Going to Lublin in eastern Poland is a bit like visiting Pompeii. The city’s old town – compact, intricate, fetchingly tarnished – is as haunting as Krakow’s and more authentic than the reconstructed Warsaw. But something is missing, and you can feel it. Before the war, the Jewish population of Lublin stood at 43,000. Now, it is just 40. Structures remain but their purpose has gone forever, replaced by a palpable absence.

Lublin was once a centre of Jewish life, the foremost in Europe. From the 16th century onwards, it teemed with yeshivas and synagogues, rabbis, philosophers and publishing houses. The Jewish ‘Council of the Four Lands’ operated from Lublin, an effective authority for all the Jews in the country. There were Jewish schools, Jewish restaurants, Jewish tailors, Jewish hospitals. Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, in his novel The Magician of Lublin (his father was a rabbi from the region) described the atmosphere as it once had been:   

The few sites which survive are part of Lublin’s tourist trade

The dusk descended… In the shops, oil lamps and candles were lit. Bearded Jews, dressed in long cloaks and wearing wide boots, moved through the streets on their way to evening prayers… Smoke came from the chimneys; housewives were busy preparing the evening meal: groats with soup, groats with stew, groats with mushrooms…. In Lublin one felt only the stability of a long-established community… Old customs prevailed here: the women conducted business and the men studied the Torah.

But Lublin, once the Nazis took power, was also the first city in the Nazis’ ‘general government’ region to suffer Operation Reinhardt: ‘the Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. Not only was its population of Jews ruthlessly exterminated; almost their entire quarter was dynamited by the Nazis, who resolved that no trace of Jewish Lublin should remain.

Now, the few sites which survive are part of Lublin’s tourist trade. The 4-star establishment I’m staying at, Hotel Ilan, promotes itself as a Jewish hotel (the restaurant serves a ‘set Shalom’ of starters, like herring, chopped liver and chicken soup with matzah balls). It occupies the handsome old........

© The Spectator