When Poland returned to the map after a hundred and forty years of partition, Stary Sącz found itself in the Nowy Sącz county of Kraków Voivodeship. It was a little town of craftsmen and railwaymen, with Jewish merchants leading the trade. Its population was growing: about 4,800 in 1921, about 6,000 in 1939. Just before the war the town had 956 buildings. The rhythm of life was set by the market, held on Wednesdays.
A small town between the wars
The 1920s and 1930s brought Sącz a modest but unmistakable modernity. In 1925 a fur factory opened at 3 Batorego Street, and in 1928–1930 a power station was built on the Moszczenicki stream. The new municipal cemetery, opened in 1909 and enlarged in 1917, served a growing town. In 1933 Stary Sącz became the seat of a joint commune with the surrounding villages. In the Dom na Dołkach, on the market square, the Steireich family kept a wine bar.
The town was run by its own people. In the 1920s the mayor was Edward Szayer, advocate and co-founder of the “Sokół”, and father of the singer Ada Sari. Before the war and in September 1939 the mayor was Robert Ogorzały. On 12 March 1931 Józef Tischner was born in Stary Sącz – later one of Poland’s best-known philosophers and priests.
There were hard times, too. In July 1934 a flood inundated the lower parts of Mostki, and the years 1934–1935 proved very difficult for the area. Yet in 1935 the lost records of Kinga’s canonisation process of 1742 were found in the archive of the Congregation of Rites in Rome. It was the first step towards what would happen sixty-four years later.
The seminary – the town’s pride
The greatest pride of interwar Sącz was its teachers’ seminary. When plans to move it elsewhere emerged in 1920, the townspeople protested. On 27 January 1925 the school moved from the magistrate’s building into a new one on Dworska Street, and on 12 October that year it was named after Jan Długosz. The building at today’s 15 Daszyńskiego Street still serves as a school.
National education policy, however, proved stronger than local attachment. The Jędrzejewicz reform of 1932 halted admissions, the last class was moved to Nowy Sącz in 1935, and the final examinations in the summer of 1936 closed the school’s history.
On 18 February 1937 the town council, chaired by Mayor Ogorzały, assigned the empty buildings to a Pedagogical Lyceum. A private women’s seminary had also opened in 1921, and the Poor Clares ran their schools until 1938. In the early 1930s further school buildings were put up on Daszyńskiego Street.
September and the occupation
The border fighting in the Sącz region lasted from 1 to 6 September 1939. The Stary Sącz sector of the 2nd Mountain Brigade was commanded by Major Włodzimierz Kraszkiewicz. On 5 September Polish sappers blew up the road and railway bridges over the Poprad in Stary Sącz. At about 10.30 cyclists of the German 11th Reconnaissance Battalion reached the town and came under fire. Nowy Sącz fell the following day, 6 September, at about six in the morning.
The occupiers gathered the inhabitants in the market square and held the men overnight in the school. On 26 October the military administration came to an end. On 6 December 1939 the Lutheran pastor from Stadła, Fryderyk Spiess, was appointed commissarial mayor; he held office until August 1944.
Stary Sącz – in German, Alt-Sandez – was one of seven towns of the Kreis Neu-Sandez in the Kraków District. From 1940 the local police was headed by the Volksdeutscher Franciszek Lawitschka, an organiser of round-ups, who fled in June 1944.
The terror touched everyone. On 21 August 1941, 44 prisoners were shot at Biegonice. The tailor Franciszek Kwiatkowski, who had hidden the property of a Jewish dentist, was shot in Nowy Sącz, probably in 1942. Courier routes to Hungary ran along the Poprad valley, through Rytro, Kosarzyska and Eliaszówka. Biegonice and Nawojowa served as staging posts, and the couriers Jan Żółciński and Stanisław Dziedzic of Mostki came from the commune.
The Holocaust of the Jews of Stary Sącz
Before the war some five hundred Jews lived in Stary Sącz. At the end of 1939 the Germans set up a Judenrat. From March 1940 Jews from the surrounding villages were resettled in the town, among them the family of Mońek Goldfinger from Wierchomla. In the spring of 1942 an open ghetto was created on Krakowska Street, next to the cattle market, into which about a thousand people were crowded.
On 17 August 1942 the Jews were ordered to assemble at the cattle market. Lorries carrying the elderly and the sick turned off towards the Poprad. In a copse at Piaski, 95 people were shot.
The rest were driven to Nowy Sącz, from where, on 25–28 August, they were deported to the Bełżec extermination camp. The Stary Sącz ghetto was the first in the Sącz region to be liquidated, before the ghettos of Limanowa, Gorlice, Grybów and Nowy Sącz. The synagogue on Staszica Street was devastated.
Mońek Goldfinger was the only member of his family to survive. He passed through Rożnów, Tarnów, Szebnie, Birkenau and Buchenwald. He returned to Stary Sącz as a guest of the Remembrance Assembly in 2016, called the last witness of those days. The grave at Piaski, in the woods above the Poprad by the bridge, is the site of the annual Remembrance Assembly held on 17 August.
The end of the occupation
The occupation ended in January 1945. On 20 January, at about eleven o’clock, the Germans left Nowy Sącz, and soon afterwards, fearing encirclement, abandoned their positions on the Poprad and in Stary Sącz. The exact date on which Soviet troops entered the town is uncertain. As they withdrew, the Germans blew up the railway station and the railway and road bridges. The town’s buildings themselves, however, suffered no great damage.
The gravest loss was the loss of people. As a result of the war and the Holocaust, the population fell to about 4,500. Among the victims of the Katyń and Kharkiv massacres were 23 officers who had graduated from the Stary Sącz seminary. They are commemorated by a plaque unveiled in 2010.
In old and new photographs
