Destination: Poland : THE SCHINDLER’S LIST TOUR : A journey, inspired by Spielberg’s Holocaust film, through the remnants of Jewish life in Poland

Behind Shimon Holzer, the last Jewish man in Nowy Sacz, stretched the cemetery wall, built as a memorial after World War II from broken tombstones that the Germans had uprooted to pave the streets in this southern Polish town.

Beside the stocky factory worker stood 10 solemn Americans, the Jews among us reciting the Kaddish--the ancient Hebrew prayer of mourning--at the grave of his father, Kalman Holzer.

“This is very important to Shimon, because he doesn’t know the words of the Kaddish himself, and there’s nobody else to pray for his father,” said tour leader Stu Feiler. A Chicagoan who lost more than 30 relatives in the Holocaust, Feiler was spurred by Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning movie “Schindler’s List” to organize several “Oskar Schindler’s Poland” tours such as the one we joined in July.

The soft-spoken Holzer had steered us across the wet morning grass, stopping at monuments inscribed in Yiddish, and sometimes in Polish, as well. Erected for the most part since democracy took hold in Poland five years ago, they memorialize some of the 5,000 Nowy Sacz Jews executed by Nazi firing squads in the centuries-old cemetery or deported to the gas chambers of the Nazi death camp in Belzec.

“There were nine synagogues in Nowy Sacz in 1939,” Holzer told us through an interpreter. “Jews made up a third of the 15,000 population back then. About 20 surviving Jewish families returned after the war. Some went to Israel in 1956, and the others to Sweden and Australia in 1968.”

That slender remnant of survivors departed their native Poland, he said, “because the Jewish people were not liked here. But it doesn’t make a difference to me.”

So Holzer remains, along with one Jewish woman still living in Nowy Sacz, now a pollution-shrouded industrial city of 75,000. He tends to his ailing Roman Catholic mother, who hid his Jewish father at home during the five years of German occupation.

The elder Holzer emigrated to Israel in the ‘60s, but came back because of bad health and died here in 1984 at age 78. Only when the occasional Jewish visitors come to Nowy Sacz from Israel or America can the proper prayer be said for his soul.

Deserted Jewish cemeteries, with their haunting echoes of a venerable civilization snuffed out overnight, became one leitmotif of our 11-day tour. And “Oskar Schindler’s Poland” proved to be an emotionally wringing crash course in a vibrant culture that all but vanished in a five-year blink of the eye beneath the barbarity of Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution.

In Krakow, the trip’s hub, we even met a startling apparition--a Holocaust survivor who believes she is the true-life incarnation of a character killed off in the movie version of “Schindler’s List.” Roma Ligocka, a 55-year-old painter of ineffably sorrowful portraits with bottomless eyes much like her own, believes she was the little “Girl in the Red Coat,” the powerful lone color image used amid Spielberg’s black-and-white footage to pinpoint Oskar Schindler’s conversion from war profiteer to savior.

A morning’s excursion to “Schindler’s List” locations in and around Krakow, enlightened by Spielberg production consultant Franciszek Palowski, spotlighted the movie’s heartening tale of courage and rescue.

Five of us were inspired enough to see the film again the next afternoon (with Polish subtitles, for $1.80, in a sweltering Main Market Square cinema with no air-conditioning).

But our long day at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 30 miles west of Krakow, painted the full canvas of the Holocaust in deepest black with vignettes such as these:

* Two tons of human hair, turned gray by the Zyklon B gas before it was shorn from the freshly asphyxiated victims, to be sold for carpet padding and coat lining in Germany.

* An entire gallery of shoes, some of the 40,000 pairs found when Soviet troops reached Auschwitz in January, 1945.

* Another room containing heaps of battered suitcases with their owners’ names chalked hopefully on the side.

* The hulking ruins of five huge gas chambers and crematories, the killing machines of the Nazi inferno.

* The slippery feel of the slivered human bones that can be found in almost any handful of dirt scooped up near several cloudy ponds still clogged with the ashes of men, women and children gassed and burned at a pace that sometimes reached 20,000 a day.

Seven hours inside Nazi Germany’s most prolific death factory hammered home the message that the “Schindler’s List” saga--as true and inspirational as it surely is--ranks as an extreme exception to the rule. For the overwhelming majority of Jews who fell under the swastika’s shadow, the bottom line was death by disease, starvation, slave labor, torture, shooting or gassing.

Oskar Schindler saved 1,300 Jews. Close to 6 million other Jews--roughly half of them Polish citizens--perished in the Holocaust. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, we gazed into the heart of that darkness.

In fact, half the 15 million Jews in the world today (including many Americans) are believed to have ancestral roots of some kind in present or former Polish soil. In 1939, there were 3.5 million Polish Jews--a full 10% of the national population, comprising Europe’s largest Jewish community. When the war ended in 1945, about 250,000 remained alive. In Poland today, estimates of the Jewish population range from 5,000 to 15,000, well under 1% of the prewar total and mostly age 70 or older.

“This is like going to Pompeii,” said tour colleague Bob Denlow, a St. Louis lawyer whose parents managed to survive the Holocaust. “You’re walking past buildings still standing from an ancient civilization where all the people are long gone. But here, the people disappeared only 50 years ago. It’s a ghostly feeling.”

Those of us who’d done some homework expected to encounter ghosts aplenty on the tour, especially during our three days on the road stopping at Nowy Sacz and a dozen other towns east of Krakow that boasted thriving Jewish communities before the war. As we heard from Joachim Russek, a professor at Jagiellonian University’s 8-year-old Research Center on Jewish History and Culture in Poland, “this entire country is a vast Jewish cemetery.”

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But it was an eye-opening surprise to discover that Poland’s Jewish heritage has become a highly marketable commodity here, notwithstanding the virtual absence of flesh-and-blood Jews. This Jewish chic is thanks in substantial measure to “Schindler’s List,” seen so far by about a million Poles among the box-office total of more than 75 million worldwide, but also for reasons that predate the movie’s powerful impact since last fall.

For example, a half-dozen or more brands of kosher vodka have come on the market in Poland since 1990--including one with a dim-witted label that portrays a hook-nosed Jew much like the hateful stereotype propagated by the Nazis. Primary customers for this rising tide of kosher vodka, we were told, are Polish yuppies who serve it at parties as a fashionable flourish.

A more salutary development is Krakow’s Jewish Culture Festival, which staged its fourth annual potpourri of films, concerts, exhibits and seminars two months ago. And Russek’s research center recently signed an agreement with New York University to bring American students to Krakow starting next summer for an intensive Jewish studies program.

On the tourism front, the Kazimierz neighborhood--a bustling hub for Krakow’s 65,000 prewar Jews--boasts three Jewish-themed cafes. Two are fierce side-by-side competitors, both claiming the name Ariel and both presenting Yiddish folk music, usually performed by non-Jews. The third, Cafe Sara, is housed at the Jewish Cultural Center, which opened last November with U.S. funding in a former prayer house.

On the same Szeroka Street square as the two Ariels, the Jordan bookshop sells not only guidebooks and souvenirs but also two-hour escorted tours of locations from “Schindler’s List,” which Spielberg shot mainly in Krakow from March through May, 1993.

“Krakow is famous because of this wonderful film,” Russek said. “But ‘Schindler’s List’ will be a great victory only if people who see it are impelled to go to the library and learn more. It will be a small disaster if people see the film and say, ‘Now I know all about the Holocaust.’ ”

The Holocaust learning curve spanned a wide spectrum among our group--from Bob Denlow and his non-Jewish wife, Pat, who’d both prepared extensively for their mission of tracing his relatives’ Holocaust fate, to Mary Randall, an Alabaman who said she’d never known any Jews until this trip.

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We credited Feiler with putting together a compelling tour, especially the unfailingly superb experts he lined up to brief us. But his overbearing, know-it-all style of leading the group became increasingly frustrating as the trip went along. Sometimes he seemed to forget that we were his paying customers.

All this added a subtext of personal tension to a trip that would have been emotionally demanding under any circumstances. Still, the overall experience was intensely stimulating, and we had Feiler’s vision to thank for that.

Feiler is propelled by a strong sense of extended-family loss, as became evident on the first morning’s excursion to Jewish Krakow with well-versed guide Renata Zwodzijasz, who’d done graduate work a decade ago at the University of Missouri.

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We visited Poland’s oldest Jewish cemetery (1552), located behind Remuh Synagogue on Szeroka Street, and then the New Jewish Cemetery on Miodowa Street, where Feiler showed us the tomb of his great-grandfather. The marker lay toppled beneath another stone in the crazy-quilt jumble of grave markers that German troops used for target practice when Krakow was the seat of Hans Frank’s notorious occupation government for the shank of Poland not annexed to the Third Reich.

We also passed the weed-choked vacant lot on Kupa Street where the house of Feiler’s great-grandparents once stood. In the same block rises the shell of Ajzyk (Isaac) Synagogue, one of seven surviving in Krakow (although only Remuh is active, with 180 Orthodox members but no resident rabbi). The Germans torched Ajzyk’s interior, and a dearth of funds has halted restoration of its exquisite wall paintings.

The tour’s 400-mile eastward loop from Krakow turned up disused synagogues in various states of disrepair. Some were as mournful as the cemeteries.

In Tarnow, scene of the first deportation to Auschwitz in June of 1940, we found only the towering bimah (the raised central pulpit) standing at the Old Synagogue, which was dynamited and burned by the Germans on Nov. 11, 1939. A plaque at the

entrance to Tarnow’s Jewish Cemetery reported: “The original gates to this cemetery, through which thousands of Jews were marched to be executed, are on display at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.”

There was nothing special about Rzeszow’s two former synagogues, one housing municipal offices and a small museum, the other used as an art gallery and cafe. But the 17th-Century synagogue in Lancut (pronounced “wine-soot”) dazzled us with its sumptuous decoration--a vision of all the splendor wiped out by the Germans in their zeal to desecrate the Jewish faith.

Now the best-preserved synagogue in Poland, according to Feiler, Lancut was saved from demolition by a civic crusader after the war and restored to its present majesty.

The richly hued stucco and polychrome motifs include Hebrew prayers, signs of the zodiac, scenes of religious feasts, animals and plants, and Old Testament tales. The inside of the bimah dome is painted with a leviathan--a fantastic giant fish curled to swallow its own tail. We saw nothing more glorious anywhere on the tour than this synagogue.

By contrast, Lancut’s Jewish cemetery is a wasteland of tumbled tombs, some barely protruding from the ground. Here and at the next cemetery, in Lezajsk, the only spruced-up section surrounds the tombs of several revered Hasidic rebbes (rabbis) from past centuries. Hasidic donations have financed the mausoleums built in recent years to shelter the graves.

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We began to go numb the second day out from the flow of similar sights: another haunting Jewish cemetery in Sieniawa; a former synagogue used as an art school in Jaroslaw, with Hitler graffiti on the wall outside; an upper-class cemetery in Przemysl, where one ex-synagogue functions as a bus-repair depot; a 16th-Century Sephardic synagogue, built like a fortress with walls five feet thick, in Lesko.

Then Rymanow hit us with a synagogue as melancholy as Lancut’s was magnificent. We climbed over a low wire fence to inspect the ruins left by Nazi vandalism: the roof blown off and mostly open to the sky; the bimah severely damaged; fragments of murals dimly visible, including one of the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Here, indeed, was a place to wail with grief.

The repertoire varied in Szebnie, where our bus driver located the site of an SS forced-labor camp where 14,000 prisoners died from 1941 to 1944.

A sign describing the camp is posted on the apartment building and grade school now on the property.

The moving cemetery encounter with Nowy Sacz’s last Jewish man was followed by a final synagogue stop in Bobowa at a wood-facaded temple built for an 18th-Century Hasidic rebbe. The weathered wood cottages on the neighboring block struck Pat Denlow as exactly the kinds of homes from which the Jewish residents of so many Polish towns were brutally dragged when the Nazis began the deportations to the ghettos.

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Back in Krakow, at the university Jewish research center, Joachim Russek helped focus our tangled thoughts.

Noting that the center is run mainly by non-Jews like him, Russek observed that “it’s difficult to meet a Jew in Poland without a special effort. That’s a reflection of the statistical picture. The Jewish community in Poland is essentially gone, so we concentrate on preserving the memory of their culture.”

Russek addressed the issues of Polish anti-Semitism, which has surfaced in election campaigns here since 1989.

“If we have invented anything along these lines in recent years,” he said wryly, “it is anti-Semitism without Jews.” But he expressed hope that programs like the center’s could help bridge the gaps of understanding.

Then we watched a marvelous video, “The Unexpected Guest,” illustrated with paintings from a recent exhibition of Polish art depicting Jewish subjects over the centuries. After World War II, the narrator noted, the Poles had their own 3 million dead to mourn. It was easy to move into an empty Jewish apartment and forget who had lived there.

That brought to the screen the portrait of “The Unexpected Guest,” a man anxiously pushing open a door. And the narration: “Inside, he will find strangers. His descendants are missing . . . In a way, Poles and Jews have always been strangers. Yet they fit together like adjacent pieces of a puzzle.”

Our extraordinary tour ended with more puzzles than answers. “In the United States, you are an enormously privileged people,” Russek had told us. “You can afford to think about tomorrow more than yesterday.”

Overloaded with images and impressions, we would go home prepared to do a lot of thinking.

GUIDEBOOK

Oskar Schindler’s Poland

Schindler’s List tours: Space remains on this year’s final two “Oskar Schindler’s Poland” tours led by Stu Feiler, creator of the program. Departure dates are Sept. 18 and Oct. 19 for the 12-day package, priced at $1,750 per person, double occupancy, including round-trip air fare between Chicago and Warsaw on KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, with express-train connections between Warsaw and Krakow. More tours are planned for 1995, but dates and prices have not been set; it is possible that someone other than Feiler will lead next year’s trips.

Included in the price are seven nights at the Hotel Orbis Holiday Inn, a comfortable hotel with casino on the outskirts of Krakow. One night is spent at the Sieniawa Palace, an 18th-Century baroque mansion, and one night at the serviceable Beskid Hotel in Nowy Sacz. Most meals are included, as well as touring transportation, and the excellent guides and experts arranged by Feiler. The group stays one night in Amsterdam on the return trip to the United States. A brief tour of the former Warsaw Ghetto is offered on arrival in Poland.

For more information on the “Oskar Schindler’s Poland” tour, contact Brian Smith at Edgewater Travel, 5701 N. Sheridan Road, Chicago, Ill. 60660; telephone (312) 784-3400.

Escorted tours that focus on Poland’s Jewish heritage are also available through the Air Tours Department of LOT Polish Airlines, tel. (800) 223-0593 or (212) 852-0243. LOT flies nonstop between Chicago or New York and Warsaw; Delta has non-stop service from Dallas or New York to Warsaw, and several airlines fly nonstop to Frankfurt, from which there are non-stop flights to Krakow or Warsaw.

Resources: A helpful guidebook for planning a Jewish-heritage trip to Poland is “Jewish Heritage Travel: A Guide to East-Central Europe,” by Ruth Ellen Gruber (John Wiley & Sons, $16.95). Also useful are the “Poland” volumes in the Rough Guide series, by Mark Salter and Gordon McLachlan ($16.95), and Lonely Planet’s Travel Survival Kit series, by Krzysztof Dydynski ($17.95), as well as “Poland’s Jewish Heritage,” by Joram Kagan (Hippocrene Books, $16.95).

For more information: The Polish National Tourist Office has branches in New York (212-338-9412) and Chicago (312-236-9013), or contact Orbis Polish Travel Bureau, 342 Madison Ave., Suite 1512, New York, N.Y. 10173; tel. (212) 867-5011.