MUSINGS 7-23-03

 

NOWA SLUPIA.  Nowa Slupia is a village in a rural Polish valley of about 10,000 people.  It lies at the foot of a Polish National Park, The Gory Swietokrzyskie, and a forested mountain ridge rising to 600 meters (about 2000 feet) that was a center of armed resistance to the Nazis during WWII.  It is about 30 kilometers east of the provincial center of Kielce, 120 kilometers northeast of Krakow and 100 miles south of Warsaw.  According to the 1931 census, approximately 1000 of the 1600 residents of the village were Jewish.  When visiting in July 2003 with my wife, daughter, youngest son and Polish Jewish guide (a graduate student in Krakow), I observed a gravestone memorial depicting a rifle, violin and resistance flag on the front lawn of a residence in Nowa Slupia. The gravestone stated that the memorial was for a freedom fighter that died in Auschwitz in 1944. As discussed later, Polish resistance to the Nazis should not imply a brotherhood-in-arms of Jews and Christians.  There was no evidence on the observed memorial of any Jewish sympathies or relation.

 

On my visit I explored my family's roots in Nowa Slupia.  I had already obtained the birth certificate of my maternal grandfather, David Fruchtman, a.k.a. David Frochtman, a.k.a. David Fruchtmann, born in Nowa Slupia on January 26, 1869.  In Poland I obtained David's parents' marriage certificate:  this document stated David's parents, Israel Frochtman (born 1843 in Nowa Slupia) and Sosia (Mandel) Frochtman (born in 1845 to Majer & Prywa Mandel of nearby Lagow), were married on July 6, 1864 in Opatow (a.k.a. Apts, a.k.a. Opta where David's wife-to-be, Annie R. Wotman, was born September 18, 1883); Israel's parents, Herscheh & Laja Frochtman, also of Nowa Slupia, gave the groom away at Israel and Sosia's 1864 wedding.  I'm searching for documentation to confirm that David married his beloved Annie on June 12, 1900 in Opatow, and Lillian, their first child, was born in Nowa Slupia on September 19, 1902. 

 

At 44 years of age, David departed on the "Amerika" from Hamburg, Germany in route to Toronto, Canada via Ellis Island, where he arrived December 20, 1913.  His place of residence on his passenger records was Slupia, Russia (in 1913 there was no Poland - during this period Nowa Slupia was part of Russia).  David would later bring his immediate family, brothers and sister to North America.  His mother remained in Poland where he returned to visit her near the end of her life. 

 

If we assume that David's grandparents were born at least twenty years before David's father Israel was born, it is likely that Fruchtmans', a.k.a. Frochtmans', a.k.a. Fruchtmanns', lived in Nowa Slupia for 100 years or more.  My research also linked the family to Warsaw, nearby Lubin and Krakow, Poland plus the Lwow, Tarnopol, and Wojewodztwa areas of the Ukraine.  There is an ongoing project to catalog and index approximately 10,000,000 Polish records of Jewish births, marriages and death dating back to 1808.  Currently, the project is about 20% complete. 

 

Other than documents connecting Frochtmans to Nowa Slupia, what other evidence of Frochtman or Jewish heritage did I find in Nowa Slupia?

 

We visited the local tourist office.  The friendly operator immediately sought to help us in our quest and called a woman who he said would recall the Jews.  She agreed to meet with us.  He closed the tourist office and walked us the approximate one-quarter mile to her home located on a dirt road across a creek behind the town center.  We were invited in, served tea and cookies, and enjoyed a Polish hospitality. 

 

Our friendly elderly Nowa Slupian, Michalina Rybczynska, who was born in 1917, told us that Jews owned and operated all the businesses in town when she moved into the village as a little girl in the 1920's.  She was a friend with the Jews as was her father.  She told us the richest Jew, Mr. Zimmerman, gave her father the deed to the town center before the Nazis deported him.  She said everyone cried as the Jews were rounded up in the town center and taken away.  She explained that she lost the deed when she moved to her present residence.  Her daughter indicated their desire to prove their family's ownership of the central business district and inquired of our Jewish guide whether she could help them prove ownership of the property through a substitution witness process.  Our guide indicated unfamiliarity with this process, and our discussion ensued.  Later, the elderly lady offered to ride in our car and point out the locations where once there was Jewish establishments, including the cemetery.  We drove around the town with her pointing out, "Here was the fruit market, this was the butcher, this was the tailor, the bakery, the restaurant, the cafe, etc." and "this was the cemetery."  She declined to get out of the car at the cemetery "because she didn't want to cause trouble for her daughter and son-in-law" who shared her residence.  The former Jewish cemetery was now a fire station with a field adjacent.  There were no gravestones.  There was no memorial plaque.  There was no evidence that this land was the resting place of anyone. 

 

Although before WWII Jews owned virtually all land and improvements, operated all businesses, and constituted approximately two-thirds of the population, there is no evidence today that Jews ever lived in Nowa Slupia.   According to the tourist official, we were only the second Jews who had ever come to Nowa Slupia searching for their personal history.  The first Jews were searching for land they believed they owned.

 

From Nowa Slupia we drove on to Opatow, where my grandmother Annie was born and David & Annie married.  It lies 30 kilometers east of Nowa Slupia on a significant transport route between Warsaw-Rzeszow and Kielce-Lublin.  With a municipal charter dating back to 1282 and history for merchant trading, Opatow has a tradition as an administrative center.   Like Nowa Slupia, Jews played a large role in civic life and constituted approximately two-thirds of the population according to the 1931 census.  Five survivors of the Holocaust from Opatow (a.k.a. Apts) have posted on jewishgen.org a seventeen page English abstract of their Memorial Book, plus a Yizkor Book.  It is a heart wrenching account of their survival and the demise of many of their brethren.  They conclude their Memorial with the following:

 

"In 1944 there were still 1,500 Apt Jews alive.  But to our great sorrow only 300 Jews survived the war.  These are scattered today in all parts of the world.

 

We, the survivors, were forced to begin life anew and strike roots in strange fields.  In Apt itself, not a sign of Jews or of the Jewish community that existed for hundreds of years was left.  The German murderers uprooted every trace of Jewish life in Apt.

 

                                                                        PINCHAS HOCHMITZ

                                                                        ELIYAHU SILBERBERG

                                                                        RIVKE KATZ

                                                                        MEIR LUSTMAN

                                                                        SHLOMO FEIDMAN"

 

 

Included in their Yizkor Book are:

 

            'Fruchtman Volf, wife Sarah, children Hindele, Yosef;

            Wotman Yechiel, wife Reyzel, children Nechte, Feyge-Sheyndel, Avraham;

            Wotman Zalman, wife Sarah"

(Wotman is the maiden name of my grandmother, Annie R. (Wotman) Fruchtman.)

 

We were directed to a park where the Jewish cemetery in Opatow had been.   I estimate the park consisted of twenty-five acres or more of a forested area, with a school built in the center.  At the back of the park, near where a handful of teenagers were drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana, we found the only evidence of Jewish life in Opatow: flat on their back, facing skyward, nine concrete slabs embedded with partial Hebrew gravestones arranged in the shape of a menorah.  There was no other evidence that the park had been a cemetery, although there was a peculiar broken concrete sculptor that included a Star of David near the park's entrance.

 

I await further response for my record requests for birth, death and marriages of my ancestors from Polish officials in Kielce, Nowa Slupia, Opatow and Sandomierz.

 

I also await reconciliation of my Polish soul.  Although I have Romanian and other blood in my heritage (Austrian?  Slovenian?), there is a Polish history that my lineal ancestors have passed on through me.  How should I view my lineal ancestors' neighbors, compatriots, customers, and friends.... enemies?

 

Last night I finished reading Brothers In Arms by Peter Duffy, "the true story of the Bielski brothers who built a secret town in the heart of the forest to save their people from the Nazis."  Tuvia, Asael & Zus Bielski were Jewish partisans who partnered with Christian Poles and Russian partisans to save perhaps 1000 or more Jewish lives.  Situated in what is now Belarus in a physical location remarkably similar to Nowa Slupia, these brothers fought Nazis, anti-Semitic Poles, and even Jews who challenged their authority. Although their commitment to saving Jews is beyond question, they were violent cruel men.  If I had found myself in a time and place where I was given the choice, I concluded that I would have joined with them and behaved similarly.

 

When the Nazis invaded Poland, every Pole had to make life or death choices.  Although the Nazis proceeded during WWII with deadly efficiency to eliminate Jews as a people, they did not target only Jews.  Brothers In Arms details that the Nazis and their Polish collaborators killed many non-Jews who helped Jews, and Poles who simply didn't cooperate satisfactorily.  The Bielski brothers killed Nazis and collaborating Poles with equal disdain.  They also avoided the anti-Semitic partisans who opposed the Nazis and their collaborators but who did not oppose the Jews cruel elimination. 

 

If you or your family were a Christian Pole during WWII, would you have helped the Jews, tried to stay uninvolved, or collaborated with the Nazis?

 

In a world where killing was a common outcome in daily life, there was wariness, alliances of convenience, and enormous strain.   It was not a time to "have a nice day."  With this background, my soul is not so quick to condemn all Poles.

 

But anti-Semitism is deeply imbued in Polish history.   Our Jewish Polish guide reported that there are estimated to be 1,100 Jews in Poland, 100 of whom live in Krakow, of which she is one.  After WWII she said there were 300,000 Jewish survivors of the 3,000,000 Polish Jews who constituted somewhere between 20-25% of all Poles before WWII.  In addition, 300,000 Russian Jews came to Poland, bringing the post-WWII Jewish population to 600,000.  Despite the many opportunities presented abroad after WWII, it is simply inexplicable that a hospitable environment for Jews in Poland would leave such a paltry community remaining, absent Polish antipathy toward Jews.  I note that Kielce, the main town between Warsaw & Krakow, the largest town near Nowa Slupia, was the site of a July 1946 pogrom.  According to The Rough Guide to Poland by Mark Salter and Jonathan Bousfield, Fifth Edition, 2002, at page 491:

 

"...Inflamed by rumours of the attempted ritual murder of an eight-year-old Gentile Polish child, elements of the local populace attacked buildings occupied by Jewish survivors of the Nazi terror, killing 42 people and wounding another forty over a period of hours, with no sign of intervention from the local police.  ...The precise circumstances surrounding the pogrom or the security forces' failure to prosecute the local alcoholic whose claim that his son had been abducted sparked the killings - a story he himself later admitted to have fabricated - were met with a deafening silence...."

 

 

Stalinist era executions for the killings and subsequent apologies notwithstanding, I contend I have a legitimate question in inquiring about the root of Polish anti-Semitism.  Given the importance of the Catholic Church in Poland I suspect the Church's teachings and practices must play some role in explaining Polish anti-Semitism.  I am ignorant of what the Church's efforts have been to address this question, so I apologize if an analysis is available of which I am uninformed.  I do pledge to pursue the answer to this question over time.  With the answer may lie my own resolution of whether I explore further my Polish heritage, or, share my beloved grandfather David's farewell bid to his Polish roots:  good riddance.

 

Sincerely,

 

Norman Kulla

July 23, 2003