Before this famous Polish bakery was “opened” in 1944, it belonged to a Jewish family that was murdered by the Nazis – The Forward

The Kuźmiuk bakery in Lublin, Poland, stands in the shadow of the Holocaust: The family that runs it took over a bakery whose Jewish owners were murdered by the Nazis. (Shira Li Bartov)

(JTA) – LUBLIN, Poland – On a quiet corner of Furmańska Street, the warm scent of bread from Lublin’s oldest bakery breaks at dawn, announced by a sign: “Kuźmiuk Bakery since 1944.”

But even before 1944, when Furmańska Street was part of the historic Jewish quarter of this Polish city, there was another bakery there. Before the Kuźmiuk Bakery opened that year, and before the Nazis killed 99% of Lublin's Jews, the city's best bakery offered rye bread and onion buns within the same walls. It was run by Mordka and Doba Bajtel and their children, a Jewish family that had completely disappeared from the city. The third-generation owners of the Kuźmiuk Bakery say they only learned about the place's pre-war history in the last decade.

The bakery's post-war history is evident throughout its operation. Katarzyna Goławski, the third-generation owner, inherited recipes and techniques from her father, Sergiusz Kuźmiuk, and his father, Włodzimierz Kuźmiuk. (The traditional rye sourdough, however, dates back to the 1980s.) Brochures in the shop tell the story of how Włodzimierz Kuźmiuk and his young family escaped the destruction of World War II across Poland and eventually settled in an empty bakery in Lublin. In 1944, his first loaf of bread provided Lublin residents with their first Christmas after the city's liberation from Nazi Germany.

But her father and grandfather never told Goławski what had happened before.

She knew nothing of the shop's Jewish history until a woman walked into the Kuźmiuk Bakery in July 2017 and introduced herself. Her name was Esther Minars, and she had traveled from her home in Florida to tour the bakery that once belonged to her great-uncle Mordka and great-aunt Doba.

The visit shocked Goławski, who still runs the family business with the help of her husband Artur Goławski and daughter Natalia. Minars showed that the Bajtels lived in an apartment behind the bakery – today it is the Goławski family home. Records from the Grodzka Gate-NN Theater Center, a Lublin institution that focuses on the city's Jewish history, confirm that Mordka Bajtel owned a bakery in the building that now houses the Kuźmiuk Bakery.

“It impressed us,” Goławski told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Because they lived here in this place and they visited us.”

Minar's mother, Eva Eisenkeit, was a native of Lublin, loved the city and fondly remembered her aunt and uncle's bakery. She was 20 years old when World War II began. In March 1942, she escaped from the Lublin ghetto, two days before the Nazis began the “liquidation” – an operation to kill all Jews, mainly through extermination camps and mass executions. Eisenkeit spent 22 months in an underground hole beneath a pigsty in the nearby village of Dys. When she resurfaced, she was the only surviving member of her family.

“My mother survived alone,” Minars told JTA. “She came from a home [where] There were eight children. My mother didn't have even one first, second or third cousin surviving. She eventually met a fourth cousin, who is the closest to her.”

Minars had a clear image of the bakery in her mind. While in Lublin, she also completed her mother's memoir, “A Lublin Survivor: Life is Like a Dream,” based on 14 years of interviews, transcriptions and research. The book was published in 2018, six years after her mother's death.

The Lublin of Eisenkeit's childhood was a vibrant center of Jewish life. Much of the city had been Jewish since the 17th century. Lublin produced some of the earliest Hebrew books and prayer books, had famous printing presses, 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, about a third of the population. Today, about 40 Jews live there.

Bakeries were an integral part of the rich Jewish cuisine and culture. The many Jewish bakeries in Lublin sold rye bread (known at the time as “Jewish bread”) and pumpernickel (or “German bread”), as well as challah, rugelach, and pletzel, an onion flatbread invented by Jews in the Lublin area in the 19th century. The most famous bakery, however, was Bajtels'.

“People were queuing outside, waiting to get into the bakery,” Eisenkeit recalls in her memoirs. “Wholesalers and shopkeepers from the surrounding towns and villages came to Lublin to buy baked goods from the Bajtel bakery.”

Mordka Baytel was a religious man who, according to Eisenkeit, spent a large portion of his bakery's profits on local Jewish institutions. He was particularly inspired by the Lublin yeshiva, which donated 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 the Hasidic rabbi of Lublin, which he personally delivered before Shabbat.

The Germans closed almost all bakeries in Lublin in 1939, but the Bajtel bakery remained open. Bajtel and his sons were forced to bake bread exclusively for the Germans until November 1942. Then they were finally rounded up and murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp. Doba Bajtel was shot in the Krepiecki Forest with her daughters-in-law and grandchildren. None of the Bajtels survived.

After the war, Eisenkeit returned to Lublin and, as the only surviving heir, wanted to claim ownership of the bakery. But the Polish government had already given the building to Włodzimierz Kuźmiuk.

After the Holocaust, Poland moved quickly to redistribute the property of deceased Jews through decrees that provided for the nationalization of private property under the post-war Soviet regime.

Eisenkeit was able to file a claim, but had to wait months or a year for her paperwork to be processed. She did not want to stay in her hometown, where her family, friends, neighbors, and all Jewish life had disappeared. Other survivors who returned to their homes were threatened or killed by conscripted Poles. Nevertheless, she decided to visit the new owner of the bakery.

And so, 70 years before her daughter's trip from Florida, Eisenkeit walked into the bakery and met Kuźmiuk. He told her he was waiting for a surviving heir, but when no one showed up for months, he took over the building only the day before. She said the bakery belonged to him.

Soon after, she met by chance a former Jewish neighbor from Lublin, Moshe Eisenkeit, who had also lost his entire family. They married and left Poland to move to Israel and later to the United States.

Today's best-seller from Kuźmiuk Bakery is known in Polish as cebularz, which Yiddish-speaking Jews of Lublin once called pletzel: 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 Jews. Polish children who grew up eating cebularz from Jewish bakeries wanted to eat cebularz as adults, even if the baker was no longer Jewish.

“If you ate something as a child, it’s quite normal to still eat it,” says Goławski.

She is currently working on printing a Hebrew-language brochure on the history of Cebularz and its origins in the Jewish community of Lublin, 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 on the memory of the Holocaust in Poland. Many of the few Jews still living there have only recently discovered their Jewish roots, after 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,” Nazaruk said. “In Poland, there are maybe 20,000 Jews in the whole country, and most of them are highly assimilated and usually have some degree of disconnection from Judaism. So there are no Jewish businesses that have emerged from the past.”