Goodbye "Hometowns"

Today was our first full day without a guide and our last day in Zamosc. We began by going back to the town hall archives to request an official copy of Chaim Zylberman's birth record, as well as to find out if Zayde had had any other children. Yesterday, we visited the archives a second time in the afternoon, and by then Alex had left to travel back to Ukraine. After a few minutes of back and forth between us, speaking in English, and the woman at the office, speaking Polish, a girl walked in (what seemed like out of nowhere!) to act as our translator. This morning, seconds after we arrived in the office, the woman at the desk had the translator assist us again. We filled out the necessary forms, and were told to come back for the results at 2.

We then went to the Zamosc synagogue, a 17th-century Renaissance building that survived the war, and was recently restored to its pre-war state. The building is now used as a cultural center and gallery, as well as a museum to the history of Jews in Poland. We watched several short films on pre-war Jewish life, specifically on the Jewish life in the cities of Lwow, Warsaw, and Krakow. The films were narrated in Yiddish and featured cheesy Klezmer music, so ended up being both informative and entertaining.

Later, we went back to the town hall archives, and the woman there provided us with our answers: Chaim's birth record exists, but records from the years after Chaim's birth don't--so we can conclude that Zayde only had one child. On the birth record, one section lists a street name as the location of the "announcer" of the birth, that being Zayde in this case. The street name was one that was different from the street we visited yesterday, so we concluded that the location was either the place where Zayde lived when he first moved to Zamosc, or the place where Chaim was born. We went to the tourist information center to find out where this street was today. The woman working there didn't know exactly where the street was, but noticed that I also had written down "1 Maja, #1" in my notebook--this is the street name that's listed on Zayde's concentration camp forms, that we assumed was the same as Kamienna Street--the street we visited yesterday. However, she pointed to a different street on the map, one right in the center of town, that intersects with the main square, as the former 1 Maja Street. We thanked her and set off to see the former 1 Maja, #1 building, and when we got there, it was clear that this was not a modern building--it was a huge, white apartment building on the corner of the street, on the edge of the center of the city. Unfortunately, we don't have an apartment number, but this was definitely the same apartment building that Zayde must have lived in at some point after he lived on Kamienna and before the war. That means that I was in 3 out of my 4 grandparents' pre-war residences!

We also visited one of Zamosc's former cemeteries today, which is today a memorial to Zamosc's pre-war Jewish population. Since the cemetery's headstones were smashed, the builders of the memorial took the fragments and put them together into a monument and 3 walls to serve as the memorial. We lit candles there, and spent some time reading the fragments to look for familiar names.

Anyway, as I mentioned before, today was our last day in Zamosc, and tomorrow morning we go to Krakow! Everyone we've spoken to has said that Krakow is beautiful, so I'm sure we'll enjoy our stay there. More to come!

Interior of the Zamosc Synagogue

Zayde's apartment building at #1 (former) 1 Maja Street