In 1939, the German occupiers began the systematic persecution and mass destruction of the region's Jews. The Jewish cemetery was desecrated; headstones used by the Germans to pave local roads. After the war, these were recovered and formed into a monument to the 3,000 Jews from the Kazimierz Dolny ghetto who perished in the Holocaust. The monument takes the form of a broken wall (fragment below). Through the crack we see a path leading up a steep hill through a wood, at the top of which grow fields of berries.
Below: on the road from the ferry to Janowiec, there's what remains of another, smaller, Jewish cemetery, again marked with a monument – a raw iron slab flanked by stones. As at Kazimierz Dolny, headstones were also used by the Germans for construction purposes; unlike Kazimierz Dolny, none survived the war in a recognisable state.
Below: affixed to the back of the iron slab, the largest fragment that remains from the Jewish cemetery of Janowiec.
Kazimierz Dolny's scenery and atmosphere attracted many artists in the interwar years, Poles and Jews alike, making it an important artistic colony, similar in national importance to Zakopane. Along with the painters and potters came photographers, eager to document the town and its inhabitants and to capture its essence. The Jewish quarter, around the small market square and synagogue, came to represent the stereotypical shtetl, and was used as a filming location for Yiddish films such as The Dybbuk (1937). [Referred to in the opening sequence of my favourite film of all time ever, the Coen brothers' A Serious Man.] 
Below: a close-up of the wall of headstones. Note the stones and scraps of paper with prayers that have been left in the interstices.
Below: affixed to the back of the iron slab, the largest fragment that remains from the Jewish cemetery of Janowiec.
Below: the former synagogue currently houses an exhibition of photographs of the town taken between the wars by the Jewish photographer Benedykt Jerzy Dorys, one of the founding members of the Polish fine-art photography association set up in 1929. Dorys had a studio in Warsaw, and would often visit Kazimierz Dolny. He escaped from the Ghetto in 1942 and was hidden from the Nazis by his former housekeeper and three Polish families. After the war Dorys resumed his photographic business and died in 1990 at the age of 89. The photographs document the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz Dolny, showing the people and the place, capturing the essence of pre-Holocaust life. A must-see exhibition.
And to cap the day; back at the apartment, the wifi wasn't working. So what's on telly? TVP Kultura had just started airing The Woman in Gold, a 2015 British film about the legal fight for Gustav Klimt's
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which had been stolen from her family by the Nazis after the Anschluss of Austria. The film portrays in flashbacks the country's sudden anti-Semitic turn; how people could behave with such savagery towards their neighbours was all the more upsetting in the context of today's toxic populism. Never again.
This time last year:
Mindfulness, exercise, diet and health
Mindfulness, exercise, diet and health
This time two years ago:
Blasted!
Blasted!
This time seven years ago:
My new used laptop
[Six years on, it's still fine albeit without a battery; I can no longer source a new one; it still works fine when connected to the mains.]
This time ten years ago:
Face to face with Mr Hare
This time 12 years ago:
Central Warsaw vistas
This time 13 years ago:
Future of urban motoring?
[Sadly not. It proved to be V8-powered two-tonne SUVs for dragging lazy lard-arses into town]
This time 15 years ago:
On foot to Limanowa
This time 17 years ago:
Crumbling neo-classicism in Grabów
[Now the possession of friends from London!]
This time 18 years ago:
Bike ride into deepest Mazovia
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