Trip to Golcowa

I visited Grandpa’s village in Galicia, Poland last week. I was in Ukraine on business and traveled overland from Kyiv to Galicia, stopping first in Lviv, a beautiful city in western Ukraine. Lviv was for centuries a city mixed with Poles, Jews, Armenians, and Hungarians (the Hungarian border is just over the Carpathian Mountains), with most Ukrainian Slavs lived in the country side. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Lviv became part of the Second Polish Republic, where it remained until the beginning of World War II. I made friends with the Financial Times bureau chief for Ukraine, an American-bored Ukrainian from Lviv who showed me around the town. He pointed out that streets were named after the ethno-religious groups that lived on them, Hebrew Street, Armenian Street, etc, and showed me a building where the paint had recently been removed from the edifice to reveal Hebrew writing and Jewish names:

The Soviets captured the territory in cooperation with the Third Reich in the early days of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As the Nazis moved east through Poland, Lviv’s Jewish population grew to around 200,000, swelled by Jews fleeing the Nazi advances. After the Nazis went to war with the Soviet Union in 1941, Lviv was occupied by the Germans and the extermination of Jews began. Several thousand Jews were marched to the cemetery, forced to dig mass graves and then shot by their captors. The remaining Jews, numbering well into the 100 thousands, were shipped to the Belzec extermination camp just on the other side of the border in Poland, where almost all were murdered. The Soviet counterattack recaptured what is today western Ukraine. The region was later formerly annexed to the Soviet Union through a rigged plebiscite,.

I crossed over the border on foot into Poland. As with most borders, there is a line for nationals and a line for visitors (in the case of Poland, an EU member, the lines were divided between EU and non-EU passport holders). This meant I was stuck in line with Ukrainians smuggling cigarettes and liquor into the Poland for a significant resale markup. I met a young Polish couple who were graduate students in Kraków, Poland and were visiting Lviv for the May 1 labor day holidays celebrated in many socialist and formerly socialist countries. They were as puzzled as the border guards why an American was crossing on foot from Ukraine, I told them about Grandpa’s village and the mission I was on. It turned out that one of them was from a small town near Golcowa and he offered to point me in the right direction and put me up the following night in Kraków, an offer I happily accepted. After watching Ukrainian after Ukrainian get turned away at the border or have his or her cigarette and liquor cargos discovered and confiscated, I made it through after two hours of waiting.

Lying a few kilometers over the border in Poland is the city of Przemyśl, which was the dividing line between the Soviets and Nazis during WWII, cut in half by the San River. Jews in this city, like most others in the region, were a plurality of the population. Grandpa spoke of this town as a major regional city. I met an old Ukrainian man from Przemyśl, now living in Lviv, who recalled seeing the town’s Jews swimming and rowing across the river fleeing the Nazi occupied half of the city, only to be rejected by the Soviets. Eventually, one side opened fire and cut down thousands of Jews in the middle of the river (who began the shooting is still debated today, but the fact that neither would let them leave the river is enough to make both guilty of the same crime). The old man recalled seeing the river turn red with blood.

I spent the night in Rzeszow (pronounced zjezj-off), another town Grandpa spoke of as a big regional city. When I arrived, there was a pleasant concert on the main square by a Polish jazz band of sorts and live fire-spinning shows. In the morning, I went to the genealogist and the birth records archive. Unfortunately, the Nazis destroyed most of the Jewish birth records, so unsurprisingly there was no record of Freifeld or Klarman at the regional archives. I went to a government-run Jewish genealogy building housed in an old synagogue to ask specifically about the Freifelds (you can see a little Star of David on the corner of the building).

I found a small man there named Dr. Zamoyski who looked into several databases but was unable to come up with much (and he did not seem super-adept at using a computer).

However, he did show me a book cataloguing origins for Jewish names in Galicia and there I found Freifeld. The towns listed are all near Golcowa.

The next morning, I rented a car and drove the 1.5 hours south to Golcowa. Grandpa always said he was born in a small village. In fact, it’s so small that to find it on Google Maps (which has thankfully mapped Poland), it required zeroing in on the tightest zoom. I found the town by driving south from Rzeszow and following the little blue dot on my phone’s GPS. There are three roads to Golcowa, two paved and one semi-paved. Since I was following my phone’s GPS, I missed the main road and was overwhelmed with bucolic sentiment of a simple country life driving over the bumpy, half-paved road into town.

I entered the town at the crest of the hill and took a picture of the first house in the village and a panoramic.

Here are some more pictures of the town:

The town cemetery

I poked around the town for a half-hour and found three stores. I walked into the first store and tapped into the translator on my BlackBerry “my grandfather was born in this town. His family owned a small store. His name was Freifeld and he was Jewish.” I think the people in the first store thought I was there to claim their property! They started speaking quickly in Polish and finally pulled their daughter out of the backroom of the store and presented her as someone who spoke English. Of course, she didn’t. But instead she sent me to another store, which was equally unhelpful. I saw some ancient-looking men and pulled over to ask my question. After five minutes of speaking at me in Polish, I slowly backed off. I then decided to go to the elementary school to see if there was an English teacher who could help me out. The second I found one, she yanked me into her classroom and made me teach two classes in English, asking and answering questions in English with the class.

As I explained to the class what I was doing in Golcowa and asking them to go home as ask their parents and grandparents if they remember the Freifelds, one of the children offered to go climb in the window of the town hall (which was closed Monday) and get the town’s copy of its history book. Returning a few minutes later, he produced this book:

In it, I found a list of Jewish families living in the town up until 1939, but obviously no Freifeld:

The school principal did recall that her grandmother used to talk about a Jewish family that owned a general store which they referred to as “Sklep Pod Skala,” which means ‘store under the rock,’ referring to the area of town called “under the rock.” You can see two Jewish families lived in that end of town in 1939, the Strausses and the Jammels. Who knows if she was talking about our family?

I put requests into a number of places to look deeper into local records, asking the birth registry authorities in the nearest major municipality, plus the county seat (Rzeszow). We’ll see if anything comes back.

In any case, it was a wonderful trip. The countryside was beautiful and relatively well-kept. It was nice to see that town that Grandpa used to play in and study the same magnificent rolling green hills and clear country air. If any of you have the chance, I encourage you to make a quick visit.