( JTA ) — LUBLIN, Poland — On a quiet corner of Furmańska Street, dawn breaks to the warm smell of bread wafting from the oldest bakery in Lublin, announced by a sign: “Kuźmiuk Bakery since 1944.”
But another bakery was there before 1944, when Furmańska Street belonged to a historic Jewish quarter of this Polish city. Before the Kuźmiuk Bakery opened that year, and before the Nazis killed 99% of Lublin’s Jews, the best bakery in town served rye bread and onion rolls from within the same walls. It was run by Mordka and Doba Bajtel and their children, a Jewish family entirely erased from the city. The third-generation owners of Kuźmiuk Bakery say they only learned of the site’s pre-war history in the past decade.
The bakery’s postwar history is threaded throughout its operations. Katarzyna Goławski, the third-generation owner, inherited recipes and techniques from her father Sergiusz Kuźmiuk and his father Włodzimierz Kuźmiuk. (The traditional rye sourdough starter, though, dates only to the 1980s.) Brochures inside the store tell how Włodzimierz Kuźmiuk and his young family escaped the destruction of World War II across Poland, finally settling in an empty bakery in Lublin. In 1944, his first batch of bread fed Lubliners for their first Christmas after the city’s liberation from Nazi Germany.
But her father and grandfather never told Goławski about what came before.
She knew nothing of the store’s Jewish history until July 2017, when a woman walked into Kuźmiuk Bakery and introduced herself. Her name was Esther Minars, and she had traveled from her home in Florida to see the bakery once owned by her great-uncle Mordka and great-aunt Doba.
The visit shook Goławski, who still maintains the family business with help from her husband Artur Goławski and daughter Natalia. Minars pointed out where the Bajtels lived in an apartment behind the bakery — today, it’s the home of the Goławski family. Records from the Grodzka Gate-NN Theater Center , a Lublin institution focused on the city’s Jewish history, confirm that Mordka Bajtel owned a bakery in the building that is now the Kuźmiuk Bakery.
“It made an impact on us,” Goławski told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Because they lived here in this place, and she visited us.”
Minars’ mother, Eva Eisenkeit, was a native Lubliner who loved the city and fondly remembered the bakery run by her aunt and uncle. She was 20 at the start of World War II. In March 1942, she escaped the Lublin ghetto two days before the Nazis began its “liquidation” — an operation to kill all the Jews, mostly through extermination camps and mass executions. Eisenkeit spent 22 months hiding in an underground hole beneath a pigsty in the nearby village of Dys. When she reemerged, she was the only member of her family alive.
“My mother survived by herself,” Minars said to JTA. “She came from a home [where] there were eight children. My mother didn’t even have a first cousin or second or third cousin survive. She finally met a fourth cousin, that’s the closest.”
Minars had a clear picture of the bakery in her mind. While she visited Lublin she was also completing her mother’s memoir, “A Lublin Survivor: Life is Like a Dream,” based on 14 years of testimonial interviews, transcription and research. The book was published in 2018, six years after her mother died.
The Lublin of Eisenkeit’s childhood was a vibrant center of Jewish life. A large share of the city was Jewish dating back to the 1600s . Lublin produced some of the earliest Hebrew books and prayer books, famed printing houses, religious leaders and one of the world’s largest pre-war Jewish educational institutions, the Chachmei Lublin Yeshiva . On the eve of the Holocaust more than 40,000 Jews lived in Lublin , roughly a third of the population. Some 40 Jews live there today.
Bakeries were embedded in the rich tapestry of Jewish food and culture. Lublin’s many Jewish bakeries sold rye bread (then known as “Jewish bread”) and pumpernickel (or “German bread”) along with challah, rugelach and pletzel, an onion flatbread originating from Lublin-area Jews in the 19th century . But the most famous bakery was the Bajtels’.
“People stood in line outside waiting their turn to get into the bakery,” Eisenkeit recalled in her memoir. “Wholesalers and store owners from the surrounding towns and villages came to Lublin to buy baked goods from the Bajtel bakery.”
Mordka Bajtel was a religious man who spent a great deal of his bakery’s profits on local Jewish institutions, according to Eisenkeit. He was particularly inspired by the Lublin Yeshiva, donating money for windows, pillows and bedding in the school’s dormitories. Every week, he donated challah to the yeshiva and the Jewish Hospital. And he never failed to bake challah for Lublin’s Bialer Hasidic rabbi, which he personally delivered before Shabbat.
The Germans shut down nearly all of Lublin’s bakeries in 1939, but the Bajtel bakery stayed open. Bajtel and his sons were forced to bake bread exclusively for the Germans until November 1942, when they were finally rounded up and killed at the Majdanek concentration camp. Doba Bajtel was shot with her daughters-in-law and grandchildren in the Krepiecki Forest. None of the Bajtels survived.
After the war, Eisenkeit returned to Lublin, intending to claim the bakery as its only surviving heir. But the Polish government had already granted the building to Włodzimierz Kuźmiuk.
Poland was quick to redistribute the property of dead Jews after the Holocaust, using decrees that nationalized private property under the post-war Soviet regime.
Eisenkeit could place a claim, but she would have to wait for months or a year while her documentation was processed. She did not want to stay in the hometown where her family, friends, neighbors and all Jewish life had vanished. Other survivors who returned to their homes were threatened or killed by Poles who had moved in. Still, she decided to visit the bakery’s new owner.
And so, 70 years before her daughter’s trip from Florida, Eisenkeit walked into the bakery and met Kuźmiuk. He told her that he waited for a surviving heir, but when no one appeared for months, he took ownership of the building just one day earlier. She said the bakery was his.
Soon after, she ran into a former Jewish neighbor from Lublin, Moshe Eisenkeit, who had also lost his whole family. They married and left Poland, moving to Israel and later the United States.
The Kuźmiuk Bakery’s bestseller today is known in Polish as cebularz, once called pletzel by Lublin’s Yiddish-speaking Jews: a round flatbread topped with diced onions and poppy seeds. Before World War II, the pastry was widely known as a Jewish specialty. But after the Nazis killed 90% of Poland’s Jews, the country was left with fragments of Jewish heritage — like an onion flatbread — without the Jews. Polish children who grew up eating cebularz from Jewish bakeries still wanted cebularz when they grew up, even if the baker was no longer Jewish.
“If you used to eat something from childhood, it’s quite normal for you to still eat it,” said Goławski.
She is currently working on printing a Hebrew-language brochure dedicated to the history of cebularz and its origins in Lublin’s Jewish community, which she plans to display in the bakery.
For decades after the war, Soviet rule suppressed Jewish religious and cultural life and imposed ideological socialist narratives over Holocaust memory in Poland. Among the small number of Jews who still live there, many have only recently discovered their Jewish roots following generations of fear, secrecy and assimilation. Goławski and Piotr Nazaruk, who leads research at Grodzka Gate, could not name a traditional Jewish bakery like the Bajtels’ today.
“There are no Jewish bakers in Poland,” said Nazaruk. “In Poland, we have maybe 20,000 Jews in the entire country, and most of them are highly assimilated, usually disconnected from Jewishness to some degree. So there are no Jewish businesses rising from the past.”
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