I’m an upbeat Lubliner, which is to say that I happily make my home in Lublin, Poland. Of course, Lublin should not be confused with Dublin (or Paris, for that matter). It’s its own kind of former Russian but still very East European place, with lots of those leftover communist blocks and overgrown grass everywhere. Moreover, say “Lublin” to anyone in the know and they will immediately think—“Majdanek is somewhere around there, right?”; or: “wasn’t that the Nazi headquarters of Operation Reinhard during the Holocaust?” Yes and yes, I’m sad to say. In fact, the concentration camp is right in the city itself; and SS General Odilo Globocnik lived in Lublin (in a building now owned by the university where I teach) when he was tasked with organizing the largest killing Aktion of Nazi Germany’s “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”.

 

Fortunately, Lublin is far more than the four years of the Holocaust. A thriving commercial hub in medieval times thanks to its strategic location between Vilnius and Kraków, the city was also strategically so vulnerable to eastern invasions that King Casimir III constructed a fortified castle with defensive walls. The castle’s fourteenth-century Catholic chapel has a Byzantine fresco ceiling that’s beyond stunning and boldly symbolic for the intermingling of Christian confessions. In a similarly conciliative vein, the city is celebrated as the place where, on July 1, 1569, Poland and Lithuania united into a single, powerful federal state—a proto European Union known then as the Union of Lublin. That lasted until the late eighteenth century, when Poland was partitioned and Lublin eventually got placed in the Russian portion. But commerce and culture continued to flourish, as did Jewish life. There were once over 100 synagogues in Lublin, and the Talmudic college was so famous that its rabbi headmaster received the prestigious title of university rector from the Polish king. Lublin henceforth was known as the “Jewish Oxford” (so where else could Isaac Bashevis Singer have set The Magician of Lublin?). Indeed, in 1930, just nine years before the Nazi invasion, a large new yeshiva/synagogue/mikvah complex was dedicated on bustling Lubartowska Street, in the heart of Jewish Lublin. Today, the synagogue is immaculately preserved inside the Hotel Ilan.