Visit to Przasnysz April 28, 2010

Below is a piece Rich wrote for his family about our visit to Przasnysz, the home of his grandfather. It reiterates some of what I said in the last post and contains many more details about the town than I had previously related.


1st I have to say many of my stereotypes are gone. The Poles we met among friendliest people we have encountered anywhere in Central Europe. Well, not all stereotypes. People in Warsaw & Krakow restaurants drink beer from stynes the size of small swimming pools (a full liter with lunch for a smallish person seems like a lot to me) and the beer bellies there were reminiscent of the NW side of Chicago.

After years of my own sad lack of inquisitiveness about Wener lineage, Ginny & I were able to set foot in Przasnysz, Poland on April 28th – the town from which the proto-Weners left for the USA around the turn of the 20th century. After seeing the sites of devastation and numerous war & holocaust memorials throughout Poland, I can only regret never having shown my grandfather the gratitude he deserved for taking the risk to come to Chicago, making our survival and current lives possible.
We arrived in Warsaw at 7:00AM on an overnight train from Vienna and, after a brief stop at the hotel met the car and driver we had arranged for the drive to Przasnysz. The driver was a local fireman and the brother of the colleague who had invited me to Warsaw to give a talk. He showed up with water bottles, chocolate bars and an interesting, though very roughly translated history of Jews in Przasnysz. Przasnysz is about 100km north of Warsaw and so should be no more than a 1 hour drive on good roads – but we saw no good roads. The ones we traveled were heavily congested & mostly 2 lane (which are largely driven as if they had 3 or 4 lanes – see Youtube videos about why not to drive in Poland http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqq5_abn--k ). I was happy to make it back in safely. It is a simple route – routes 61 to 57 to 544 - but harder to drive than to map. Our driver (Chrystof) managed the 100 km in 2 hours of tough work.

Once we got within 50 km of Przasnysz the landscape was mostly rural but never empty land. This is a very old country and the many farms were small, with several neatly clustered farm buildings. There was an occasional restaurant typical of road restaurants anywhere - with garish signs (two 20 foot statues of chefs pointing way in; a place called Panorama – but on a ground floor with no view of anything that we could tell). The language on signs was all but impenetrable for us. There were dots of towns, some barely a cluster of buildings around a church, others more significant. We became excited when saw road signs with names that were now – Cechanow and Przasnysz, (we never saw Ducymin). Przasnysz is a regional center as is nearby Ciechanow.

We drove straight to house of Mariusz Bondarzok – with whom I had been corresponding by email for about 1 month. He is a local journalist and unofficial town historian – and may know more than anyone, & about the history and fate of the local Jewish population. He has made a small (& non-remunerative) avocation of finding facts about local Jewish life and sharing this with anyone interested. He has given many tours to people like us. Mariusz has written several books on the topic (he was kind enough to give me a copy of a recent book about the local high school which includes a section by a Przasnysz Jew who remembers some of the pre-war Jews. This man’s name is Seenek Ruda (91 yrs old) and he lives in Tel Aviv). Mariusz lives in lovely old white house at the main roundabout into town. He said it was once owned by Rabbi, who later became the Chief Rabbi of Uruguay.

Przasnysz was founded in the 15th century. It was largely destroyed in WWI during a Russian-German battle, and was rebuilt between the wars. Przasnysz has about 18,000 residents now, but there were only about 9000 before the war. The Jewish population began to arrive sometime in the 18th century. A novel by an American about life Przasnysz early in the 20th century can be found on Google Books - Irving Fienman -Here ye my sons (1933) – his father was born in Przasnysz in 1866.

Mariusz said that in Yiddish Przasnysz was called prusnitz which is also a play on words – meaning “happy here” “please nothing” as in “this is enough” or “good enough.” If so I suggested it might be a play on the Hebrew word “dayanu.”
Pre WWII Jews made up about 25% of Przasnysz’ population and they had been successful in Przasnysz. Jews owned many of the shops on the main street around town square, just a minute walk from the site of the two synagogues.

The center of town is formed by a classic medieval square – a small park & city hall in the center, tight buildings and shops around it, and rest of town spreads slowly from there. The Town Hall & Square are being restored. MB took us to a corner about 50 meters from the square that had two post-war and rather unattractive buildings. These, MB said, were the sites of Przasnyszs’ 2 synagogues –the Bet Midrash and the Bet Kinneset. This was the “Jewish Quarter,” although Jews lived in many places and were never segregated to a ghetto. All homes were undoubtedly within an easy walk of the synagogues, which does not seem difficult to imagine given the scale of the town.

The Jewish cemetery is not far outside the square. It dates from the 17th or 18th century. Nothing was left after the German Army tore up the stones (though the graves remained). There is now a small memorial from 1986 that includes grave stones although they are mostly from cemeteries in other areas (including Duczymin). The Germans, who obviously hated to discard good stone, tended to use them for building or to pave streets. Some of these were recovered after the war and have been used in memorials around Poland. Some of the stones from Przasnysz are in such a memorial in Putusk (called a “lapidary”), which we stopped to see on the way back to Warsaw. I left a stone on a grave in the Przasnysz Jewish Cemetery for all of us.

The last Rabbi of Przasnysz was Yitzak Parzenceski (spelling?). He was apparently a good friend of the local priest – they were known to take long walks together. There are stories of this priest trying to save Jewish children such as that of a local Jewish electrician who managed to get out with his son. His daughters didn’t make it so the priest tried to save the daughters by placing them in a cloister – but they were caught when the German army arrested all of the nuns there and eventually they died in the camps. Years later the son came to Przasnysz & cried over the priest’s grave for the attempt to help his sisters.

This area of Poland seems to have been ground zero for WWII. When the German army invaded in 1939 one army group came in from East Prussia (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/Poland1939_GermanPlanMap.jpg), almost directly through Duczymin and Przasnysz . The Jewish population there was driven out and/or arrested – one of the first of the Jewish in Poland communities to suffer.

We were told that a German major, in a rare act of some small mercy, sent 10 trucks full of local of Jews – those willing to go (others begged to stay) toward Russia. Those who made it there (about 50% of all Jews in Przasnysz) avoided the Holocaust. Those who stayed didn’t. Of the total of about 2500 Jews in Przasnysz, about 1200 may have survived the war in Russia. Some came back to Poland after war, but many were afraid to go back to their home town as they were afraid of the public reaction if they wanted property back (read about the 1946 Kielce pogrom). Most went to Palestine.

Reference: Memorial Book to the Community of Proshnitz edited by Schlompo Bachrach 1974. Pub by Proshitz Landsmanshaft in Israel – Edit comm. Of Yizkor – book (some in Austria/ ask).

Late news – found on http://www.zwoje-scrolls.com/zwoje31/text11p.htm


Here are more pictures from the town on a picassa album:
Przasnysz Visit April 2010