Meeting with the writer Patrycja Dołowy

On 22.04.2022 in the Municipal Library in Mszana Dolna a meeting with well-known writer Patrycja Dołowy took place. The meeting was organized by us as a part of the project "The story of bi-cultural, pre-war Mszana Dolna". Her latest novel "Skarby" also refers to our history of taking care of memory in Mszana Dolna. Ms. Patrycja accepted our invitation and met with readers in the library building. The meeting was led by Rachela Antosz-Rekucka, a psychologist and PhD student at the Doctoral School of Social Sciences at the Jagiellonian University. The participants had the opportunity to ask questions, talk to the author and get a dedication in the book. The main topic of the meeting was memory and oblivion, their univocal meaning and scope. The trauma of silence about a difficult history and overcoming it. The importance of listening to stories and creating them. The ambiguity of the term: "treasures". The event was held under the honorary patronage of the Mayor of Mszana Dolna, Anna Pękała, and was co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of the program of the National Center for Culture: EtnoPolska. Edition 2022 and the Limanowa district.

The meeting was important to us, not because the book includes Mszana's or our personal themes, but because the "mournful emptiness" mentioned by the author is also present in our town. Under the "smooth surface of silence" it shouts to us and demands to be heard also in Mszana Dolna. As long as we do not want to hear it, as long as we do not tell the full story, as long as we do not admit that we cannot always be proud of it - we will not experience peace and tranquility, we will not be able to build an honest future. Karel Capek said that what we keep silent about will never give us peace and will always come back to us. Patrycja Dolowy tells us important things about memory and oblivion. About treasures sought and found. For us, one such treasure, irretrievably lost, is the important thread in the history of the city, created by its Jewish residents. That is why we want to talk about it, to bring it back to life, to recreate it piece by piece, although it is not always an easy subject to talk about or to listen to.

Photos by Agnieszka Józefiak Lewandowska and Urszula Antosz-Rekucka

Fragments of the novel "Treasures" containing plots connected with saving memory in Mszana Dolna: 

Ursula
Ursula stubbornly lights the Shabbat candles every Friday and bakes challah as a sign of discord that no one in Mshana does this for her anymore. She is a Christian, so she does not celebrate Shabbat, but these candles are for them and for them.
- My town's way of remembering is total oblivion, or rather silence," says Urszula. When she started dealing with Jewish stories, she had absolutely nothing. No face, no name, no memento.
Ursula doesn't understand why I want to talk to her. She writes me back late at night with an email lajlatov (Hebrew for good night):
- I do elementary and ordinary things. I'm trying to collect crumbs of memory and put together anything from them as a disagreement about what happened to the people who once lived here. I fear that meeting me might be disappointing.

MAPS
Ursula
- Everything I do - says Ursula - results from coincidences, but also from various catastrophes that happened to me and, as it turned out later, had a different meaning. I had two dreams: to become an actress or a doctor. I had a talent, I loved reciting poetry. Krzysztof Globisz saw me and said that I must go to a theater school. My heart was torn. Here was the idea that I would save children, and here was my love for the theater. I decided that I would try - once - to apply to drama school. If I fail, I will go to medical school. I wrote the written exam with Dorota Segda. She made a career, and I didn't. I did quite well in those exams, but in the end I didn't get in, supposedly because of insufficient voice conditions. I went to medical school. And it was good, but my health went sour. It broke me down. I didn't get anything out of one, I didn't get anything out of the other. But I thought about psychology. I went to the dean's office, I was referred to the rector for student affairs Professor Jan Błoński! This was before he wrote "Poor Poles look at the ghetto". And at that time I was not thinking about Jews yet. But such are the cases. It was the eighties. Błoński was very sympathetic to me, he said that if I got into medicine, I could also get into psychology. First there was the written exam, I had excellent results, I was third on the list. The oral exam was supposed to be a formality. And then the day of the exam came and I got - for the first time in my life - an abscess in my throat. I had a forty degree fever - well, Providence! They moved my exam to the very end. I go into the exam, get trivial questions, answer them pretty well, and they say I didn't pass. It seemed that they had already given out the places and, in order to make me fail, they gave me failing grades. The world ended for me then. I didn't know what to do with my life. Terribly depressed, I went to the Jesuit Basilica and met Father Stanislaw Musial. I would not have believed that some years later I would receive an award named after him. I cried, and he leaned over me and asked: what is your name, child? And then he said: Ursula, it will be fine, I will pray for you. I left there strengthened, I met a friend and she said that she was studying theology. I was surprised, but I thought that I could too, because existential matters have always occupied me. In college, first of all, there was the Bible and the Old Testament. The Jewish stories captivated me. Especially the story of Jacob and Rachel. How they loved each other! I thought that if I had children, I would name them Jacob and Rachel. And that's what happened after that. Which was crown proof to everyone that I was Jewish. For example, the mayor, who used to throw terrible stumbling blocks at me, once wrote publicly, seemingly in a friendly manner, on the occasion of the celebrations I was organizing: "once upon a time not only Józek and Marysia walked this land, but also Jacob and Rachel." Only that Józek and Marysia are also Hebrew names. I studied in Cracow. At that time the Festivals of Jewish Culture were beginning - I took part in them. I lived in Kazimierz, which was still dirty and peeved, but what delighted me greatly was walking down the street and seeing Hebrew letters on the walls. I took pictures of these traces and remains. I read somewhere about a competition, which later resulted in the famous exhibition and album of the Shalom Foundation "And I can still see their faces". I was tempted to send my pictures there. They were not faces, only traces, but it turned out that I was even in the album somewhere in the small print. They gave me a Jewish figurine made of Jerusalem silver with a plaque: "To those who saved the memory." I felt monstrously stupid. I thought: "God, I didn't do anything. I sent a few pictures" Then I forgot about it, but I think I incurred a debt then, and then the repayment began. To deserve. After graduation I moved to Mszana, my dad's hometown, and started teaching school. I once asked my dad: Were there Jews in Mszana? And he started crying. He had witnessed a terrible scene. Two little Jewish boys were walking with their dad. On the other side of the street was a German. For absolutely no reason at all he pulls out a gun and kills this dad. 

Those boys had to load the body on a cart and take it to the cemetery. Their grief was carried all the way to heaven," my father said through tears. I wrote a petition to name a street after the Mshany Jews. This proved to be an unpalatable task. Finally, the city agreed to name the street in memory of Holocaust victims. I was expelled from school with a bang because I talked too much about Jews - that was the first time I felt trampled. As punishment, I ended up in high school, which was supposed to be for the better.

POSTED
Ursula
When Urszula started researching Jewish topics, there was absolutely nothing in Mszana, zero. There was a contest in the town library to bring in old photos from Mszana. They came up with three photos that were somehow related to Jewish themes: the wall of the synagogue, children in long hats dancing in front of the synagogue. There was a picture of a market square with a Jewish bakery in the background, a picture of barefoot kids in front of a house, and that was it. After these many years Ursula has dozens of photos, many contacts. But then there was only one witness, Henryk Zdanowski. What Ursula regrets most is that Mr.

Henio did not live to find the people in his story. Mr. Henio was charming, he told a lot of stories, but he had no pictures. The most important thing, however, were the people, the names. For example, he had a friend, Jurek Streimer, and he went to school with him. The Stremers were assimilated Jews. There were also other beloved neighbors, and among them Rachelka, who liked Heniu very much, would grimace when eating and say: I won't eat unless Heniu comes. He came and she ate. Henio didn't know what happened to them. There was also a baker, Beldegrün, who had a daughter, Lusia. She was beautiful and when there were plays at school, she would recite a poem about a butterfly. He remembered it after so many years. When he talked about her, his voice faltered. "I saw a butterfly fluttering on a leaf, its wing broken." Urszula asked: "Heniu, weren't you in love with Lusia? And you know... What happened to Lusia? She was murdered. But she is not on the list from Mszana. In Henrik's stories there was also a handicapped woman named Sura, who used to collect scrap metal together with her father.
All these stories of Mr. Henrik were told by young people - they created the whole program: stories, songs. The girls played klezmer music on the violin, they learned Yiddish and Hebrew.

KORZENIE
Urszula
Ursula is often referred to as a Jewish woman, or even as "the Jew." This is accompanied by epithets that Ursula prefers to leave out. They are those who would prefer that she not bury herself in the past of the place where they live. But her friends also sometimes ask her if she is sure that there are no Jewish ancestors somewhere in her family? Any even a few drops of Jewish blood?
No blood, but there would be a few drops of milk. Urszula's mother comes from Broniszów near Kazimiera Wielka in the Kielce region. She was born in 1937. When the war broke out, she was two years old. Her parents had Jewish neighbors. He was a feldsher. During the September campaign, when the bombardments were going on, Urszula's grandparents with her little mother and those Jewish neighbors made a shelter together in a ravine, a kind of dugout covered with a barn door. The Jewish woman had a tiny baby at her breast. The bombardments went on for a long time and grandma, at some point, said that she had to go feed the cows and she would also bring something to eat. And she went. And Urszula's two-year-old mother started to cry terribly. There was no way to calm her down, so the neighbor weaned her baby for a moment and put the little mother to sleep. And she calmed down. So the daughter was fed with Jewish milk. In her family home Ursula did not encounter any manifestation of anti-Semitism. Her parents had a natural empathy. At Ursula's husband's house, if someone did something wrong, it was said that he did it "the Jewish way. From her parents Urszula took over the attitude of indifference. When something bad happened to someone, her parents always intervened. 

COLLECTORS
Ursula
It was after the song shows and in the fourth year of the battle for Holocaust Memorial Street. Ursula was just in the garden when her husband called her: there is a phone call for you, but sit down. She sat down because Alex Danzig from Yad Vashem called. He said that Ursula did the right thing, that she did not start with death, but with life. Alex Danzig says: We're doing a program called "To Preserve Memory. History and culture of two nations. Polish and Israeli. Would you decide to take part in it? The idea is to host Israeli youth for one day. Urszula went to Yad Vashem for training and then, as part of the program, young people from Hadera came to Mszana.
- It was incredible," recalls Urszula, "so terribly important. They came only for one day, but incredibly rich. Our people were full of imagination about who would be here. The others were afraid too. They went in tense. And I got our girls to sing Hallelujah in English. Maybe the people there would know and join in. Of course they did. They sang together, then they taught each other the Polish and Hebrew versions. It turned out that they read the same books and sang the same songs. The first ice broke. On the Israeli side, the coordinator was a teacher, Ilana. She later returned to Israel. There was a meeting of teachers and she told us: we were once in Poland, we were so afraid, but in the town of Mszana Dolna fantastic things happened. The husband of the daughter of one of the Survivors was at the meeting. He says: what do you mean Mszana Dolna? My wife Szoszana comes from there. The teacher gave her an email and that's how we met our first descendants. Gołda, Szoszana's mother, was the only survivor from the whole family. She managed to survive the ghetto and Auschwitz. In this family, life was carried by women. Gołda gave birth to Szoszana and Szoszana to Shiri. I have incredibly warm relations with them. When Szoszana came here, she fell into my arms.
- Ursula, you are like my sister - she repeated. I hosted them at home, I made sour soup, Szoszana ate it and said:
- She ate it and said: "Only my mom used to make such a soup.
At Henia's we stayed with Marysia and my son, who was the editor of the school newspaper. In that paper, he wrote a series on the Jews of Mszana and did a great interview with me. The paper came out with an English version and hung somewhere on the school's website. And then Jurek Streimer's daughter read it, but she couldn't find the contact. Four years ago, when Henryk had already died, I received an award and my husband and I decided to go to Israel. We had already booked the plane, accommodation and suddenly I got a message on my Facebook page: Hello, I am Heli, Jurek Streimer's daughter. So I immediately wrote to her that we are going to Israel and if she can tell us where my father is buried so that we can find his grave. I really wanted to bring him a pebble from Mszana. And she wrote me that it was in Haifa. When we arrived in Haifa, Jurek Streimer's three daughters were already waiting for us. Finally, I saw pictures and found out what Jurek looked like, what age he was when Mr. Henio mentioned him. We went to his grave. On his stone is engraved in Hebrew: "from Mszana Dolna."

NAMES
Ursula
I thought I would never find out what happened to the other characters in Henio's stories. For example Rachel, the poor eater. She was one of the first people I heard about from Henryk. I couldn't find any trace of her for so many years. Mr. Henio thought she had died, I knew she hadn't in Mszana. And suddenly, a few weeks ago, her daughter wrote to me! It turned out that Rachela was alive! She is no longer able to talk, but she survived! She has children, grandchildren, a big family in Israel. I have a cordial contact with her daughter. She sends pictures.
I have been able to bring several initiatives to fruition here, although each time it was a struggle of several years. In the place where the synagogue used to stand, a commemorative plaque finally appeared, and the resistance was so great that first two years of wrangling with the town authorities, a nationwide dispute, and then thirteen months it stood empty, although it was enough to print the materials we had prepared. We finally planted an Oak of Remembrance for our completely forgotten Righteous, and erected a wooden matzeva at the site of mass graves in the cemetery. And we planted crocus bulbs for the children-victims of the Holocaust.
August 19th is a symbolic day for us, when a thousand Jews from Mszana and the surrounding area were murdered here. There were as many underage victims of the Holocaust as I have students in a year. Every year I go with each class, each student gets one bulb and one name, sometimes we have the whole story. More often just a name. I was able to find many of the names of the people I heard about from Mr. Henio in the Congratulatory Books from Poland on the 150th Anniversary of Independence of the United States to America. Some names appear only there. The only thing left of people is a signature made with a child's hand. We try our best to say the name out loud, say the name and plant an onion.
Ola Nachman went to my last high school class. It was such a terrible fall that it was impossible to go outside to plant bulbs. But crocuses can be planted in pots to grow at school. I said: I would like you to plant them this year just for those kids I can tell something about. I told stories and asked who would like to plant for that person. Ola sits in the last pew and says: I would like to plant for my grandmother's friends. Then I remembered that a long time ago I read an article about five girls murdered in a mass execution. They came from Lubomierz. Mrs. Nachman told about them. I had been looking for Mrs. Nachman for seven years and couldn't find her, and then it suddenly dawned on me that Ola was Nachman. It turned out that her grandmother was alive, and she came to the school for the anniversary to tell the kids about her friends. She told us how she said goodbye to them. This was the family of Chaskiel and Regina. They had five daughters, and in 1938 Mrs. Regina became pregnant again. In childbirth both she and the twins she was carrying died. Chaskiel was left alone with five daughters. He despaired terribly. He would go at night and cry out, but then he picked himself up. He was friends with Ania Nachman's father, Ola's grandmother. This father told him: listen, Chaskiel, the war is coming, they say the Germans have bad intentions towards Jews. I would run away if I were you. Chaskiel had a mother in the United States. They went to a photographer, hence the pictures we have today. They already had passports and had tickets for the ship for September 4, 1939. They could have been saved! The friends did not want to part, they took each other's hands and sang: "Life passes quickly...in a year, in a day, in a moment we will be gone together". They said goodbye for a long time and Ania never saw them again. Only they did not go to America, but ended up in a mass pit. They killed the daughters, but not Chaskiel. They wanted him to work in the quarry. He begged to be killed with his daughters, to be loaded on a cart. He didn't want to live, and since his religion didn't allow him to commit suicide, he figured that if he jumped off and ran, the German would shoot him. He jumped down, but the German missed. Chaskiel hid in the forest for many months. Anna's father brought him food. Unfortunately, in the end, Chaskiel was given away by a local peasant for a pair of shoes, still bloodied - they took them off the corpse and gave them to the peasant. He walked around the village in them, and the children shouted that the devil.
There is still a lot of work and hope, but also a lack of hope, because it is clear that many people have nothing left. Just that name on the list. It is good that we have it.

KLATWA
Ursula
Have I managed to do anything in the social consciousness? - Urszula asks herself - In our country the taboo on this subject is so great that few of the inhabitants dare to come to the anniversaries of the Holocaust that we organize - in Mszana these were mainly mass executions. They watch the Remembrance Walk from behind the curtains. And comments are reportedly made: I wonder when they will come to take back their homes? Sometimes there are a few of our friends, a few of my students. There are always more visitors. Symptomatic is the fact that - despite my numerous appeals - there is not a single material memento of almost a thousand people. Not even one lost tea spoon, nothing. It has evaporated. One vague trace of a mezuzah in an abandoned house and everyone claims that no Jews lived there. The subject doesn't exist at all.
There is a great resistance, that why move it. The easiest thing to say is that I am a "Jew." I knew it would be so. I consciously undertook it, because I thought: these people suffered so much, I can take some mud. The worst thing was when my children were small and the neighbors called after them: the Jews from France. It was hard for me to explain to them. They were in elementary school then. Later they also joined in these activities quite consciously. They support me and help me. My husband also supports me. It was a difficult moment when I had to explain to my children why we had to put up with this. I keep hearing here that I take money from Jews. And yet every broken candle is from my own pocket! As a rule, the ceremonies are attended by people from abroad. Or people who come from Mszana but live somewhere else. I have a lady who teaches at the Pedagogical Academy in Krakow. She left many years ago. Her mom was sitting in a classroom with some Ryfka. I would like to know who this Ryfka was. I can't find out, because we have incomplete files. She came every year. And no one from Mszana shows up. One lady said to us: You are doing amazing things. So my husband says: Then please come. And she: God forbid, they'd think I was Jewish.
They are afraid of that. Or they say it's too difficult for them, too much suffering. And I always think to myself: What if it were me, if it were my children, my mother? This does not allow you to be indifferent.

Ursula
Ursula is a catechist at the Technical and Information School Complex in Mszana. There was a time when she only taught vocational classes. This was so that she wouldn't spoil the technical students too much with Jewish stories. As punishment, she got the most difficult class. Such "bad" boys, who don't care about anything. The previous teacher told them: You have your smartphones, I have mine - we don't get in each other's way. And Ursula is ambitious. They were furious that she was demanding anything. She explained to them that it was out of respect, that she was treating them the same as the tech people. But there was a war. Ursula had even already gone to the principal to drop that class. Why should everyone get tired. But he wouldn't agree. So Ursula stuck to her program. The next point was to be a trip to a memorial site - one of the two places of mass executions in Mszana. She decided to take them to the place where the Germans had murdered young Jewish rebels. At first they said: what do we care about Jews, we will not go to Jews. Finally Urszula pulled them out. She says: either we sit in class and roll out the Bible or we go for a walk. So they went. On the way there and on the spot she told them a story. They were our would-be insurgents, they wanted to defend themselves. It was a myth that Jews were going like sheep to the slaughter. They gathered weapons, tried to do something. They were lured into a trap, there was a machine gun hidden behind the bushes and they got shot. But at least they were lucky that they were spared the humiliation. They did not have to strip naked before the execution. They watched their loved ones die.
They were a little bit interested in it, because the insurgents, because they were shooting. Urszula says: And imagine that one of those boys was fifteen years old, like you. We don't even know what his name was. He was only wounded in the leg, and they buried him alive. He was screaming: Tate, tate, I'm alive!
They recited a psalm, lit a candle, and went back to school. Some time later was Memorial Day. Again Ursula has a lesson with them and asks: So, guys, are we going to light a candle where we were before? And they say in a dialect: We were already there today! They had a window. So we got together to buy some candles and we went to light them. You said he was the same boy as us.
- They threw themselves for a candle instead of cigarettes! - says Ursula, "That is what it is all about. These small "successes", little joys. There are also failures - at least two All-Polish students among the graduates. But one of them read out a prayer for the murdered on the mass graves.
A lady who teaches at a university in Copenhagen came to Mszana. Her great-grandparents lie here. She wrote to Ursula: Why didn't I know before that there was such a person in Mszana? Once, I dared to come here, I asked at the railway station about a Jewish grave, and I was answered with such a gesture that I was not sure whether my life was in danger. I could not find the grave. I ran away terrified. Now you will come with me, you will show me, you will tell me. It's so important!
Szoszana, the daughter of Gołda the Survivor, the one who loves Urszula's sour soup and says that they are like sisters, once said to Urszula: You don't realize what this means to us. If my mother knew that you are here and that you take care of these graves, it would be easier for her to die.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)