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Mystery of the mill
Adam Bartosz
(translated by Dorota Głowacka)
Until 1939, there were about 25 thousand Jews living in Tarnow. This was almost 45 % of the town's population. It was also one of the largest Jewish communities in the former Galicia, which was the highest percentage of Jews anywhere in Galicia, even if you take into account some larger cities. Wealthy Jewish inhabitants were dispersed throughout the center of the town and on its main streets. A traditional Jewish community was located in the eastern district of Grabowka, which was located on both sides of Lwowska Street. The streets running into Grabowska ended in the fields and gardens. To the South, the district reached [the river] Watok. On both sides of Lwowska Street, the houses of well-to-do Jews were situated; the poorer houses were located in the side streets. There were over a dozen thousand Jews living in that district. Jewish stores, schools, temples, workshops, small factories, and the entire infrastructure necessary for survival were located there. Among this Jewish element there lived a few Christian families, especially at the border of Grabowka and the village of Rzedzin.
Before the Germans sealed off the Tarnow ghetto, they concentrated about 40 thousand Jews in the eastern part of the town. Over a dozen thousand of those Jews were brought there from the nearby villages and towns, resettled in order to facilitate the extermination process. The district was not sealed until the summer of 1942: the Jews were allowed to leave it, but they were not allowed to live outside of it. In June of 1942, the first "actions" took place, during which half of the Jewish inhabitants of the district were murdered. Most of them were transported to Belzec, and a part of the elderly and ill inhabitants were shot in the forest of Buczyna near Tarnow. Many victims were shot to death in the streets and in the Jewish cemetery. After this week-long massacre, the Germans announced the creation of the ghetto - a sealed Jewish district. The remaining 20 thousand Jews were crowded inside. The left side of Lwowska Street became the southern border of the ghetto. The windows and doors of the houses on Lwowska Street were walled in. Since then leaving the ghetto without a permit was punishable by death. All the Jews who had still lived outside the designated area had to leave their houses and move to the crowded ghetto. Similarly, Poles who had lived within the area closed off by the streets: Lwowska, Under the Oak Square, Goldhammer, Mickiewicza, and Starodabrowska had to leave and relocate to the outside of the ghetto, which was now closed off with walls and fences.
The next actions during which the Jews were murdered took place in September, 1943. Crowded in the ghetto, threatened with death, people tried to survive in any way possible. The easiest way was to find a hiding place on the Aryan side, among the Christian inhabitants of Tarnow. This was an expensive way, however, accessible only to the wealthy. Hiding a person or a family carried not only a personal risk (denunciations on the part of one's neighbors, German searches), but it also required expensive maneuvers, such as preparing a relatively comfortable hideout with access to toilets, safe from potential informers. It is important to remember that the discovery of a hideout meant certain death to the owners of the apartment. Another difficulty was finding food, which was severely limited by the Germans. This is why the cases of hiding Jews in one's own home were rare and required immense heroism. We know very little about such cases, since even those who helped the Jews survive preferred to keep silent about it after the war, faced with the hostility on the part of the Christian inhabitants of Tarnow toward the Jews and toward those who had been helping them.
This is why the case which I am about to present, namely, the discovery of a hide-out in which a group of Jews survived the war, merits careful documentation. The hide-out was located in the buildings of the Dagnan mill, which was demolished in 2001. The Dagnan family - probably of French origin - settled in Tarnow in the beginning of the 19th century, and in the beginning of the 20th century, the Dagnans built a modern mill in Grabowka. The mill competed with the mill owned by the Szancer family, which was a wealthy Jewish family (a well known theater critic Roman Szydlowski, the author of the memoir entitled The Second World War Started in Tarnow, came from that family). Between the wars, the brothers Antoni and Augustyn Dagnan also managed a large workshop and services complex, which opened near the mill, and which housed a workshop producing the parts for the mill machinery, repair shops, garages, and modern offices. Facing the street was a beautiful villa, which was built by the mountaineers from the Podhale region. The buildings of the mill became a hideout for a group of persecuted Jews, who stayed there for over a year.
I was told the story of the nine Jews by Mrs. Zofia Dagnan (born in 1910 in Tarnow), in the beginning of February 1001. Mrs. Dagnan was Mr. Augustyn Dagnan's widow (who died in 1987), whom she married in 1930. It was during the liquidation of the mill and the adjacent buildings that the story of the hideout was revealed or rather remembered again. At that time, Mr. and Mrs. Dagnan's son-in-law, Dariusz Dworek, a connoisseur of the monuments of architecture, who was intrigued by a peculiar structure of the garret in one of the buildings, started asking questions, directing them at his wife's grandmother.
The building was a single floor structure, covered with a roof that was sloping to one side and was covered with red shingles. The building closed off the yard on the southern side, and its "blind" wall was adjacent to the buildings in the neighboring plot. In the eastern end of the garret a brick wall was erected, which concealed a space between the wall and the top wall of the building. A small square opening, which served as an entry to the hideout, was located in the lower part of the blind wall, just where the roof was touching the floor of the garret. The garret was always full of junk and chests with machinery parts: one of those chests served to conceal the entry to the hideout. The floor of the hideout consisted of a mud-floor. It was covered on the top by the sloping part of the roof. It was a rather drafty space, with no possibility of warming it up. The total surface of the hideout was about nine square meters, although one could only stand up on about a half of that space. Underneath were the workshops, and the machinery powered with steam made noise during the day, which muffled all the sounds.
How did it happen that the hideout was built? Who helped the runaways? Mrs. Dagnan remembered very little, or rather she knew almost nothing about what went on in the mill during the war because it was a secret. She told me what she had heard from her husband: "In the neighborhood there lived two brothers, brick layers, whose name was Drozd. At one point they were adding an office to the mill, and that's probably when they built that wall." The elderly woman maintained that nobody knew about it, not even the owner of the mill and the workshops. It is however unlikely that in a busy place like that several hundred bricks could have been secretly transported and the new wall was built, which must have taken more than a dozen hours. And who, besides the owner, had the authority to order this type of work? But Antoni Dagnan himself, when the affair became revealed, maintained he knew nothing and was pointing to the Drozd brothers.
According to Zofia Dagnan, the Drozd brothers brought the first group of the Jews into the hide-out. It was the Unger family. Mr. Unger lived on Lwowska Street and he was a flour merchant. His wife and two sons came to the hideout with him. Then a man whose name was Aleksandrowicz, with his wife and two young girls (their daughters?) came to join them. The Jews who worked in a garage near the mill then brought in their mother, an elderly lady, about 70 years old. All in all, there were nine people in the hideout.
The area around the mill was guarded at night by a security guard who had a small room near the gate. The buildings of the entire complex surrounded the yard on all sides, so the gate was the only entry. The hidden Jews could thus leave the hideout at night, and apparently after leaving the hideout they even cooked meals for themselves. Someone had to help them leave the building, however, since it was locked with a lock, which was still there when we entered it. It was probably also possible to cook in the hideout itself since the wall that the blind wall was adjacent to contained a chimney that led from the room immediately below. There was an opening at the level of the hideout (probably to sweep the chimney), where the hidden people could connect a small stove, which could have given some warmth, maybe even serve to cook a meal? There were spots on the wall that suggested it.
Apparently it was the Drozd brothers who made it possible for the Jews to contact the outside world. They also brought food, which was paid for by the hidden Jews. When they had no money, they stole flour from the mill, which they would give to the Drozd brothers to sell, according to Mrs. Dagnan. How impossible it is that the owners of the workshops knew nothing about all this is revealed in a fragment of Mrs. Zofia's story when she told me that once, late in the evening, she saw Mr. Aleksandrowicz in the hall. He seemed very weak, green in the face, cold, he could barely stand on his feet. The son-in-law quickly put his brother Antoni's coat around Mr. Aleksandrowicz's shoulders and they left in a hurry.
She didn't ask questions, she was afraid since she knew what the punishment for hiding the Jews could be for the entire family. "Perhaps," she said, when we asked her about those times "my husband knew about it, but he was hiding it from us." After the war he never said much about it. But he must have said something if the elderly lady remembered a few details.
She also remembered that it was told that the persecuted Jews had stayed in the hideout for about a year and a half. She also saw Mr. Unger, when he left the hideout after the Germans had left. He was swollen and apparently he died soon after. She knew nothing about the other Jews. The Dagnans never contacted them after that.
During a phone conversation a former inhabitant of Praca Street, which was adjacent to the Dagnan mill - Franciszek (Federico) Jachimowicz from Buenos Aires confirmed the fact about the Jews being hidden in the mill. He himself survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, and he returned to Tarnow in the end of January 1945 right behind the Soviet Army. It was then that he met a terribly thin Mr. Unger, his acquaintance from Lwowska Street, who told him about the hideout. It was obvious for Jachimowicz that it was the owner of the mill who ordered the hideout to be built and that he himself was protecting the Jews. He knew Dagnan, who was his neighbor, from before the war and he knew his very friendly attitude towards his Jewish neighbors. He was not surprised that no one was telling the story after the war. "You know what it was like after the war, people would not admit that they had been hiding Jews, it was not well looked upon, people were afraid of the returnees, the survivors. They were afraid because in the meantime they took over the Jewish homes."
The Dagnan mill and the beautiful villa that belonged to its owners no longer exist. Only those few sentences written down from the story of a very elderly Ms. Dagnan and the drawings and photographs of the hideout, made immediately before the buildings were demolished by the employees of the Provincial Museum in Tarnow, testify to the existence of the hideout that saved the lives of nine people .
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