Bielsko-Biala -- My latest Centropa column

Jewish-style restaurant in Bielsko-Biala. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's a link to my latest column for Centropa.org, on Bielsko-Biala, Poland.

BIELSKO BIALA

Published Aug. 20, 2009

Before visiting Bielsko-Biala in southern Poland, I went online to check hotels. One of them, I found, was offering what it called a "Jewish Heritage Package."

Terrific, I thought. I was going to Bielsko-Biala for something else -- an international performance art festival. But I knew the town is rich in Jewish history, and I was looking forward to exploring it in more detail. Then I clicked the link and saw the itinerary.

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My Article on Silesia, on IHT/NYT web site

My article on the Industrial Heritage Route in Poland's Silesia province, in the International Herald Tribune and New York Times web site.

The monument to Wincenty Pstrowski, a miner and Communist-era labor hero, in Zabrze.Photo 9c0 Ruth Ellen Gruber

A Road Trip Through a Revolution, Mine by Mine and Factory by Factory

By Ruth Ellen Gruber (July 30, 2009)

ZABRZE, POLAND — A bell rings out with a strident clang, and the metal cage begins a slow descent into the earth.

The Nikisowiec workers' housing estate, which was built between 1908 and 1915 for workers at the Wieczorek coal mine.

As I stand inside, helmet on head, shoulder to shoulder with a group of slightly nervous strangers, the refrain of a Merle Travis song keeps running through my head: “It’s dark as a dungeon, damp as the dew/ the dangers are double, the pleasures are few/ where the rain never falls, the sun never shines/ it’s dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.”

I’m headed down 320 meters, or about 1,050 feet, on a guided tour of the Guido Coal Mine, which was founded in 1855 in Zabrze and closed decades ago.

Today it’s a mining heritage park: its soaring shaft tower the dominant feature of a complex that includes a subterranean museum showcasing more than a century of coal-mining technology — from hand-held picks to huge automated drills that resemble creatures from a sci-fi film — and a research center for industrial tourism.

The mine is a key stop among the 31 sites on the Industrial Monuments Route, which opened three years ago as a kind of tourists’ alternative to the country’s castles and churches. Crossing Silesia Province in the south, the route pays homage to the heritage of the country’s most heavily industrialized region.

This region is essentially Poland’s Rust Belt. The route includes not only mines but foundries, factories, railway stations, power plants, even a wooden radio tower in Gliwice. Some of the facilities are still in operation.

The route also includes museums devoted to specific areas of trade and manufacturing — beer museums at well-known breweries in Zywiec and Tychy; a bread-making museum near Bytom; a press and publishing museum in Pszyczyna; and a textile industry museum in Bielsko Biala. A small Museum of Sanitary Technology, located in a century-old waste-water pumping station in Gliwice, shows the history of sewage treatment technology.

Most sites date to the region’s Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 19th century, when belching smoke from thousands of red-bricked chimneys darkened the Silesian sky, and mines and mills transformed, and blighted, the landscape.

Many of these installations functioned throughout the Communist years. But though Silesia is still heavily industrial, most of its aging plants have either closed or modernized, and much of the old machinery has been scrapped.

The route, in fact, was set up to single out and preserve the more noteworthy of those that remain.

I’ve always been fascinated by the mechanics of heavy industry and the almost sculptural forms of mine towers and factory smokestacks. In the course of a few days I took in many of the listed monuments, visiting some as easy day trips from Krakow and others while staying nearby.

Zabrze, near Katowice, has several listed sites. Before visiting the Guido Mine, I toured an open-air display of shaft machinery at the Krolowa Luiza mining complex. And I admired the monumental sculpture of a weary yet heroic coal miner — the Communist-era workers’ hero Wincenty Pstrowski — that dominates a city park across the street from a museum of mining history.

Two train stations provided a stark contrast. The one in Bielsko Biala, built in 1890 and recently restored, looks like a temple to transportation with elaborate frescoes. The station in Rada Slaska Chebzie, however, stands almost derelict, its red brick, glass and cast-iron facade covered in graffiti.

One site I found particularly striking was the Nikiszowiec Workers’ Housing Estate outside Katowice. One of several such estates included on the route, the Nikiszowiec development was built between 1908-15 for workers at the adjacent — and still functioning — Wieczorek coal mine. It’s a sprawling tract of three-story, red brick apartment buildings, arranged around a large red brick church and connected by courtyards and archways.

Mine workers still live there — I ran into some of them, still in their helmets, coming home after their shift — and the place has a gritty, proletarian air. But there is also evidence of nascent gentrification: window frames are freshly painted in a vivid red, and cafes have begun to appear.

The Industrial Monuments Route is designed as a car route. Some sites, though, can be reached on foot or by public transportation. I drove, but in Bielsko Biala, for example, both the train station and the Textile Industry Museum, with its fascinating collection of looms and mill machinery, were within walking distance of my hotel.

To get around, I used a free illustrated map available in English at tourist information offices. It provides a brief description and photograph of each site, and locates them on general and local maps. (Detailed information is available on the English-language Web site www.silesia-region.pl/szt/en/inf_turyst.html.)

But even with the map, finding my way around was not always easy. Many of the sites are well off the beaten path, and roads, highways and signage, particularly in the heavily congested areas in and around Katowice, can be confusing — I wished more than once that my car had GPS

Read full article on New York Times web site

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN -- Summer Reading and the Holocaust

Holocaust memorial in Budapest, on the bank of the Danube. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

My latest Ruthless Cosmopolitan column deals with three books by people I know -- The Shanghai Moon, a detective story by S.J. Rozan, The Budapest Protocol, a political thriller by Adam LeBor and The Pages In Between, a memoir by Erin Einhorn. The books are very different, but they deals with how the Holocaust and associated with it, have an impact today.

RUTHLESS COSMOPOLITAN: Summer Reading and the Holocaust

By Ruth Ellen Gruber (July 29, 2009)

BUDAPEST (JTA) -- Summer's here and my recreational reading has included three books by people I actually know.

Each book is quite different from the others -- "The Shanghai Moon" by S.J. Rozan is a detective story; "The Budapest Protocol" by Adam Le Bor is a political thriller; and "The Pages In Between" by Erin Einhorn is a nonfiction personal memoir.

But they all have something in common: They use the Holocaust and the lingering impact of its memory as springboards for narratives that take place in the present. And fiction or nonfiction, all three books are gripping yarns that make readers think, as well as become lost in the story.

"The Shanghai Moon" is the latest in Rozan's award-winning series of mysteries featuring New York-based detectives Lydia Chin and Bill Smith. It hinges on the experiences of the more than 20,000 European Jews who found refuge in Shanghai, China, during the Shoah and on the fate of their looted belongings. The book is the first in her series in which Rozan explores Jewish themes. Like the other two authors, Rozan is Jewish.

"The Shanghai ghetto is a compelling aspect of Jewish and Holocaust history that gets almost no attention," Rozan told me when I asked her what prompted her to write about it. "Once I started the research, I was completely enthralled with these people's stories and thought that whole rich world needed to be brought to light.

"The past never stops reaching into the present,” she said. “In a sense, crime and mystery novels are all about making that clear, about bringing above the surface, as it were, how and when that happens.”

Rozan said she occasionally hears from people who were in the Shanghai ghetto or had family members there.

"They almost never encounter that time and place in fiction, and they're thrilled to see it," she said. "And I'm thrilled when they tell me my picture of it feels right to them."

"The Budapest Protocol" tells quite a different story. Le Bor, a veteran British journalist and author, sets his story in the Hungarian capital, where he lives. But he creates an alternative Budapest, using today's city -- including its former Jewish quarter -- as a backdrop for an imaginary political scene in which Nazi-inspired political forces gain power in a bid to take over Europe.

Le Bor told me he extrapolated from a 1944 U.S. intelligence document an account of a meeting of leading Nazi industrialists in the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg, France. They admit the war is lost but lay out their plans for the next Reich, the fourth, which will be an economic empire.

"I simply moved that meeting to the fictional Hotel Savoy in Budapest and took the story from there," the author said.

Le Bor described the book -- his first novel after several nonfiction books -- as weaving "past and present together, just like everyday life everywhere in Eastern Europe.

"We walk on pavements once trodden by the Gestapo and the [Hungarian fascist] Arrow Cross, we marvel at the beauty of the Danube, which within living memory was also a watery grave for thousands of Jews," he said.

"But Hungary, certainly more than its neighbors, is making real efforts to remember what was lost at numerous memorials and Holocaust commemoration ceremonies. It also celebrates what remains at events like the Jewish summer festival," an annual event at the beginning of September.

"Jewish culture," Le Bor said, "is an ever-richer part of Budapest life."

Erin Einhorn's nonfiction memoir, "The Pages In Between," gripped me as much as -- or more than -- any fictional thriller.

The Detroit News called it "a detective story framed as a memoir." The story's subplots, it said, "reveal how memory often distorts the truth, and how family legend is often colored in its retelling."

The book recounts Einhorn's attempts to find out the truth about how her mother, who was born in the Polish city of Bedzin in 1942, survived the Holocaust.

Einhorn, then in her 20s, moved to Poland for a year in 2001. She found the house in Bedzin that once belonged to her family, met the descendants of the Christian woman who took in her mother as a baby and became immersed in an ever-widening web of truths, half-truths, myth and deception.

A reporter with the New York Daily News, Einhorn uses her journalistic skills to record not only her search for her mother's past but also her search to understand the present -- and, in a way, her search for her own identity.

Along the way she presents an honest and intensely vivid appraisal of contemporary Poland, especially the nuances and contradictions that compose the complexities of Poland's centuries-old relationship with the Jewish world.

Sadly, Einhorn's mother died at age 59, just as Einhorn was embarking on her project. That loss becomes a milestone that turns Einhorn's book into not just a search for family history, but a coming-of-age chronicle that links the past with an open-ended future.

I stayed up well past midnight to finish it.