Above: Three of six photos of Krakow's Old Town in the late 1920s. The tower at the end of the street in the bottom photo is St. Florian's Gate.
Source: Posted by r/krakow on reddit in 2024.
Above: Fruit seller on the Little Market Square in Krakow, Poland, 1927. Photographer: Henryk Poddębski, from the colections of Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe.
Source: Dworski, Lamus, lamus dworski (blog). "Uncovering Poland: culture, folklore, history, archaeology, arts, curiosities, and more. Main blog at lamusdworski.wordpress.com.
Above: A streetcar passing through a gateway in Krakow's ancient city wall (detail). The Krakow town hall clock tower is in the background.
Source: "Cracovian Nostalgia – Images of a Bygone Era," Krakow Travel, Wednesday, September 2, 2020 – Sunday, October 4, 2020.
8. Bucharest, 1928 (continued)
Warsaw to Krakow (Map 10-11)
Rachel planned to stay three days in Krakow and she left the city on Sunday morning, September 2. This suggests that she arrived in Krakow on August 30, which in turn would suggest that the trip from Warsaw took her nine days rather than the seven days that she intended. Whatever the case, these snippets outline her stay in Krakow:
"Yesterday at 8 oΓÇÖclock in the morning, the French horsewoman Miss Dorange arrived in Krakow. Several officers of the Warsaw Uhlans greeted her. Ms. Dorange was treated to breakfast at the barracks of the 8th Uhlan Regiment Rakowice, where she paid a visit to the D.O.K. Subsequently, she toured the cityΓÇÖs monuments in the company of Lieutenant Kuks of the Uhlans. Ms. Dorange will stay in Krakow for three days, after which she intends to travel to Cieszyn." (Nowy Kurjer)
The photos at left of Krakow in the 1920s show scenes that Rachel might have encountered on her tour of city monuments.
The Uhlans were light cavalry, originally armed with lances. Racowice was a village outside of Krakow and is now a district in the northeast part of the city. Cieszyn is 138 kilometers west of Krakow. The D.O.K. was the Corps District Command for military district number 5, headquartered in Krakow.
"Athletics Championships for Men. On Saturday [September 1], the Polish Athletics Championships for 1928 began in Krakow at the Wisła stadium....
"The competitions took place in beautiful weather and attracted a large audience. Among others, the championships were honored by the presence of O.K.V. General Wroblewski and the well-known French athlete Miss Rachel Dorange." (Goniec Wielkopolski)
"O.K.V." would have meant [D.]O.K.V. or D.O.K. Number 5.
But despite the breakfast and the city tour and the athletics competitions there was a darker side to Rachel's stay in Krakow. The rumour of her Jewish identity surfaced once again, and once again, at least initially, she found herself shunned. The newspaper Nowy Dziennik – the same Nowy Dziennik that had helped spread the rumour (page 27) – made a remarkable revelation:
"Only recently, we hosted in Krakow a friendly French horsewoman who tours the countries of Europe on horseback. When we say "hosted" there's a certain euphemism in the word, as the reception Miss Dorange received in Krakow was quite cold, and after the first few days of her stay, people became more interested in her. We don't know the source of the initial coolness, but we suspect that one of the reasons was the rumour that Ms. Dorange was Jewish, and her real name was Pomeranz. Only when it turned out that Ms. Dorange was a devout Catholic and had nothing to do with Judaism did the temperature of Krakow's hospitality rise.
"The situation was much worse in Romania, where Ms. Dorange was initially welcomed with great enthusiasm, but then, during her stay, a rumour about her Jewishness spread, and everyone distanced themselves from her, simply boycotting her until she decided to leave Bucharest. So it was the opposite of what happened in Krakow: here, there was initial coldness, then a warm welcome, while there, there was an initial warm welcome, then coldness. The change in mood depended solely on the suspicion of Jewishness."
However, Nowy Dziennik shied away from attributing the rumour to antisemites and instead pointed the finger at a misguided attempt to claim a celebrated person for Judaism.
"Where the hell is the breeding ground for the rumour that every great man is a Jew? Who, for heaven's sake, cares that every emerging great figure on the horizon should immediately be labeled Jewish? As soon as some great scholar, or great explorer, or great dancer, or great boxer appears somewhere, immediately, without thorough investigation, one newspaper or another triumphantly proclaims that he is either Jewish himself or had a Jewish mother. It is simply a disease and a dangerous addiction.
"In this way, Miss Dorange was also made Jewish, and even a birth certificate was immediately found: P╨╛meranz (orange = pomeranz!). I understand very well that at the root of this mania for Judaizing great people lies not only snobbery, but also a kind of noble national sentiment. However, I believe that if Moses, Jesus, Spinoza, Marx, and Einstein were undoubtedly Jews, then ultimately we can give up on the likeable and brave Miss Rachel Dorange."
The Nowy Dziennik article appeared on September 18. It was quoted by Nowy Kurjer on September 20. But Nowy Kurjer, under the title "Jewish Megalomania" added its own poisonous comment:
"Oh, wow! This is a very generous gesture on the part of Mr. Jewish columnist! And such megalomania exposed by the Jewish press is indeed a very nasty habit! But in claiming that 'every great man is a Jew,' the Jewish press is – in my opinion – even too modest in relation to its well-known braggadocio. I wouldn't be surprised if it even ventured to claim that 'every Jew is a great man' ... within the scope of his profession, of course. For example: a great profiteer, a great counterfeiter, a great conman, and sometimes... a great scoundrel."
The story of Rachel's unpleasant experience in Bucharest had reached as far as Germany where Berliner Tageblatt published an account of it on September 2. However, none of the newspapers that reported on the rumour of her Jewishness raised certain key questions: why had the rumour found such a receptive audience? Why was the rumour taken at face value by so many people, including journalists? And why did people feel that the rumour justified treating Rachel as a pariah?
The answer is the entrenched antisemitism that was rife in all the countries that Rachel visited and which had festered for centuries. Rachel was exposed to a small taste of what was the daily experience of Jews in these countries.
The hostility that affected Rachel in the form of snubs and rejection could explode into violence at any time, as it had only a few years earlier. Between 1917 and 1920, during the Russian civil war, there were over a thousand pogroms – deadly riots and outright massacres targeting Jews and organized or abetted by the authorities – in over a thousand localities.
Somewhere between 35,000 and 250,000 people were brutally murdered, with many of the killings carried out by armed forces on all sides in the war. These pogroms were a repeat on a much larger scale of waves of similar violence that swept the Russian empire in the 1880s and from 1903 to 1906.
History would repeat itself when Nazi Germany overran Europe in World War II. The Nazis had no trouble finding willing accomplices in the countries they conquered who were eager to assist in carrying out the Nazi policy of genocide against Jews and other designated "undesirables".