A funny thing happened on the way to Krakow

Before we left Zamosc this morning, we stopped at the city museum to make sure that the former 1 Maja Street we had found yesterday was the correct street. We learned there that the street we had visited, Grodzka Street, was called 1 Maja only after World War II, and only was recently renamed Grodzka. A different street, Solna, was called 1 Maja before World War II, when Zayde would have lived there. We visited 1 Solna Street--and it turns out, it's a building that's connected to the hotel where we stayed and right around the corner from the Zamosc synagogue! So scratch that part of yesterday's post--although that building was, at some point, 1 Maja #1, this building had that address before the war. We went inside the building, and today it's mostly used for various businesses.

We were picked up shortly after to ride to Krakow, and guess which town we had to pass through on the road from Zamosc? You got it--Szczebrzeszyn. We decided to stop by the town hall to see if they had records of the births of Zayde's three brothers. Again, we were lucky to have a nice and eager woman working at the archives, and she pulled out book after book to find something for us. The first thing she found was a record for the birth of Huna (what we think is another name for Hersh), born in 1916. The most exciting part about this specific record is that it also listed the names of Hersh's (and Zayde's) grandparents, or my great-great-grandparents--Laibus and Haia Zilberman. The next record we found was a record of the birth of Isak, born in 1919. This record was similar to Zayde's birth record in that it was in the form of an announcement. The woman there also found requests or listings of births and deaths of two of Zayde's brothers--Hersh and Rachmiel--written up in 1946. The request/listing also had Zayde's birth, with the 1904 birth-date we found the other day. The listing didn't specify who requested or wrote up the documents, but the woman there speculated that since Zayde's listed birth-date was the only one with a month and day (the others just had approximate years listed), then maybe it was Zayde who came back to the town in 1946 and requested/listed the documents. Further research is needed on that point...

Anyway, we arrived in Krakow in late afternoon, and we got situated into our hotel. We're staying right in the middle of the former Jewish quarter, Kazimierez. For those of you who don't know, Krakow is the second largest city in Poland, and unlike Warsaw, very little of it was destroyed during the war, so much of its historical landscape, including the Jewish quarter, has been preserved. Today, the whole Jewish quarter promotes Jewish culture through Jewish-style restaurants, Klezmer music, and the annual Krakow Jewish Festival, which features two weeks of speakers, presentations, workshops, concerts, meetings, tours, and more. Lucky for us, we've caught the last few days of the festival, which ends Sunday! There are so many people here from all around the world just for the festival, so it will be exciting to get to attend some of the events. Tomorrow morning, though, we'll take a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau to the see the museum and former concentration camp there. More on that tomorrow...