Being Polish,Jewish,and Tarnovian: Youth and Polyvalent Senses of Belonging during the Second Polish Republic

The Urban Space during the Second Polish Republic

Towns during the Second Polish Republic offer insights into senses of belonging of an ethnically mixed population. They were multiethnic realms of interaction, in which polyvalent sets of belonging and plural reference systems (Mehrfachbezügigkeit) became the everyday practice and norm. Cesia’s experience of dismay in 1938 came from being forced out of that polyvalent system and from being reduced to the Other, a Jew amidst ethnic Poles.

The Second Polish Republic was a state of many nationalities. About one third of its citizens were of Ukrainian, Jewish, Belarusian, or German origin. The vast majority of Jews during the interwar period, around 76 percent of them, lived in towns, whereas 78 percent of Catholic Poles lived in the countryside. ⁵ Thus, urban space in Poland was both multicultural and multireligious.

Focusing on the daily life of these towns offers an alternative narrative to the mainstream interpretation of Polish history. The story of towns in Poland cannot possibly be written as a history primarily of the ethnic Poles and, separately, of Poland’s minorities. Urban society was a space of intense entanglements, interactions, and multifaceted alliances between different ethnic and/or religious groups. Majority and minority relations differed greatly from the overall national pattern, and were frequently inversed. Local politics functioned differently from politics on the national scale, since in the towns and shtetlekh, half (or more) of the electorate could be Jewish. We cannot possibly depict the economic interaction within urban space by trying to fit it into an “ethnic Poles and a minority of Jews” paradigm. In short, the Polish-Jewish Lebenswelten were intensely entangled in the urban space.

It is thus especially pertinent to ask how Jews living in a midsized town such as Tarnów recounted and expressed their sense of belonging to Polishness, to the locality itself, to Jewishness. How were the identification patterns reflected in the memories of Tarnów’s Jews?

The vast realms of interconnectedness and interaction in towns notwithstanding, the Second Polish Republic was a nationalizing state. ⁶ The dominant elites of the state promoted the language, culture, placement in administrative positions, the economic upswing, and the political hegemony of the so-called titular nation, that is, that of the ethnic Poles. ⁷ The “core nation” was defined in ethnic terms, turning other ethnic groups to categories of the Other. The ways in which state institutions (but also local administrative units) as well as the dominant culture pursued this process of nationalizing were dynamic and changed over time. The shift to the right after Marshal Piłsudski’s death in May 1935 was a salient caesura, after which the discrimination of Jews and open hostility to the later became part of the political agenda as well as everyday practice.

Inhabitants of multiethnic towns like Tarnów lived in the heart of the conflict: On the one hand, they lived in towns where ethnic Poles were not necessarily the majority population. Thus, cooperation, interconnectedness, and interaction were preconditions for the modus vivendi and a practiced norm of everyday life for centuries. On the other hand, these towns were part and parcel of the nationalizing state in which discrimination and antisemitism was, especially after Marshal Józef Piłsudski’s death in 1935, on the rise. How did the interplay between national and local scales and everyday practices reflect the way in which Jews in Tarnów spoke about and negotiated their belonging?

Tarnów: A Short Introduction

Tarnów was a midsized town of 50,000 inhabitants in the south of the Second Polish Republic. Jews have inhabited the town since the fifteenth century. The names of streets in the old town such as Żydowska—Jewish street testify to the presence of the Jewish population in Tarnów for centuries. After the partitions of Poland, Tarnów was situated in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which belonged to the Austrian part of the Habsburg Dual Monarchy. Here, Jews gained civic rights in 1867. Since the same year, Jews of Tarnów were represented in the city council, and since 1906 an unwritten tradition was established that the mayor of town was to be a non-Jew and its deputy mayor a Jew. ⁸

The Jews of Tarnów were very heterogeneous as to their religious affiliation, political leanings, and social class. Secular political movement such as the Zionists and the socialist Bund were strong among the Jewish population. ⁹ The town was very heterogeneous as to social makeup. In 1931, 37 percent of its population worked in industry and crafts, 21 percent in trade and insurance, and 11 percent in the public domain, while 10 percent of Tarnów’s population was unemployed. ¹⁰ However, the labor market was in its majority ethnically split. Jews were mostly employed in the garment industry or they worked in retail trade. Around 90 percent of the shops in Tarnów were run by Jews. ¹¹ Non-Jewish Polish workers were employed in state-owned industries such as the modern azote industry, established at the end of the 1920s in Tarnów. Out of around 4,200 employees here, only 14 were Jewish. ¹² The public sector and the railway plant employed mostly non-Jews.

Across the Lines: A Personal Perspective

When Ludwik Garmada wanted to sketch out the prewar local society of Tarnów in his 1995 interview for the USC Shoah Foundation, he characterized the town as being composed of two societies: a Polish and a Jewish one. As soon as he said that, Ludwik stopped and clarified himself, saying,

But at that time nobody spoke that way—Polish and Jewish. In my gymnasium, for example, no one said Poles and Jews. Rather one would say Catholics and Jews. That was the only difference. Everyone was considered a Pole. The difference was religious—some observed and others didn’t, but that made the difference. There was no “Pole and Jew,” but rather a Catholic and a Jew. ¹³

While the divide between Poles and Jews is based solely on ethnicity and exclusion (Polishness being defined in opposition to Jewishness), the category of Catholics and Jews is based primarily on religious observance. The latter divide was essential for Garmada. He identified himself as being a Pole, and it was thus important to him that he felt he was also considered to be a Pole in school. So, many years after his prewar experience, in an interview from the 1990s, he stressed that an open definition of “Poles”—one that included Jews—was the dominant categorization in his prewar school. However, the divide between Catholics and Jews is narrowed down to religion and does not encompass other (including a-religious) senses of belonging to Jewishness (national, cultural, etc.). Nevertheless, using this terminology in the official language was crucial for the perception of the Jewish students, such as Garmada. He felt that his personal identification option was part and parcel of the public school’s policies toward their student body. However, we might ask if the official language in schools genuinely reflected the teachers’ attitudes toward Jewish students. We will come back to that point later.

In 1917, Ludwik Garmada was born as Zygmunt Schönfeld into a well-to-do, bourgeois, and acculturated intelligentsia Jewish family. He acquired the name “Ludwik Garmada” during the German occupation, when he passed as a non-Jew, and he kept his “Aryan name” after the war. He survived in Warsaw and stayed in Poland after the war’s end, becoming a physician in the capital city. Back in Tarnów before World War II, Ludwik’s father was a doctor. The family lived in an apartment in the center of the town, an ethnically mixed neighborhood with beautiful, fashionable apartment houses constructed at the end of the 19th century. Ludwik’s mother tongue was Polish. In 1995, Ludwik summarized his reading skills as follows: “I read in many languages, but when I read for leisure, it’s only in Polish.” He did not know any Yiddish and his family hardly practiced any Jewish traditions at home. ¹⁴ Ludwik’s mother attended a progressive synagogue twice a year for the High Holidays. Even though Garmada stresses the terminology of religious difference in his school, his sense of belonging was not marked by religious adherence. Rather, we might assume, he underlines that, in the official rhetoric of his school, being a Pole was not defined by ethnic categories and that religious alterity was integrated into that model of “being a Pole”—at least in his (retrospective) perception.

At the same time, Ludwik Garmada’s father considered himself to be a “national Jew” (in Polish: narodowy Żyd). He supported Zionist activities, collected donations for the Keren Kayemeth LeIsrael, and financially supported the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He even traveled to Palestine in 1925 for its opening. ¹⁵ Yet, he did not send Ludwik to the private Zionist school in Tarnów. Instead, Ludwik attended a public elementary school and continued his education in a public gymnasium. Identifying as a Pole, Ludwik simultaneously regarded himself a Jew. He participated in Zionist youth circles (in Hebrew: Ha-No’ar Ha-Ivri-Akiba) but politically leaned toward leftist, socialist movements. His Jewishness was part of the picture, although neither in a religious nor in a traditional sense. Asked about his friends growing up, Ludwik answered that mostly Jewish friends visited him at home. He hardly had any contact with non-Jews outside of the school.

In his interview in 1995, Garmada continued on his insights on the local society as follows:

Tarnów was one town but had two societies [. . .] yet the realms of interaction were immense. My father had many Catholic patients, but also Jews. Everyone was buying goods in Jewish stores, because 90% of the stores belonged to Jews, so that all Catholics would also buy at the Jews. On the market day we would buy from Polish peasants, so the interface was immense, everywhere, on every step, but nevertheless there were walls, these boundaries, these were of course not the walls of the ghetto. They were invisible but they were there. ¹⁶

As we see, Ludwik treats alterity and divisions as well as interface and interdependencies as simultaneous phenomena, not excluding one another. Ludwik’s assessments in the first and second quotes may seem contradictory at first glance, but they reveal manifold identification options and various group patterns existing simultaneously. These dividing lines could shift and interchange depending on the standpoint of the beholder. Beside the religious categories (“Jews” and “Catholics”), Garmada now introduces ethnic and class distinction suggesting ethnic and social cleavages (“Jewish shopkeepers” and “Polish peasants”). He continues on the socioeconomic divide within Tarnów’s population as follows:

The divides within society were horizontal and not vertical. That is, not so much Catholics and Jews, but each of the societies was extremely stratified horizontally: Lumpenproletariat, poor workers (in Polish: chałupnicy), poverty, typical Galician poverty. Also, within Polish society. The difference between a rich Jew and a poor Jew was much greater than between a rich Jew and a rich Catholic. The same goes for a poor Jew and a poor Catholic. ¹⁷

While the different cleavages evoked by Ludwik may seem contradictory, they make perfect sense when one considers this narration as a way of expressing the plurality of belonging. His inability to sketch an unambiguous picture of Tarnów’s society with firm group divides shows how fluid these cleavages could be, depending on one’s perspective, context, and situation. Thus, the sense of belonging was multilayered, situational, and dynamic as well. This kind of portrayal of the town’s population allowed Ludwik to position himself in a plural context integrating different frameworks of belonging into his narrative—his Polishness, his understanding of nonreligious Jewishness, and his belonging to the intelligentsia. This social class represented a crucial aspect of Garmada’s sense of belonging(s). At the same time, Ludwik underlined his estrangement from religious Jews in town, the Orthodox, and Chassidim. “As a child I was afraid of them,” he recalled:

They were something very alien to me. [. . .] My parents were not sympathetic to them, a strange segment of the society, maybe even superfluous [in Polish: niepotrzebna]. [. . .] For me, they were a kind of “lower” sphere in quotation marks. There was a distance, I can’t explain. ¹⁸

Ludwik’s Jewish friends from acculturated middle-class intelligentsia families shared his views of religious Jews, whom they considered inferior and source of embarrassment. Elżbieta Brodzianka-Gut, for example, who lived just around the corner from Ludwik in Tarnów, remembered: “We didn’t like those sidelocks Jews.” ¹⁹ She also spoke with disdain about the “dirty mob” living somewhere in the Grabówka district, the eastern, poor part of town. When asked about her sense of belonging, Rahel Klimek, daughter of a well-known Tarnovian lawyer and a Zionist city council member Salomon Goldberg, responded, “I divide Tarnów’s Jews into two worlds: One world was the intelligentsia, who were well educated and mostly not religious, and on the other hand there were those who spoke Yiddish.” ²⁰ She called the Grabówka, the poor district in Tarnów’s east, a sort of “ghetto.” ²¹ Elżbieta Brodzianka-Gut, Rahel Klimek, and Cesia Ritter went to the same Jewish private school. Just like their friend Ludwik Garmada, they all stemmed from acculturated Jewish middle-class, non-observant families. In their narratives, they all reveal multiple and polyvalent senses of belonging(s). They were aware of their Jewishness, albeit they were not religious in their daily lives. Culturally and language-wise they considered themselves part of Polish culture. They underlined the importance of their social status and their distance from Yiddish and the religious world of Orthodoxy.

Cesia Ritter, Ludwik Garmada, Elżbieta Brodzianka-Gut, and Rahel Klimek all survived the Holocaust and were interviewed for the Spielberg Visual History Archive in the 1990s and 2000s in their homes in Poland, Israel, and the United States, respectively. With the exception of Cesia Ritter, all survived the war on so-called “Aryan papers” in occupied Poland and kept their “Polish name” after the war. Cesia Ritter also survived in occupied Poland, but in hiding with a Polish family. They all remembered their hometown many years later. In what follows, I will contrast their retrospective memoirs with contemporary sources about school life. Also, I will integrate voices from other social strata, including the poorer and working-class segments of Tarnów society.

Public Schools as Contact Zones

The vast majority of Jewish children during the interwar period, around 81 percent of them, enrolled in Polish public schools. ²² Primary education, which began at the age of seven and consisted of seven grades, was compulsory during the Second Polish Republic. ²³ Thus, Jewish and non-Jewish children often attended classes together, interacted during breaks, and sometimes even shared their lunches, as Eugeniusz Michalik recalled in his memoirs. ²⁴ The classroom of a public school was a place of interaction between Jewish and non-Jewish children in their everyday life. It was, in the words of Eugenia Prokop-Janiec, a Polish-Jewish contact zone. ²⁵ These zones of interaction have been studied by scholars using primarily autobiographical texts. ²⁶ However, we have few contemporary ego-documents from Tarnów’s children on schools. Therefore, minutes of teachers’ conferences will complement our image of Tarnów’s schooling life—a source still rarely used by historians.

Although the classroom of a public school was a place of interaction, the public school system also played a salient role in the state’s nationalizing project. Indeed, in Poland, schooling was not only a matter of education (e.g., alphabetization) but also of patriotic upbringing. After the period of partitions and the regaining of statehood in 1918, the Polish state viewed public schools as a key instrument for infusing students with “national spirit.” ²⁷ Although national minorities were granted the right to have public education in their languages, de facto schooling in minorities’ languages was outsourced to the private sector, as the historian Stephanie Zloch has underscored. ²⁸ In historiography, the question of whether and in which ways public schools have been top-down agents of acculturation has been widely debated. ²⁹ Recently, Kamil Kijek proposed a complex view on the basis of contemporary autobiographical writings from YIVO’s collections. ³⁰ He argued that while many Jews identified with the symbolic universe of the Polish nation (symbols, heroes, historical narratives) due to their upbringing in the public schools, they were never allowed to be fully part of this “Polish” “imagined community” (imagined, one might add, in ethnic categories). This rejection was not only all the more painful, given that Jewish youth grew up in this Polish cultural environment and identified with it. But it also constituted, as Kijek puts it, following Bourdieu’s notion, “symbolic violence” of the dominant society vis-à-vis the Jews. ³¹

The classroom in the public school of Tarnów was at an interface—the multiethnic reality of the town was literally sitting in front of the teacher’s desk, whereas the schools were transmission belts of the Polish nationalizing state. What different perspective can we see when examining not ego-documents, such as memoirs or retrospective interviews, but rather the minutes of teachers’ conferences, at which the staff debated the situation in classrooms?

The minutes of teachers’ conferences in the Czacki school in Tarnów are preserved in local archives from the mid-1920s until 1939 and even after the Second World War. The tension between the multiethnic reality of the classrooms and the function of the school system as part and parcel of the nationalizing state becomes very palpable in these sources. The Czacki elementary school was situated in Grabówka, the poorest district of town, where a high percentage of Jews lived. While Grabówka seemed to be a sheer nightmare for the youth of the acculturated middle class, as we have seen above, it was home to many orthodox Jews, as well as very conscious working-class activists and organizations. The headquarters of the Jewish Labor Bund of Tarnów were situated in the district, and many socialist demonstrations, union’s activities, and so on stemmed from this very place.

In contrast to Ludwik Garmada’s social upbringing, the Czacki school students came from underprivileged spheres of Tarnów’s population. The students were poor, did not have enough food to eat at home, and had no warm clothes to wear in winter, as the teachers remarked. ³² Most Jewish students in the neighborhood spoke Yiddish at home and their parents observed the Shabbat and other Jewish holidays. Out of the approximately 500 students, half were Jewish. ³³

The language in the official minutes of the teachers’ conference of the Czacki school was based on civic understanding of “Polishness.” Ludwik Garmada, former student of a gymnasium, remembered, that his teachers never used the phrase “Poles and Jews.” Also, in the minutes of the Czacki school, we will not find the dichotomy between “Poles and Jews.” The only difference made in the minutes was the one between Catholic and Jewish students. However, was this only a matter of wording, a linguistic choice, or did it reflect a reality in which ethnicity as a factor was absent from classrooms? Or to put it differently: were there really only “Poles” in the public schools, albeit of different religious affiliation?

When reading the minutes, quite a contrary image begins to take shape. One gets the impression that teachers from the Czacki school blamed the Jewish children for virtually everything that went wrong. If one were to trust the teachers’ opinion expressed in the records, it was mostly Jewish students who had problems grasping the material, showed up late for class, were dirty, and did not behave properly during classes. ³⁴ The teachers argued explicitly and repeatedly that the standard of the school was so low, because half of the students were Jewish. ³⁵ If Jewish children lagged behind in learning, teachers attributed this to stereotypical pejorative features: Jewish children were unable to speak properly, behaved badly, and were dirty and lazy. ³⁶ Teachers often complained that it was difficult for them to teach, given that some of the Jewish students spoke Polish poorly, especially in classes where, for example, 45 out of 60 children were Jewish. ³⁷ Although this problem seemed to disappear as the children grew up and acquired the language of their surroundings quite quickly, the limited knowledge of Polish among Jewish students was a constant source of discontent among teachers employed in this public school. The lack of sufficient Polish language skills among school children entering the public education system was not considered to be a more general dilemma in a multiethnic state, in which children from diverse ethnic backgrounds attended one school. Rather, it was considered to be solely a problem of the Jews, and to be solved by the Jewish children themselves, by their parents, or by the Jewish religion teacher.

Another ground for complaints was the fact that Jewish children had the right to be absent on Saturdays in observance of the Jewish Shabbat. The result was that half of the classes were empty on Friday afternoons and on Saturdays. During the teachers’ conferences, instructors even tried to convince their colleague, Dr. Wachtel, who taught Jewish religion in the school, to influence Jewish parents to send their children to school on Saturdays. Although Dr. Wachtel stressed that he was more than eager to prove his loyalty to the state, it was very hard for him as a teacher of religion to comply with such a request: How could a Jewish religion teacher convince Jewish parents to send their children to school on Shabbat? However, Dr. Wachtel never forbade the children to come to school on Shabbat, as he declared in front of the teachers’ committee. ³⁸

Dr. Wachtel was summoned by the other teachers repeatedly when Jewish children did not behave properly, or if they did not succeed in learning Polish fast enough and he was asked to interfere or to broach the topic during religion class. ³⁹ This demonstrates that the behavior of Jewish students was considered somehow a “Jewish problem” that should be solved by the Jewish religion teacher (i.e., among the Jews). Minutes of the teachers’ conference in the Czacki school reveal that the attitude of teachers toward Jewish children was marked by a feeling of cultural superiority of those belonging to the “titular nation.” As a result, any conflicts and difficulties experienced in school were explained in ethnic categories. Although, in the official language of the school records, the teachers underlined religious alterity by using the wording “Catholic and Jews” and not the ethnic divide between “Poles and Jews,” their attitude toward the Jewish student was marked by the feeling of ethnic difference and the conviction that Jews did not belong to the ethnically defined Polish “in-group,” the “imagined community,” they remained the Others.

Did this feeling of cultural superiority of teachers toward Jewish students translate into contempt between non-Jewish and Jewish children? We have very few sources to answer this question. One would assume that it could not be any other way. However, some children underline what they had in common. Aleksander Dagnan, a non-Jew from the Czacki school, remembered retrospectively: “They were boys just like us, especially in Grabówka [. . .] because everyone was sitting in the same boat—of poverty, of common poverty.” ⁴⁰ Here, Dagnan expressed belonging to a social class as an important feature, but this time the shared experience of poverty fused the children together. Dagnan only considered boys from Chassidic families as being distant from his reality, but not Jewish boys in general.

What more can we say about children stemming from working-class families and their experience in the public schools of Tarnów? Israel Baicher, raised in a working-class family, remembered that the majority of his friends were non-Jews. He did so well in math in his gymnasium, he declared, that it simply benefited his classmates to be friends with him. ⁴¹ Besides schooling life, Baicher stresses repeatedly, in his retrospective interview, that Jewish and non-Jewish workers had close ties in Tarnów and collaborated “hand in hand,” on the party level as well as in the unions. ⁴² Indeed, the Bund and the Socialist Party collaborated exceptionally well in Tarnów and formed a common “Socialist Club” in the city council. ⁴³

While speaking about children and youth from the working class, it also noteworthy to consider extracurricular activities in town. While these were ethnically split, the social divide was simultaneously very crucial. For example, the Zionist organizations founded their own sports club “Samson,” and the non-Jewish Polish “Tarnovia” was an offshoot of the Sokół sporting movement. ⁴⁴ The Sokół clubs, first established in Lemberg at the end of the 19th century, were of Polish-national orientation and aimed to integrate sports and body politics with national education. ⁴⁵ Both, the Zionist “Samson” and “Tarnovia” clubs were led by the local intelligentsia and respectively assembled the ethnic Polish and the Jewish gymnasium youth with the aim to invoke the (respective) national spirit through gymnastics. ⁴⁶ The socialist parties, on the other hand, offered their own after-school activities and established their own sports club—based on party and/or company affiliation. Although the working-class sports teams were also ethnically split, the Bundist coach remembered his successes against the Zionist “Samson” much more vividly than matches with “Polish” clubs. Thus, the sports club founded in Tarnów had their respective political, national, and social agenda and assembled different groups of youth according to it. It was not sports that divided the youth in the first place but rather the agenda of the organization.

Sophie Gottlob came from a traditional Yiddish-speaking family with 12 children altogether. Her parents’ home was fairly traditional. “Here, they call it religious,” she said in an interview in 1996 conducted in the United States: “But in Poland we didn’t call it religious. Any Jewish home was like that, kosher, different dishes for meat, different dishes for dairy, different dishes for Passover. It was a traditional home.” ⁴⁷ Despite her traditional family, non-Jewish girlfriends frequented her home. Gizela Fudem came from a very religious family. She went to the St. Jadwiga public school, which had a high percentage of Jewish children. During the German occupation, she obtained help from a non-Jewish, Polish classmate. We also have testimonies of non-Jews, who recalled having Jewish friends in school and who later on took the risk of assisting Jews during the German occupation. Janina Wałęga from Tarnów was honored as a Righteous Among the Nations for helping Jews during the German occupation. When asked about her motivations, she answered: “I used to have a lot of Jewish friends, who were very kind to me in the gymnasium, so we became close somehow.” ⁴⁸ She had attended the Eliza Orzeszkowa school for girls, which had a high percentage of Jewish children. ⁴⁹ During the German occupation, some Jewish families hid in the Dagnan mill. They were assisted by Polish boys from the neighborhood, all of whom went to the Czacki school before the war. ⁵⁰

Thus, we can observe the following phenomenon: In the teachers’ tone and in the ways they talked about the Jewish students in the Czacki school, we can discern contempt for the Jewish children and their culture, language, and behavior. Yet for some students, the fact that Jews and non-Jews were in daily contact in the classroom reduced their feeling of cultural difference. Although we have few sources, at least we can state that some of the students, including those cited above, were able to integrate ethnic and religious alterity into what they considered to be the “we” group: we the poor people, we the students who need math homework, we the classmates, etc. Despite the teachers’ hostile attitudes, school could in some cases minimize cultural differences and integrate alterity into everyday life in a multicultural town.

Ethnic Divisions in Secondary Education and Antisemitism

After the seventh grade, students could continue with secondary education, which was neither compulsory nor free, and students had to pay high fees to attend a gymnasium. Thus, in most cases, only educated and well-to-do parents could send their children to a gymnasium. There was only one Jewish private school in Tarnów—and the only coeducational school for girls and boys in town, the previously mentioned Safa Berura, where most of the subjects were taught in Polish. There were also Hebrew courses, and students learned about the Jewish religion and Jewish history. The aim of the school was twofold. On one hand—as we can read in an official report to state authorities from the 1938 to 1939 school year—the school wanted to “harmonize completely” the civic and state education (in Polish: wychowanie obywatelsko-państwowe) with national-Jewish upbringing. ⁵¹ The students of the Safa Berura were expected to internalize Polish culture and loyalty to the state, as well as Jewish values. The school wished to promote love and belonging to a Jewish community. ⁵² In short, the education in the Safa Berura was simultaneously aimed at strengthening a Jewish-national belonging, as well as civic-patriotic belonging, which were not considered to be irreconcilable oppositions but, quite to the contrary, “harmonized.” This is at least the official stance in the school report submitted at the time when Jewish civic belonging in Poland was questioned in the public discourse, as well as by state policies.

Cesia Ritter is an example of how one of the students internalized these polyvalent senses of belonging. She and many others saw themselves as Polish patriots and marched with other Safa Berura students, demonstrating their support for the Polish army and the Polish state proudly presenting their gift. But from the reactions and the insults of ethnic Polish onlookers during the parade, Cesia understood that she was being forced out of her polyvalent systems of belonging. That antisemites reduced her to being the Jew—Poland’s “threatening Other.” ⁵³

But many other Tarnovian Jews insisted—at least retrospectively—that there was no antisemitism in their town. “I didn’t feel any antisemitism before the war,” testified the aforementioned Sophia Gottlob. ⁵⁴ Israel Baicher remembered: “Tarnów wasn’t as antisemitic as other towns.” ⁵⁵ And Ludwik Garmada stated that he experienced antisemitism only when he wanted to pursue higher education and was not accepted because he was a Jew:

Until the Matura [high-school diploma] I didn’t know what antisemitism was at first hand. I knew from the newspapers, but not from school, not from the teachers and not from fellow students. [. . .] I experienced the first failure after the Matura, but until then, no, there were absolutely no differences. ⁵⁶

Also, Amos Lavyel, who attended a public gymnasium, and Rahel Klimek, who studied at the Safa Berura, explain that they encountered antisemitism only at the university—that is, after they left Tarnów to pursue their studies elsewhere. They thus located antisemitism outside of the town, in other places in Poland. Was Tarnów indeed a place insulated from antisemitism? Or did the retrospective view dissemble the ways of remembering one’s hometown and youth?

True, Tarnów was an old Galician town with many realms of Polish–Jewish interactions and common politics, as presented above. The nationalistic and antisemitic party of the National Democrats, also called Endecja, was very weak in town. ⁵⁷ There was no university in Tarnów, so students did not experience the numerus clausus, the practice of limiting access of Jews from higher education or excluding them altogether in their hometown, but they encountered this humiliating practice elsewhere. The right-wing nationalist academic youth association All-Polish Youth (in Polish: Młodzież Wszechpolska) movement was not broadly represented in Tarnów either, and the violent nationalistic tendencies among university students were palpable for Tarnów’s Jewish youth only when they traveled to bigger cities like Kraków, Warsaw, and Lwów to attend universities. However, antisemitic university students came home to Tarnów during breaks and they organized their followers among the gymnasium students quite successfully.

Antisemitic tendencies were increasing in Tarnów, and they must have been perceptible among gymnasium youth. The three public gymnasiums for boys in Tarnów published official school reports disclosing the share of Jews and Catholics among students. As the graph below shows, the percentage of Jews clearly declined since the beginning of the 1930s. The secondary public education thus became increasingly ethnically split. ⁵⁸ However, no ego-documents from Tarnów reflect on this drop of Jewish students in the public gymnasiums at the local level.

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Figure 1

Percentage of Jewish students (according to religious affiliation) in the three public Gymnasia for boys in Tarnów

In all three gymnasiums in Tarnów, antisemitic tendencies were present. Maciej Suwada was a Polish teacher in the First Kazimierz Brodziński and Second Jan Hetman Gymnasium for Boys. In his spare time, he wrote harshly antisemitic articles for the local Catholic illustrated weekly Nasza Sprawa. Leszek Dziama, a teacher in the First Kazimierz Brodziński Gymnasium, was a candidate for the National Democrats for city council in 1939 (though he was not elected). ⁵⁹ They both taught in the very gymnasium attended by Ludwik Garmada, who stated in his interview that no difference was made between Jews and non-Jews and that all the gymnasium students were considered Poles.

In 1931, an antisemitic scandal in the public schools agitated the Tarnovian public sphere. At the end of the school year, a tableau of pictures of graduates and teachers was usually arranged in the schools. In 1931, however, ethnically Polish students from the First Kazimierz Brodziński Gymnasium for boys, as well as from the Second Jan Tarnowski Gymnasium, refused to include pictures of Jewish religion teachers in the tableau. One of them was the aforementioned Dr. Wachtel, who also taught religion at the public Czacki elementary school. Jewish students (as well as seven non-Jewish students) showed solidarity with the Jewish teachers and chose to be absent from the tableau as well. Finally, the Jewish graduates from all three public gymnasiums decided to have their own tableau of pictures. It was later displayed in one of the Jewish shops in the main street in Tarnów. ⁶⁰ In June 1931, some ethnically Polish students who passed by this very tableau of Jewish graduates showcased on Krakowska Street, demanded its removal as a “Zionist” photo due to “nationalist reasons.” The argument escalated into a full-fledged fistfight with Jewish students who defended the picture. ⁶¹

Moreover, in March 1936, shortly after the pogrom in Przytyk, ⁶² the students of the Third Adam Mickiewicz Gymnasium participated in a raid on Jewish businesses, together with members of the radical right-wing All-Polish Youth. They violently broke the windows of Jewish shops. ⁶³ In the minutes of the city council for the second half of the 1930s, the socialist councilors complained about the unequal treatment of Jewish and non-Jewish students in public schools, about teachers teasing and insulting Jewish students. ⁶⁴ There were even rumors in town that a public elementary school introduced ghetto benches—physically separating Jewish and non-Jewish children. ⁶⁵ One of the students from that very school remembered that he had to sit separately from his non-Jewish classmates. ⁶⁶

The question remains why in many retrospective interviews from Tarnów, the interviewed chose not to speak about antisemitism in their hometown and to relocate it either to a different town or to the very last years of the Second Polish Republic. Did the witnesses not see the antisemitism of their fellow students? Did all of this happen out of their sight? We have to remember that the interviews were conducted many years later, in the 1990s and 2000s, and they were focused primarily on the experience of surviving the Holocaust. As we know from memory studies, ways of remembering can change over the course of time, are often selective, and add coherence to life stories. In the context of the interviews for the USC Spielberg Foundation, which were focused on the Holocaust, the prewar period might be remembered in contrast to the dark times to come. It was a time when the family of the interviewed was still alive. It is conceivable that the interviewed chose to remember their youth and their hometown in a positive way, one that would allow them to keep the multiethnic, polyvalent sense of belonging intact, at least in retrospect. This “local patriotism” probably allowed the interviewed to integrate their being Tarnovian, being Polish, and being Jewish. It likely allowed them to keep a positive picture of Tarnów while very clearly recalling the phenomenon of antisemitism in Poland in general. Tarnów, at least prewar Tarnów, could thus remain their “home,” a place where they remembered what being chez-soi meant, with all the various identification patterns they could integrate into their personal and communal narrative.

Conclusion

When I entered the home of Shulamith Lavyel, a former student of the Safa Berura school, her Haifa apartment was full of paintings and prints of Tarnów. The town was the place of her and her husband’s childhood and youth, although they have now spent most of their adult lives in Israel. Their attachment to Tarnów was literally displayed on the walls of the place she called her home, of what she considered chez-soi. ⁶⁷

This article examined a variety of sources and different aspects of “belonging” of Polish-Jewish youth in one town. Oral history interviews, as well as school records from the 1930s, police documentation, and local newspapers gave us insights into the question of belonging and experiencing school and life in a multiethnic town. Interviews with Jewish survivors from Tarnów give us glimpses into how the interviewees retrospectively made sense of their belonging—how they considered themselves being Polish, Jewish, Tarnovian, or part of their social class. Belonging was a dynamic process: it changed over time and depended very much on the perspective of the speaker, and it simultaneously integrated more than one identification pattern. This polyvalent sense(s) of belonging(s) (Mehrfachbezügigkeit) seems to be the main model in the experience of Jews living in multiethnic towns. However, it was increasingly challenged by the dominant Catholic majority society. The experience of being pushed out of this polyvalent reference system and categorized in a pattern of unambiguity peculiar to nationalists (the ethnic Catholic Poles on one side and the Jews as the Other) was a painful experience for Cesia Ritter and many others. Also, many years later, Ludwik Garmada underlined how he considered himself to be Polish and Jewish simultaneously and how important it was for him that he was considered a Pole in school. Although some of the survivors stress that they had no encounters with antisemitism in their hometown, it becomes obvious through other sources that antisemitism was a very palpable experience for Tarnów’s Jews—in the attitudes of the teachers and in the attacks of the nationalist youth in town. The retrospective interviews dissemble at times the experiences of discrimination, exclusion, and violence. As we have seen, some of the interviewed choose to keep their narrative about their hometown and good childhood intact by dislocating their experiences of antisemitism outside their hometown or limiting them to the very late 1930s.

However, school could also serve as a dense contact zone that enabled friendships and the integration of cultural and/or religious difference into the “us” group at certain moments. When we think of belonging in the Polish-Jewish context, we tend to concentrate on ethnic/national categories as the most salient ones. However, as we have seen, social class played a very important role for the speakers—at the time, as well as in retrospect. Being part of the intelligentsia, or the fact of being poor, being the son of a doctor speaking Polish or being a Yiddish-speaking worker organized in unions, parties, and their respective sport clubs strongly affected the feeling of belonging to a certain group. Social class was another important layer that shaped the polyvalent senses of belonging and that needs to be integrated in our examination of these.