Visited Kraków’s Jewish quarter this morning. The guide said that somewhere between 65,000-68,000 Jews lived in Poland pre-WWII, only about five thousand survived, and only a few hundred live in Kraków today. Although most of the synagogues survived the war, few enough of the occupants survived that only one synagogue was in use when they returned.
The picture in the middle is a memorial commemorating those Jews from Kraków who were killed by the Nazis.
But the thing that made me the most emotional on this part of the trip was in the bottom picture - seeing the space in the wall that would have once held a mezuzah, as many of the houses would have, but that were all ripped out and destroyed by the Nazis.
Sometimes the numbers in the thousands are so large and unfathomable that it doesn’t even hit me, but seeing something as small and simple as a missing scroll makes everything very real and personal.
