Afterword

What this book has attempted to do is to look at the Jewish heritage of Polish Galicia from a contemporary perspective, focusing on what can be understood of the past and the outstanding Jewish civilization that flourished there by looking at the present-day realities of what has been left behind....

The Holocaust: Sites of Massacre

This chapter recounts what happened in Polish Galicia during the Holocaust, emphasizing the brutality of the destruction by the Germans and the range of locations where Jews were murdered in occupied Poland. It includes photographs that go beyond conventional symbols that reveal how the Jews were hunted down and murdered. It also describes the remaining physical fixtures in Auschwitz, such as the barracks, barbed wires, entry gates, and the ruins of the gas chambers, that testify the force and fury of the systematic annihilation of over one million Jews. The chapter talks about the case of the Bełżec death camp in south-east Poland in which 450,000 Jews were deported and gassed immediately upon arrival. It considers Bełżec as the cemetery of the Jews of Galicia as countless Jewish communities met their end in 1942 and only seven have been thought to have survived.

The Revival of Jewish Life

This chapter talks about the people who are creating and maintaining projects that memorialize both the Jewish life that existed in Polish Galicia for centuries and the enormity of the Holocaust during which it was destroyed. It discloses the public acknowledgment of the Jewish heritage that has been ongoing since Poland regained its democratic freedom in 1989, which led to the revival of Jewish life. It also describes the main Holocaust memorial in Kraków, which is comprised of symbolic abandoned chairs scattered through an entire city to highlight the Jewish absence. The chapter mentions non-Jewish Poles who have become aware of the past in Poland that included Jews and Jewish culture. It details post-Holocaust Poland in the 1970s that was severely restricted and in danger of facing extinction as 90 percent of Holocaust survivors had emigrated.

Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of Jewish civilization that developed in Poland about 1,000 years until it was brutally destroyed during the Holocaust. It describes Poland as the centre of the Jewish diaspora and the home to the largest Jewish community in the world as 90 percent of the world's Jews lived in Europe before their mass migration to the USA in the middle of the nineteenth century. It also cites the contributions of the great rabbis of Poland to both Jewish law and Jewish spirituality, including political, artistic, literary, and intellectual movements that have characterized the Jewish world in the modern period. The chapter introduces present-day photographs that offer a completely new and contemporary way of looking at the Jewish past in Poland that was left in ruins. It explains that the photographs serve as a tribute to the rich Jewish cultural heritage of Poland.

Jewish Life in Ruins

This chapter focuses on ruins as a key present-day reality of the Jewish heritage in Poland. It recounts the German occupation of Poland in the Second World War, in which about 90 percent of the country's 3.3 million Jews were forced out of their homes and murdered, leaving behind towns and villages that testify to the richness and diversity of the culture they had built up over many centuries. It also discusses how the ruins bear witness to the immensity of Poland's deliberate destruction. The chapter describes the ruins that continued to physically survive in the present-day, such as roofless synagogues and desecrated Torah arks. It talks about the ruins of the cemeteries with tombstones scattered on the ground like debris that present an eloquent and poignant testimony to the tragedy of the Holocaust.

How the Past Is Being Remembered

This chapter presents some of the ways in which the massive destruction wrought during the Holocaust that brought nearly all Jewish life in Poland to an end has been locally commemorated by both Poles and Jews. It considers how the events of the Holocaust and the local pre-war Jewish past are being remembered and preserved. It also discusses the Holocaust memorialization that started after the war but was hampered by widespread trauma of surviving Jews and the local Jewish population that suffered devastating loss. The chapter recounts how the communist government of Poland spent forty years presenting huge crimes committed during the German occupation as Polish national martyrdom at the hands of Hitler's fascists. It talks about the preservation of the Auschwitz site as a memorial and museum in 1947.

Glimpses of the Jewish Culture That Once Was

This chapter discusses Jewish culture as it once was, which stands in sharp and powerful contrast to the ruins of Poland. It illustrates towns and villages of Polish Galicia in the present-day that still has vivid traces of the strength and splendour of Jewish culture before its destruction during the Holocaust. It also mentions synagogues and Jewish cemeteries that escaped being substantially damaged by the Germans or have been meticulously restored. The chapter looks at remarkable buildings and monuments that are far from being desolate, abandoned, and in ruins, which existed in Galicia before the genocide. It describes the art and architecture of Galician synagogues that were influenced by mystical ideas and encouraged with a richness of decorative features that cannot be found in other countries where Jews of Polish origin live.