Chapter 9: Linden Dust and Mezuzah Scars
Book of Trees on Substack. Note: This story contains an images of a lynching at the end, please take care.
There are Linden Trees in L’viv, where my family lived before the Holocaust.
This is the first image I found when I opened the mysterious box my mother had hidden in the basement. It took me a while to figure out who it was. My great-grandma Felicia with her youngest daughter, Hanka, who would grow up to spy for the resistance.
I first saw this photograph a few years ago. Over the past few years, I’ve worked on piecing this story together.
Before, I had always wished to see a photograph of my ancestors. (My first film - made in the 90’s- was called “Wish I Had a Picture.”) Most Holocaust survivor families don’t have photographs. This is a treasure.
And then, tucked deeper in the box, I found an image of her that her son, my grandpa, carried all his life, through war, across borders, into a death camp…
My grandpa carried this picture of his mother.
Last chapter, I wrote about the ghost signs surfacing in L’viv. L’viv also has mezuzah scars.
The mark on the upper right of the doorframe.
As described on the excellent Forgotten Galicia website:
In Lviv’s medieval old town, the Jewish community was most concentrated on the street, which today is called Staroyevreyska, or “Old Jewish Street.“ This Jewish quarter once had two synagogues and a house of learning.
During WWII, these synagogues, along with other traces of Jewish life, were all but erased from the city’s landscape.
…In the doorframes remain angled slots that used to hold mezuz[ot]—pieces of parchment contained in decorative cases inscribed with specific Hebrew verses from the Torah.
When observant Jews used to pass through these doorposts, they would touch the mezuzah.”
(Learn more about this beautiful tradition here.) And where the Jews of L’viv came from (below)*
Now, the scarred doorframes are among the last traces of what was once one of the largest Jewish communities in the world.
My great-grandpa Szymon walks with his daughters, 1938, L’viv’s Jewish quarter.
Around the time the above photograph was taken (most likely by my grandpa), Hitler was preparing to invade Poland. But before the g-ddamn Nazis, the Soviets occupied the city.
My great-grandmother, my aunt Hanka, my aunt Yanina and my grandpa Ben, before the war.
Even before the Soviets, Jews lived as second-class citizens. Schools were segregated for the most part, and in the 1930’s, universities had “Ghetto Benches”: designated seating in the back, for Jews.
Jewish people were excluded from many professions. Yet, my great-grandpa Szymon Blader became a celebrated mathematician who published an important research paper, (Własności biegunowe krzywych algebraicznych i ich zastosowanie w teoryi tych krzywych [Polar properties of algebraic curves and their theoretical application] at age 27, which can be found in The Einstein Papers today.
But as he began teaching, Great-Grandpa Szymon found his true calling in education. He set aside theoretical math and wrote his most celebrated work: a five-volume series that aimed to transform how advanced mathematics was taught in schools. It had multiple printings and was used throughout Poland. He was awarded the Polish bronze medal "Za Długoletnią Służbę" (For Long Service), despite being Jewish.
Before the Soviets showed up, my great-grandpa, Szymon Blader, and his family loved living in Lwów. It was an ancient city, a place at the heart of Central European intellectual life. For a time, the family thrived.
Until tragedy struck. My beautiful great-grandma became sick and died suddenly, devastating her three children. Szymon retired young, in 1938.
The most popular of his five-volume series, this book had multiple printings before the Nazis destroyed evidence of Jewish intellectual life in L’viv.
In 1939, when the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact delivered Lwów to the Soviets, Great-Grandpa Szymon was 52. His children were in their teens and twenties. He’d remarried and had twin babies. The city’s famous Linden blossoms had succumbed to the summer heat and fallen to the cobblestones, and scattered like dust.
The Soviets allowed Great Grandpa Szymon to keep teaching, but they forbade him to be a Jew. He was not allowed to speak Yiddish, Hebrew, or mention Judaism. The Soviets were concerned that Szymon might be “bourgeois. “ They forced the family to live in one room of their house, and filled the rest of the spaces with Communist strangers from the East.
Suddenly, there were food and supply shortages. People turned to black markets to feed their children without being caught. Jews knew to avoid being detained by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, who imprisoned anyone who seemed to disagree with their ideology. They had spies in every building. People were pressured to report on neighbors, family members, and relatives.
Ignacy Chiger wrote in his memoir Under the Lightless Sky, about his survival of the Lvov Ghetto:
“That world in darkness had two phases - Soviet and Nazi. They differed in form but were nearly identical in content. Through spiritual humiliation and degradation of personal dignity in everyday life - at home, outside home, at work, at school, among strangers, among friends, and even within one's family - both Soviet and Nazi terror aimed at physical annihilation - in other words, genocide.”
Great-grandpa Szymon stayed optimistic. Poland had been a relatively safe place for the Jews. Anyway, where else could the family go? Under Soviet control, the only option was to starve in Siberian labor camps.
Chiger continues, in his remarkable memoir:
“…the eastern part of Poland was overtaken by the army of the Soviet Union, yet the Soviet Union never used the word "overtake" or "occupy"; quite to the contrary, it portrayed itself as an invited guest, a protector asked for help by the "oppressed" inhabitants…
Our "friends" arrived in Poland almost in rags; they resembled an army of marauders rather than an undefeated armed force, as they used to call themselves. They came with great propaganda, singing and dancing on Lvov streets and squares. They formed passersby into groups of listeners and explained to them that they, the Soviets, had come to give us freedom… Speeches, declarations, a panoply of propaganda, and buffoonery seemed to have no end….
Most people didn't treat those promises seriously. Yet some local blind fanatics of communism did believe in this crap. Although the truth seemed evident, they didn't see it and didn't want to…Thanks to their parents' wealth, they had few worries and lived a lazy, parasitic life with no concern for money and no practical interests. However, they sought to attract attention and do something unusual, so they found satisfaction in spreading political propaganda…A blatant example comes to my mind. A socialist member of the Austrian Landtag, Dr. Herman Diamand, patted his fat belly, where a golden watch on a golden chain dangled, and cried at workers' meetings: "Us, hungry laborers!"
And yet, Great-Grandpa Szymon was sure things would work out. All he wanted to do was teach people math. Surely the Soviets wouldn’t be so bad.
Meanwhile, desperate Jewish refugees streamed into the city from the part of Poland the Nazi’s allready occupied. The stories the refugees told sounded like the world had become nightmares.
Next Chapter: The Lvov Ghetto.
Jewish resistance fighters, discovered by the Nazis.
*The Jewish tradition of Mezuzot did not start in L’viv. It began thousands of years ago, as noted in the book of Deuteronomy, long before the Jewish people were expelled from Judea - present-day Israel - and became a tribe whose culture remains shaped by the seasons of their homeland. No matter where they are, Jews practice rituals rooted in the agricultural cycles of Judea - the place for which they are named. The Ancient Romans renamed Judea "Syria Palaestina" in an attempt to erase the Jews.
