the thousands of clumps of animal dung (dogs, sheep, cats, etc.) dropped everywhere between and on the graves. And on the graves still legible, I could not find any names I recognized of any of my mother's Zimmerman/Kupersmith ancestors.

While I and my interpreter were examining the back end of the cemetery near a clump of trees, a man who evidently knew the area well came walking blithely through the cemetery. He walked the entire length of the cemetery, right up to the back fence, chewing on some food all the time; at the fence, he calmly lay down on the ground, picked up the bottom wire with one hand while holding his food in the other hand, and rolled under and through the fence. Then he got up again and walked away. We never exchanged a word. He seemed to be taking his usual short cut through the cemetery.

After some photos of the cemetery, we drove to the town center, where I tried unsuccessfully to buy picture postcards. They didn't have any. At a small post office, I bought airmail stamps for my Pilzno postcards.

(Visit to) DZIKOW

After about an hour in Oleszyce, we drove to Dzikow, now divided into Dzikow Stary (Old) and Dzikow Nowy(New). Dzikow Stary is where my mother was born and her mother and ancestors had been born and lived. Today there is not much noticeable difference between Old and New Dzikow, only a few kilometers apart.

The road leading to Dzikow from Oleszyce is fairly new, recently paved with tar and two lanes wide. Our auto easily passed horse-drawn wagons and our driver could zoom at over 55 miles per hour down this country road, when wagons, geese, cows or other animals did not block it. We did not find any trace of Jewish life, current or ancient, in either Dzikow. What we did see was mostly tobacco farming (growing and curing the leaves) and horse breeding and sales. There was also plenty of cattle, including flocks of geese and ducks, occasional cows. On each little farm, there was a small pond or lake, on which geese and ducks cavorted. A truck full of logs, newly-cut, was being driven to a lumber mill.

The homes were generally small--some very old, made of wood, looking like shacks. others were modern cottages, colorful, with gardens and TV antenna on the roofs. In the town itself, the dominant features were two churches, one of the Eastern Orthodox Christian faith and the other Roman Catholic. In this part of Poland near the Soviet Union, virtually every town had the two churches.

 

(Visit to) CIESZANOW

After less than an hour in Dzikow, we drove 10 kilometers (6 miles) to CIESZANOW, where my mother's father was born. It's only 2 miles from Oleszyce. Arriving here about noon, we stayed for about an hour.

We drove first to the center of town and parked across the street from the Town Hall. I decided to try to find out if there were birth records for my mother's father (Marcus Zimmerman) who had been born in this town and where he lived before marrying Gittel Coopersmith (Kupersmith) in Dzikow, my mother's mother, his second wife. (Born in 1865, Marcus had been a butcher, buying and slaughtering cattle in CIESZANOW. He brought my mother and her sister, Fannie (Alter) to the U.S. in 1910, returned to Dzikow in 1913, and in 1920 emigrated to the U.S. permanently with Gittel in time for the marriage of my mother and father in N.Y.C. in 1921. Marcus died in 1938 in N.Y.C. and his widow, Gittel, died in 1947.)

Before entering the Town Hall, I took a photo of my interpreter in front of the building. Immediately, a policeman materialized and started questioning (or accusing) me in Polish, which, of course, I did not understand. My interpreter determined that the cop didn't like my photographing the red signs in front of the Town Hall. (I don't know why). The cop then asked for my passport; he started copying, asking my interpreter what my name was and how "Kranz" is pronounced. Next he had the interpreter and driver also produce their passports and he made notes in his book from each of them. Shirley, waiting in the car a few feet away, was not bothered. We were then free to go.

The interpreter and I entered the Town Hall, where we found only one person working on the entire first floor. She happened to be the Town Registrar. When told we wanted the birth records for Zimmerman, born before 1890, she got out several hand-written books and started scanning for the name. She examined all the records until 1915, when I stopped her and told her it was before 1890, maybe 1870 or 1860. She said records before 1890 had been destroyed, but the church might have a record for Christian babies born before 1890. However, if Zimmerman were Jewish, she said, no record would be available. The synagogue never turned in the birth records for Jewish babies before World War 11, (as the churches did), and the records were burned by the Nazis with the synagogue in 1939.

Asked if there were any remains of the synagogue, she said yes, not far from the remains of the Jewish cemetery. We asked directions and took off, walking about 5-6 blocks, crossing the junky town square block and proceeding 3-4 blocks further with guidance from a local woman walking our way.

Within a square block bounded by a thin layer of tall trees, but no fence, was the site of the Jewish Cemetery. It was two blocks from two churches and across the street from the Christian cemetery. Unfortunately, there was not a single stone showing above ground. There was a slight hill in the center of the plot, as if stones below had been covered over with a mile of dirt. In the corner were some more trees. The only thing on the plot was grass and some chickens plucking at the grass. I took a photo of the chickens to mark the place where the cemetery once was visible. "This needs an archeologist," my interpreter remarked.

When we left the cemetery, we walked past the large Christian cemetery, with large crosses and monuments, behind a wire fence. We walked past one of the churches and crossed the street. Inside a fence and stored materials was a very large brick building, two stories high and topped by a double tiled roof. This was the former synagogue; it had not been burned down, but had been converted into a warehouse for agricultural seed, feed and other farm products. All symbols of Judaism had been removed. Only warehouse signs now adorned the building. Around the outside stood 5 or 6 poorly dressed men, talking.

In an alley near the former synagogue were some very poor wooden houses on an unpaved road. This could have been the ghetto where Jews formerly lived, but there was no evidence of it now.

About 1 PM we left CIESZANOW for the Rzeszow airport and our flight back to Warsaw. The next day we visited the remains (two monuments) of the Warsaw Ghetto and of the rebuilt old town, flattened during World War 11. Two days later we were back home.