Tarnow - Where the Making of a Children’s Book Came Full Circle
When two time periods click together
In November 2022, I am sitting on a tour bus in Tarnow, Poland. My fellow travelers and I have just walked through this city, the mundane sound of traffic on wet pavement making it feel like almost any other city on a snowy day.
My husband’s grandfather Yarme, the only one of his grandparents to survive the Holocaust, was from Tarnow, and this visit was why we signed up for this particular tour of the sites of Jewish history and the Holocaust in Poland.
As Tarnow was not destroyed in World War II, it is resplendent with the stately architecture of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Patrician buildings abound, three stories high with chunky horizontal stonework encasing the first floor, facades painted buttery yellow, baby blue or apricot orange, windows trimmed in white stucco, and rooflines featuring curved gables and slim statuettes.
Like a medieval fortress, the ochre town hall with its red brick watch tower squats in the middle of the Rynek, the arcaded market square, where the Nazi occupiers held some of their “selections.” During these round-ups of Tarnow’s Jewish citizens, the Germans decided who would be sent back to the cramped ghetto to work as a forced laborer, and who’d be put on a truck to be shot in the surrounding forests or the Jewish cemetery, or who’d be transported to die in the nearby camps of Auschwitz, Chelmo, Belzec and Treblinka.
Twenty-five thousand Jews lived in Tarnow in 1939 when it was conquered by Nazi Germany. Countless others had fled to Tarnow from “Aktionen” (liquidations) in other Polish towns. Their primal fear still hangs in the air, at least for me.
The endless stories of the cruel humiliations they suffered as part of the Nazis’ relentless grinding down of the Jewish people churn in my mind: Jews forced to kneel in the square, having to strip and pile up their belongings and clothes before their deportation. Small children torn from their mothers, held by their feet, their heads smashed open on the Rynek’s cobblestones.
Along the Rynek and in the former Jewish quarter, the empty spots of Mezuzot gape in doorways. A few Yiddish ghost signs are still discernable on former Jewish stores. The spindly brick innards of the bimah’s canopy are all that remains of the 16th century synagogue.
In 1939, almost half of Tarnow’s population was Jewish. Now only stones, plaques and a cemetery remain.
What to set against all this?
Snowflakes dance through the air as I gaze out the bus window. My fellow travelers climb in, shaking the snow off their coats. Traffic swooshes by. A nearby bus station’s digital display announces the next buses approaching.
As I scroll absentmindedly through Gmail on my phone, a subject line catches my eye: “latest cover version.” I tap the message and up pops the latest version of the cover of Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers, the children’s book I have in the making.
Two time periods click together—there, on my phone, in the city of Tarnow.
Natalie is my mother-in-law, the daughter of Yarme, and this book is about her life as a hidden child during the Holocaust in France. And now I am looking at a book about her right here in her father’s hometown. This is the family branch that survived; the one branch that flourished after the unbelievable extermination of the Holocaust, the sites of which we are visiting right now.
In the summer, I had decided that I would finally produce this book. When I set out to find the right illustrator, I did not know yet that I’d immerse myself in the sites of the Holocaust later in the year.
I did not know that seeing this cover, here in Tarnow, would feel like a small redemption: While so many died, here was the story of one child who made it in another part of Europe, where thankfully more neighbors were willing to help. A child whose roots go back to here, to Tarnow.
Yarme had fortuitously left Tarnow in the 1920s to seek his fortune in Berlin. He didn’t find a fortune, but he did find a wife in Regina, who had been born in Berlin, but whose family also originated in Tarnow.
Blond and blue-eyed, Yarme had followed an acquaintance to a Nazi gathering in Berlin in the early 1930s and concluded, “das toigt nisht” (this is no good). He moved his young family to Paris, where unfortunately the Nazis eventually caught up with them. As a Berliner, Regina tragically considered herself immune to Nazi persecution. Arrested by French police in the summer of 1942, she died in Auschwitz shortly thereafter. Yarme and their four children survived hiding in the French countryside.
At that moment of marveling at the book cover of defiant little Natalie facing off with a Nazi officer, I hadn’t yet been to the Buczyna forest outside of Tarnow. I hadn’t yet stood by the mass grave that contains the remains of about 800 Jewish children. In this forest, Nazi Einsatztruppen first shot the Polish opposition, and then the Jewish citizens, making a special effort to kill Jewish children.
Standing in the freshly fallen snow, surrounded by hills and towering trees, each of us fifty tour participants was given a piece of paper with the name of a child, documented to have died in the Holocaust. Following the example of Yad Vashem’s naming ceremony on Yom HaShoah (coming up again this Sunday, May 5/Monday, May 6), we were asked to read this child’s name out loud.
I had three sobbing fits before it was my turn, but I did manage to read mine:
“Anat Braun, born in 1931 in Sapanta, Romania to parents Mendel and Leah and murdered in Auschwitz, aged 13.”
A fellow traveler and friend of ours read the name of her uncle, who, to the best of her family’s knowledge, was thrown into this mass grave at two years old. How she managed to read that, I don’t know.
After the children’s mass grave, I squeezed into a taxi with my husband, son and daughter. A Polish driver, with whom we had no language in common, took us to the nearby town of Brzesko. This private detour was a direct result of my research for Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers. In my author’s note at the end of the book, I wanted to provide accurate historical information. While researching the deported and hidden Jews of the French region of Sarthe, where Yarme, Natalie and her siblings had been in hiding, I had found papers on Yarme, including his French naturalization application, on which was noted his place of birth: “Brzesko, Polska.”
These days, the only trace of Jewish life in Brzesko, as so often in Poland, is the Jewish cemetery.
The one in Brzesko is remarkably well kept. Its current Polish caretaker inherited the job from his mother and was thoughtful enough to bring a bucket of warm water for us to wash our hands after visiting, which was especially welcome on that frigid day.
A local “Association of Memory and Dialogue” had erected beautiful signs all over the Brzesko cemetery, explaining certain aspects of the Jewish community, or introducing some of the people buried there. Among other things, we learned that the town was destroyed in a fire in 1904, a year after Yarme was born. Did that prompt the family’s move to Tarnow? We don’t know. We also had no way of finding a family grave.
Nevertheless, walking among the snow-covered tombstones of the Brzesko Jewish cemetery with the cover art for Natalie and the Nazi Soldiers in my coat pocket, I felt one narrative of our family history had come full circle.
The story of a hidden child was taking shape in a children’s book, the making of which was happening, among other places, in the very place this child’s family had come from.
I found this story of your journey very moving. I'm so glad you brought the story full circle and published the children's book.
Heartbreaking