Poland / Lublin Plateau

Kazimierz Dolny

Jewish cemetery © Vadim Akopyan – Wikimedia Commons

If one stop along the road from Lublin to Warsaw is a must, it is in the city of Kazimierz Dolny on the Vistula, first because it is a tourist city, with old houses, a magnificent rynek lined with Renaissance or Baroque facades, a large church, and castle, but also because it has been marked by an important Jewish presence, of which there remain a few remarkable traces, most notably the eighteenth-century synagogue, just behind the large square at 4 Lubelska Street. Rebuilt after the war, it serves as a cinema today. On one of the walls, a plaque recalls the memory of 3000 Jews of Kazimierz Dolny murdered by the Germans.

When you leave the city, if you take the road toward Opole Lubelskie, you can see what remains of the former Jewish cemetery on Czerniawy Street. On the hillside, overtaken by the forest, several beautiful gravestones still stand, as well as a moving roadside monument made from hundreds of peices of destroyed tombstones.