Jewish, General, History, Religious History 

Since the Holocaust, traces of memory are virtually all that remain in Poland today after more than 800 years of Jewish life there. This remarkable album, published on behalf of the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow, offers a sensitive way of looking at that past. Based entirely on arresting, present-day color photographs of Polish Galicia, it shows how much of that past can still be seen today if one knows how to look and how to interpret what one sees. The traces of the Jewish past in Polish Galicia can be approached from many angles. Jewish life in Poland was in ruins after the Holocaust, and so too were most of its synagogues and cemeteries. Much evidence of ruin remains, but, astonishingly, there are also traces that bear witness to the great Jewish civilization that once flourished there - synagogues and cemeteries of astounding beauty in villages and small towns, as well as in the larger cities. One can also see the exact locations where the Germans murdered the Jews of Galicia in the Holocaust: not only in the infamous death camps and ghettos, but also in fields, forests, and rivers.