The plan was first to search out my grandmother’s Jewish origins in Hungary and then to head across Hungary and Slovakia to the Carpathian mountains in Poland. We had to change plans on arrival in Poland because the van started to make very odd noises but this took us to Krakow and Zakopane in the Tatras mountains instead.
The week started in the Jewish museum in Eisenstadt in Austria. It was Austria’s first Jewish museum and beautifully done to commemorate the 35,000 Jews who were shot and deported in 1938. Here is the synagogue which forms part of the museum.
Across the border in Hungary we went in search of the village which my grandmother’s family originally came from (Gyorasszonfya) which is a small rural village where the Jews (including my grandmother’s cousin’s family) were all taken to Auschwitz and killed. Only one of them survived Auschwitz and that was Judy Rona who came to our wedding with her husband Loci. They married in Budapest, had two children but in 1956 when the Russian tanks rolled in to suppress the Hungarian Uprising, they escaped over the border with their two children and a couple of bags into Eisenstadt in Austria (which is why we were there in the first place).
The escape involved taking trains and travelling in cattle trucks (poor Judy going through that again), relying on traffickers to get them into a boat which had been sabotaged and nearly sank in order to cross the Neusiedler See lake between Hungary and Austria. We visited the lake which is large and surrounded by miles of marshland which must have been treacherous to walk across at night, even before they took the boat.
We then visited the station which I believe they got out at before walking to the lake. It doesn’t look as if it’s changed very much.
The marshlands near the lake contain this memorial to those who tried to escape during the Cold War rather than those who left in 1956 but it’s right on the track of where the family would have walked that December night. It’s a chilling place with barbed wire and signs warning the visitor of minefields.
When we got to the village we looked for the memorial to the Jews who were taken away which my second cousin describes visiting in the 1990s but we couldn’t find it. All we could find was a large memorial to the shrinking of Hungary and the loss of land from the Magyar former glory.
The region certainly went through complex times. In the 40 years between 1918 and 1955 the places we visited in Eastern Austria and Western Hungary changed hands six times from Austro Hungary to Hungary to Austria to Germany to Soviet occupied. And now although both are in the European Union, most of the roads between the two are roadblocked in order to prevent refugees from crossing. The complexity and division of the past is alive and that watch tower really summed it up.
I’ve written about all of this in the family history which I’m publishing soon and here is the book cover!
The Holocaust theme went on when we got to Poland both in Tarnów where half the population were deported and killed and in Kraków where 65,000 suffered the same fate. It’s been a week of deep thinking. We visited Auschwitz twenty years ago in the depths of an icy winter and it was a powerful and important experience.
But before we left Hungary we spent a night wild camping by a lake with a donkey, several goats and a white goose and it was soothing and very pretty. Here is one of the resident donkeys passing our van window.
We drove on through Slovakia where we stopped in Kosice with its fine cathedral. We saw some of the many wooden churches on the way up into the Carpathians and the border with Poland.
And we saw lots of storks’ nests in each of Austria, Slovakia and Poland. Storks need to be near water as they mostly eat frogs so these areas near lakes are ideal. I counted 18 nests in 24 hours. By now the young are getting pretty well grown and are busy practising flapping their (large) wings before taking their first flight. We also heard the clacking sound they make with their beaks (which is what they tend to do rather than sing). We haven’t seen them since Greece and it was magical to see so many.
As I explained, we were going to camp in the remote Eastern Carpathians, the Bieszczadky mountains on the borders with Ukraine but the van started to make very ominous noises and we had to take it to the dealers in Krakow. So we turned left instead of right and had a great time in Krakow while the garage took a look and said we could carry on (fingers crossed!). On the way we stopped in Tarnów where we met another familiar symbol, the black elephant, which we’d previosuly met in Catania/Sicily, in Tilos/Greece and, most recently, in Sopron/Hungary. Here are first the Hungarian elephant and then the Polish one!
In Krakow we stayed in a cool modern hotel just by the Jewish Quarter which is now a rather funky area with bars and restaurants playing klezmer music but the empty synagogues are a strong reminder of the past as are the two museums. Meanwhile, in the university area we saw pro Gaza demonstrations with their police guards.
We are now in Zakopane which is up in the High Tatras and is a great place. It can’t quite decide whether it’s a mountain village or the hang out of 19th and 20th century Polish intellectuals, or a fun place with endless shops and amusements, so it lands up being all of these and it’s interesting. Alex came here with Frances and Gloria twenty years ago in the snow and went on wild sleigh rides and took this precarious ski lift up the mountain where they had their rental skis stolen.
This time we’ve been up the smart new gondola and walked down, visited seven museums (all the old houses of artists, writers, musicians and composers), and had fun in a smart hotel with swimming pool and spa. There were massive summer thunderstorms and downpours. Below, our drawings of the scene: Alex first, then me.
And a combination of old (the villa of Poland’s leading composer after Chopin, Karola Szymanowski) and new (today’s performer taking a break).
And last, so that you can keep track of where we’ve been (it’s been a busy week) here is Alex’s map.
