This is a 1936 photograph of Jakob Kraus standing on the cobblestone street in front of his barbershop in Krakow, Poland with two other men. The doors to the shop are open and signs are posted above and on the doors. The signs read “Fryzjer,” the Polish word for barber. The sign over the door also includes the name of the proprietor, Jakob Kraus.
Jozef Seweryn tells about his grandfather, Jakob Kraus, in his oral history recorded by Centropa. Seweryn relates that his grandfather, who is standing with a cane in the photograph, opened the barbershop in the 1880s. He hired apprentices to work in his shop and learn the trade. The men wearing a white coat in the photograph was one of his apprentices. The barbers at the shop cut men’s and women’s hair. In addition to being a barber, Jakob Kraus was also a feldsher, a barber who also performed basic medical procedures. Jozef Seweryn describes his grandfather’s work in this way:
"He applied leeches, pulled teeth and applied cupping glasses. The leeches would always be in a jar standing in the window of the hairdressing salon. My grandfather would get them from Budapest, Hungary. They would arrive once a week, through the mail. They were special leeches – medicinal; regular leeches could harm a human, bite in too deeply, but these would only break the skin and suck the blood. You put them behind the ear, on the mouth, on the gums."
Jozef Seweryn lived with his grandparents after his mother remarried and left Krakow. They lived in an apartment above the barbershop. The Kraus family was religious but not Hasidic. They kept a kosher home and attended synagogue on Shabbat and festivals. They saw themselves as Poles of the Jewish faith, meaning that their religious identity was Jewish but their nationality was Polish. They dressed in Polish-style clothing and spoke Polish at home. In 1939, Poland was occupied by Germany. In 1941, they had to move into the ghetto, and in 1942 German troops came to their apartment and shot Seweryn’s grandparents in their beds because they were not strong enough to work. Seweryn was taken into forced labour, and the rest of the family were killed in concentration camps. Seweryn managed to escape from the Krakow ghetto in September 1942 and received a false identity as a Catholic Pole. He was, nevertheless, caught in December 1942 and sent to Auschwitz. Although he suffered like all other prisoners, the fact that he was documented as a Christian helped him to survive the camp. After the war he left Poland and immigrated to Israel but soon returned to Poland due to his son’s health problems. Many years later, he requested that the documentation at Auschwitz be changed to record his Jewish identity.
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Jewish Community of Krakow – Krakow is the second largest city in Poland and was one of the important Jewish centers in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. Jews began living in Krakow in the fourteenth century and established themselves in the Kaimierz on the outskirts of the town, where they built a mikveh (ritual bathhouse) and a cemetery. Despite frequent conflicts with their non-Jewish neighbours, the Jewish population grew, and by the middle of the 1800s, Jews were allowed to settle in the city of Krakow itself. At this time, secular, assimilated Jews became the leaders of the community, although religious Jews also lived in the city. By 1900, over 25,000 Jews were living in Krakow, growing to 60,000 by the onset of World War II. The Germans occupied Krakow in 1939 and a ghetto was established in 1941. The ghetto was liquidated between June 1942 and March 1943, and the Jews were sent to the death camps at Auschwitz and Belzec and the slave labour camp Plazow. As depicted in the famous film Schindler's List, the German businessman Oskar Schindler saved over 1,000 Jews in his factory that was situated in Krakow. After the war, 2,000 Jews returned to Krakow. Today, approximately 1,000 Jews live in Krakow, although only about 200 are affiliated with the organized Jewish community. Of the many synagogues that were in Krakow, only seven survived the war. Three are still active, include the famous Rema Synagogue. The community also has a Jewish community centre and a Jewish kindergarten. Krakow has hosted a popular annual Jewish festival since 1990.
Jewish Community of Poland – Jews have been living in Poland for over 1000 years at the invitation of the Polish rulers who recognised the value of their particular skills. Jews fleeing persecution in other countries found relative security in Poland, and by the middle of the 1500s, eighty percent of all Jews lived there. For the next 200 years, Jews enjoyed a certain amount of autonomy in Poland and the community flourished, becoming very influential and a centre of Talmudic learning. Yeshivot were established by the prominent rabbis of the period, and mysticism and, later on, Hassidism, had a great influence on Polish Jews. Following the Polish partition of 1795, the Jews came under the rule of Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia, and many were subject to anti-Semitism, pogroms, and poverty. Despite this persecution, Poland remained an important centre of both Jewish religious learning and the new Jewish Haskalah (Enlightment) movement. Poland was the birthplace of many influential Jews in politics, law, science, literature, and economics. Many of the leading Zionist leaders first joined the Zionist movement in Poland. Jewish culture, including Yiddish literature and theatre, also thrived here in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The end of the nineteenth century saw the emigration of many Polish Jews to the United States and Palestine due to the repressive Czarist Russian rule. By the onset of World War II, over three million Jews were living in Poland; by the end of the war, about eighty-five percent of the community had been murdered. Poland was home to many of the most notorious ghettos, concentration camps, and extermination camps, where the Holocaust was carried out by the Nazis and their supporters. Poland also saw Jewish uprisings against the Nazi occupation, and many non-Jewish Poles endangered their lives protecting Jews. After the Holocaust, most Jewish survivors did not return to Poland but emigrated to other countries. Of those who did return to their homes, many found their property confiscated and some were even victims of pogroms. Under the post-war communist rule the small Jewish community remaining in Poland faced additional hardship. However, after the fall of the communist regime, the community underwent a Jewish cultural, social, and religious revival. Jewish community centres and synagogues were built, universities started offering courses in Jewish studies, and the POLIN Jewish museum, one of the largest in the word, was opened in 2013. Many Jews from all over the world visit Poland to learn about the history of the Polish Jewish community and about the Holocaust. According to estimates by the Joint and the Jewish Agency, there are between 25,000 and 100,000 Jews currently living in Poland, including the many Poles who have discovered Jewish roots in recent years.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
