VII. Atlantis

Text: Magdalena Krysińska-Kałużna, May 2022

I’m at the Castle Square again (the Jewish name of the place, “Teper Mark”, keeps appearing in my mind recently). This time I’m here with Mr. Andrzej Moś, a photographer from the Cultural Center of Konin (CCK). Mr. Andrzej recorded a phenomenal film about Józef Lewandowski (Izaak Lipszyc) in 1990s, when he came to visit Konin – his hometown.

 Lewandowski managed to survive the occupation because his father knew some German soldiers who convinced him to flee eastwards with the family. The Lipszycs made it to the USSR. Lewandowski eventually returned to his home country as an officer of the Polish Army. After the civil unrest of 1968, he had to move again. He eventually settled in Uppsala Sweden, where he became a university teacher. Mr. Andrzej Moś talked to him in 1995.

 “This was the last movie that I recorded on a 16mm tape. It has been screened in Swedish television and received by many people and institutions. You can find it, for instance, in the POLIN museum (translator’s note: a Jewish history museum in Warsaw)” Mr. Andrzej told me when I came to the CCK to watch Moja Atlantyda (English: My Atlantis; the documentary’s title alludes to the name of Lewandowski’s book, Cztery dni w Atlantydzie, i.e. Four Days in Atlantis).

 Right now we’re looking for the houses in which the Lipszyc family resided. Mr. Andrzej remembers their location. Józef Lewandowski pointed them out during their walk together. We have started from Wodna Street. A square where Lewandowski’s “little shanty” – as he called his first house – once stood, is now a backyard of a large building.

 Lewandowski’s father was an upholsterer. They didn’t do well here. In the documentary Lewandowski explains that customers weren’t eager to visit the area due to its proximity to the “the city’s main whorehouse”. As I’m standing here, I realize that the “main whorehouse” was located just a stone’s throw away from the church. On the other hand, if you think about it, in the prewar Konin – a city much smaller from the modern Konin – almost everything was a stone throw’s away from the church. After all, a Catholic church, an Evangelical church, a synagogue and a monastery were all located in this one small town.

 Later, the Lipszyc family tried to turn things around by moving to a building in front of the town hall, at today’s Wiosny Ludów Street. They lived in a beautiful townhouse with a balcony, property of Liskiewiczowa, an apothecary. And underneath the family lived a dentist, Najman. The move did not help, and business was still slow (“customers didn’t want to climb all the way to the loft”).

 So, the family changed their residence yet again, to a townhouse by Teper Mark. They moved into a building where the rabbi Jakub Lipszyc (Jakób Liebschütz)* lived. This is where they finally became bankrupt. It was 1934, and Izaak Lipszyc was 11. He only realized how difficult the situation was when there weren’t 50 gr at home to pay for the library subscription**.

 Lewandowski’s grandfather was a Hasid, but as a child, Izaak (a.k.a. Józef) refused to go to a cheder school where, besides learning how to read and write, children had to memorize whole chapters of the Torah. Thus, Izaak was sent to a public school, located at Mickiewicza Street. He does not recall it fondly. Later, for two years, he was enrolled in a public junior high school located on the same street (the Jewish junior high wasn’t functioning anymore at the time). He didn’t like it there either. Due to his family’s economic situation, he was excluded from all social circles – both Polish and Jewish.

 The old junior high was located inside the current High School no. 1 building, a school I went to. In the movie I recognize a corridor and a classroom – Lewandowski taught a history class in it in 1995. How many people who attended this school before the war had problems because they were poor or Jewish? I never considered this. The high school has always been proud of its history.

 Lewandowski’s Atlantis sunk, together with his close ones. I feel like I am starting to see its outline. Recently, when I’m downtown, I pay attention to places that previously escaped me. They come to the forefront together with the people whose stories I’m learning, like pieces of a sunken land. I’m also talking to individuals, who have been recognizing and describing these forgotten fragments for a long time, e.g. with Robert Olejnik, a man of vast knowledge and excellent maps.

 “So where exactly was this old Jewish cemetery? Where the KDK (translator’s note: Konin’s Community Center) is?,” I ask Robert as we’re having tea after a meeting of our association.

 “More less where the Black Mańka*** used to be, between Dworcowa Street, which wasn’t there yet, and Poznańska Street,” the journalist from Konin responds. He adds that he’ll send the maps over to me. I will be able to check both the exact location of the cemetery and of Mojsze Kapłan’s brickyard.

 The old cemetery, threatened by the plans for a new gravel pit, was moved to another spot as rabbi Jakub Lipszyc said that he will bear the sin of disturbing the dead personally, a thing unheard of in Judaism.

 Konin’s rabbi was not the only unconventional individual around – the whole family of Józef Lewandowski had been Hasidic for generations and yet they didn’t insist for Izaak (Józef) to study in a cheder. Lewandowski’s mother was a big fan of Polish literature and his father, a poor upholsterer, knew Pan Tadeusz by heart. That much we know.

* Józef Lewandowski says in the documentary that his grandfather was a rabbi. Considering the similarity of surnames, one can assume that he’s talking about Konin’s rabbi, Jakub Lipszyc. That’s what I thought and so I wrote in the first version of the blog post. Having read this text, Robert Olejnik raised some doubt. As a result, I asked Damian Kruczkowski, the director of the Municipal Public Library, for his opinion – he found this dubious, too. He was able to find a testimony given by Józefa Lewandowskiego in Yad Vashem two years prior to his death as well as a birth certificate of Lewandowski’s father. According to these documents, Lewandowski’s parents were born in the Świętokrzyskie region (Rabbi Lipszyc came to Konin from Lithuania) and Lewandowski’s paternal grandfather was a merchant.  

** The Jewish library was built in 1903, housed 10,000 books and was used continually by at least a third of Jewish families living in Konin (Józef Lewandowski, Cztery dni w Atlantydzie (Four Days in Atlantis), Uppsala, 1991, pp. 61-62).

*** A legendary, albeit currently non-existent, pub.

Translation: Ada Kałużna

 
Townhouse of Liskiewiczowa the apothecary

 
The house where the last rabbi, Jakub Lipszyc, lived, I

The house where the last rabbi, Jakub Lipszyc, lived, II

The house where the last rabbi, Jakub Lipszyc, lived, III

Photographs: Magdalena Krysińska-Kałużna