"I'd Like to Tell How the City Perished"

Until now, there has been no book that comprehensively describes the history of the Jews of Nowy Targ, and especially their extermination. Studies have appeared that approach this topic fragmentarily, focusing on a single issue, topic, place, or person.

Karolina Panz's, work, “I'd Like to Tell How the City Perished: The Destruction of the Jewish Inhabitants of Nowy Targ." (Polish Center for Holocaust Research, 2025), is a milestone in this field of research and will become a reference point for writing about the history of the Jewish community in Podhale, Polish-Jewish relations, and, above all, the Holocaust.

The book explores the fate of individuals and describes the stories of many Nowy Targ families in their historical context. However, the main "guide" to the fate of this community is the Singer family, who owned a shop in the Market Square. Thanks to a survivor of this family, many valuable documents have been preserved.

The entire book draws on an impressive number of sources. These include the author's own interviews with survivors and their families, as well as witness accounts, resident records, court documents, memoirs, historical studies, materials from foreign and Polish archives, newspapers, and municipal registers. I will offer two examples of the unusual use of preserved documents from World War II. Thanks to a diligent official who compiled a daily "list of consumed food rations" at the Nowy Targ prison, we know the names of Jewish prisoners and the number of days they spent in their cells. Thanks to records from the archives of the Municipal Power Plant, we know that, on the mayor's orders, the day after the August 1942 liquidation operation, its employees recorded the readings of electricity meters in Jewish properties abandoned by people who were still on their way to the Belzec extermination camp.

The publication is complemented by approximately 200 photographs, which give this book a very personal character. Not only do we learn the many names and circumstances of their lives in Nowy Targ, but we also get a glimpse of what these people looked like. These are sometimes family photos, with children, dogs, at play or at leisure. These photographs show how similar our Jewish neighbors were to us.

At the end of the book, there is a list of nearly three thousand names of Nowy Targ Jews, which the author managed to identify through research. I know that creating such a list and verifying the fate of these individuals is a titanic task that must have taken many years. It is a valuable knowledge base for all historians studying the Jewish community in Podhale. And for all of us, the list is a testimony and reminder that almost all the Jews of Nowy Targ perished, but their memory remains.

The author meticulously recreates the final days and hours of the Nowy Targ Jewish community, and the descriptions are vivid. One can easily imagine the course of the liquidation operation, euphemistically called "Judenaktion" (actions against the Jews) by the occupation authorities. The account of those final hours of the Jews in Nowy Targ at the end of August 1942 is heartbreaking to read. The book's title also alludes to the extermination of Nowy Targ's Jewish inhabitants. It's a quote from the postwar account of Chana Hornung (née Grassgrün), who wanted to recount how the city perished. The word "City" is symbolic here, as it has always been the name for Nowy Targ in Podhale.

The author writes that she found almost no information about the fate of Jews hiding in Nowy Targ or its surroundings after the deportation. "Almost nothing is known about those who denounced them [Jews], as well as those who sheltered them. No resident of Nowy Targ was accused of betraying or murdering Jews in hiding after the war. No resident of the city received the title of Righteous Among the Nations for helping their neighbors. [...] That this could mean something other than a mere lack of help is demonstrated by the story of Jozef Jedrol, who, during the most difficult period for the Jews of Nowy Targ, fed the Dattner family for several days in the nearby forest and brought them from Krakow the documents necessary for survival."

The author also identified the Ufir family, who hid a young Jewish woman after the liquidation, and Andrzej Mazgaj, who was killed for bringing bread and sausages to Jews from a labor camp. The family that hid the teenage Henio Heller until January 1945, who was denounced shortly after other residents left his hiding place and killed on the Dunajec River, could not be identified. The author described the issue of the capture of Jews after the expulsion and their survival strategies in this area in more detail in her book "Night Without an End" (Volume II), published in 2018.

The moving story of Dawid Grassgrün, one of the few Jews from Nowy Targ to return to the city after the war, attempts to reestablish a religious community and a Jewish community.

He was killed in February 1946 in his house on Krzywa Street. Before his death, he received an anonymous threatening letter urging him to leave the city. Leaflets with similar anti-Jewish messages were posted on the streets and distributed to homes in Podhale by members of the "Ogien" unit, including his fiancée.

The stories of how Jews were transported across the Polish-Slovak border are very interesting and, to date, little-researched. Thanks to pre-war contacts with highland smugglers and their channels, many people were successfully transported south across the Polish-Slovak border. The main route led from the vicinity of Nowy Targ across the Bialka River to Kezmarok. Later, one of the channels also ran through Czarny Dunajec towards Orava in Slovakia.

The author writes about Czarny Dunajec in the book primarily in the context of the labor camp established on the site of a pre-war sawmill belonging to Izydor Landau. The occupation authorities took it over and manufactured wooden barracks components for the Luftwaffe. After the liquidation on August 30, 1942, they established the Hobag forced labor camp (later renamed Delta-Werk) for 90 Jews selected at the stadium in Nowy Targ.

The author recounts the terrible conditions in the camp, especially in winter. She cites memoirs and descriptions from prisoners and other workers, as well as documents from the trials of war criminals who described the situation at Hobag. She also describes the escapes and executions of prisoners who were later buried in the Jewish cemetery in Czarny Dunajec.

The history of the extermination of the Jews of Nowy Targ, and more broadly, of the Podhale region, is also the history of the Jews of Czarny Dunajec and the surrounding villages. They, too, were murdered in their homes, perished in the cemetery, and were similarly herded into the stadium in Nowy Targ on Sunday, August 30, 1942. Together with other Jews from Podhale, they were transported by train under horrific conditions to the Belzec extermination camp, where they all perished.

Karolina Panz, PhD, “I'd Like to Tell How the City Perished: The Destruction of the Jewish Inhabitants of Nowy Targ”, Polish Center for Holocaust Research, 2025