Kraków

Kraków appears as a proposed refuge in the family history of Saul Burnstein: after the 1919 pogrom in Korczyna, his mother Sara prepared to move there with her daughter Agar. The city’s significance is sharpened by the fate of the family scattered among it, Warsaw, and Korczyna, and by Saul’s eventual survival in America.

A Refuge Considered After the Pogrom

The family’s connection to Kraków begins in the aftermath of the pogrom and the murder of Sara’s husband, Abraham. With the family business ruined and their bags packed, Sara planned to go to Kraków with Agar. It was a practical response to catastrophe, a move toward a place where they hoped to begin again; the passage does not say that Sara and Agar ultimately made the journey.

The Family Dispersed Across Cities

A photograph of Saul’s Bar Mitzvah, held on April 12, 1919, preserves a family gathering before its later fragmentation. Sixteen people posed in the dining room in Korczyna. Agar was already living in Kraków, while Rebeca was in Warsaw and Linka was with Sara. The household portrait thus holds together a family whose members were already distributed among different places.

The dispersal did not offer lasting safety. By May 21, 1946, only two of the sixteen people in the photograph were still alive. Saul’s uncle Efraim had emigrated to America after the pogrom and waited until Saul’s Bar Mitzvah to take him with him. That departure spared Saul from the fate of relatives killed in Plaszów, the Warsaw Ghetto, or Auschwitz; the narrative makes the survival of the three brothers who crossed the Atlantic a stark counterpoint to the family’s devastation.

Kraków in the Geography of Loss

Kraków is not depicted through streets or scenes of everyday life. It enters the story through Sara’s plan and Agar’s residence, as one location in a family map marked by displacement and murder. Set beside Warsaw and Korczyna, the city names both the possibility of escape after the pogrom and the limits of what a change of place could guarantee. Its narrative force lies in this compressed contrast: a contemplated refuge amid a history in which nearly the entire family was lost.