Pouring Rain in Nowy Sacz

It poured all day in Nowy Sacz, grey skies blending with stone buildings and cobblestone streets.  I visit a museum in an old synagogue, with the usual artifacts in the vestibule, selling postcards of the way the Jewish quarter used to look before the Nazis came. Most of the people were murdered, but there is a story of one Jewish girl who managed to survive by hiding in the town hall clock tower in the Rynek.

Only the walls and heavy black iron doors remain of the original synagogue.  All of its sacred treasures were plundered long ago.  Ironically, inside the main chamber there is a display of Catholic devotional art, with a statue of a bleeding Jesus on the cross.  At first I think this is ludicrous, but then I realized Jesus was Jewish.  He would have felt right at home in a synagogue.

When I left the synagogue, it was still raining hard.  I found a little alcove on the stone steps at a side entrance to the synagogue and cried.  It seemed fitting.  So here I am, sitting on the steps of what used to be a synagogue in a vibrant Jewish community, which is now across from an ugly Communist era apartment building.  I wept for all the people whose blood was spilled on the streets of this ghetto.  I wept for the people who were forced down to the nearby river for selections, fearful they or their family members would die that day.  I wept for all the people driven across the river to the Jewish cemetery, who were forced to dig their own graves naked, so they wouldn't ruin perfectly good clothes with their blood.  These could be recycled for the Nazis.

I cried for the scared little girl I once was, half Lemko, half Jewish, who didn't understand why anyone could hate her so much they would want to exterminate her entire family.  When they threw her body on the trash heap in Auschwitz, did they find the tiny teddy bear hidden in the crook of her arm?  Did they give this precious reminder someone once loved her to a blue eyed, blond haired child? 


When I stop crying, I realize I have found the setting for my novel and my main character, Leah Marie Schoege.    Her mother was from a small Lemko village in the Carpathian hills, outside of Nowy Sacz.  Her father was Jewish from Jaslo.  Their families did not approve of their match, so they moved to a small apartment just outside the Jewish quarter in Nowy Sacz, setting up shop by the Rynek.  Like many Lemko women, her mother was an accomplished weaver and seamstress, but she died when Leah was only 13, giving birth to her younger sister, Ellie.  Now Leah works in her father's shop and takes care of her family, until the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.

So the story begins on a rainy day in Nowy Sacz.  I now understand why I had to come to Poland to write it.