13 Stradomska Street by Andrew Potok

Author:Andrew Potok
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781942134299
Publisher: Mandel Vilar Press
Published: 2017-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

4.

My father was born in a town named Bedzin, less than forty miles west of Krakow. The Potoks had lived there for generations, owned factories and homes. Living a fairly prosperous life, and with pre-war bourgeois expectations and no history of mobility, they undoubtedly expected to remain there for generations to come.

Bedzin was founded in the ninth century on a tributary of the Vistula in the Silesian highlands. For much of the nineteenth century, there were more Jews than Catholics in both town and county. Before September 1939, more than twenty-four thousand Jews lived precariously with thirty thousand others in this thriving industrial community. Of course, Jew hatred was as virulent in Bedzin as everywhere else in Poland. Still, every summer of my childhood, I was sent there to visit my grandparents and uncles and never heard the Polish word for Jew. Even if I heard it, I wouldn’t have known what it meant, or that I was one, while most Jewish kids my age were already deep into religious studies. In a recent book, A Small Town Near Auschwitz, the Jews from the area who survived tell of childhoods scarred by curses and beatings by Polish children taught by priests, parents, and teachers that “the Christ-killers deserve to be hated, tormented, and wiped from the earth.”

In September 1939, the German Army, followed by the SS death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, burned the Bedzin synagogue and murdered whoever among the Jews appeared in their field of vision. They created the Bedzin Ghetto in 1942 and, by the summer of 1943, most of the Jews in Bedzin were deported to the nearby German concentration camp at Auschwitz. Since Bedzin was one of the last Polish communities to be liquidated, there were a relatively large number of survivors, my grandparents not among them.

Now, Artur hires a car to take us to Bedzin, about an hour’s drive from Krakow. It is not quite as polluted and dismal as it was when the Lenin steel plant was active and spewing particulates for a hundred-mile radius, but it’s still grim and dirty from the remaining heavy industry in the region. The few pedestrians in the Bedzin streets still wheeze and cough as they cover their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. It’s hard to picture this ugly town in its pre-war industrial splendor. Our driver takes us to the half-destroyed, long-abandoned Potok factory, whose oil presses produced a vegetable oil marketed as Potokola and the margarine named Potokana. I had been here during my 1979 visit but now again I try to stifle tears, always ready to flow, even for the present unseen reminders of what symbolized normal times.

An old drunk leans on the loading dock of the factory, where nuts, seeds, fruits, and fiber used to be unloaded for processing. I ask him if he knows anything about this factory or the Potok family who owned it. It takes him a few moments to gather his wits.

“Knew them?” he finally slurs, “My father worked for them.” He stretches his arms to touch my shoulders.

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