In Mościce’s Eugeniusz Kwiatkowski Park there are also Marcin Zarzeka’s sculptures, which depict the never-fulfilled designs of Jan Głuszak, also known as Dagarama. This designer of future cities and ‘an extraterrestrial for personal use’, as he used to call himself, created ideas for enormous settlements of one million people, space stations and cities floating on oceans. For Tarnów, his birthplace, he designed Klub Koniczynka (The Shamrock Club), which resembled something from a sci-fi movie. He developed his own idea of a perfect city – the Humanopolis.
Dead classes
Let us return to the centre of Tarnów, or, more precisely, to the no longer extant Jewish district. Up until World War II, Jews made up almost half of Tarnów’s population. The last leader of the city’s Jewish community, Abraham Chomet, said:
It might have been the only city in Poland where in the City Council, citizens of different nationalities and religion worked together in peace and harmony to the benefit of all.
The city was an important centre for both the Hassidic and Zionist movements. An important modern Hebrew writer, Mordechai David Brandstaetter, lived there. His grandson, Roman Brandstaetter, was in turn a Polish-speaking Catholic writer and an author of historical plays.
Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class also originated from Tarnów, as the director graduated from the city’s Kazimierz Brodziński Secondary School. On the one hand, the work contains a universal message about the impossibility of returning to the past. On the other, Kantor created it in the context of the Holocaust.
Jan Bielatowicz, Kantor’s classmate, also recreated their class in a dream-like way in his short story Polihymnia: Zjazd Maturzystów (Polihymnia: A Reunion of Graduates), written years after the war in London. Mieczysław Jastrun, a graduate of the same school, wrote the following in the 1970s:
I walk on the main street of the city of T. I recognise almost every house, every distortion of perspective on the street. It all appears very familiar and close, but at the same time, strange and distant. Nothing, nothing, not even a single recognisable face. Only on the street running down next to the damp high-school wall, greeted by the sound of tall chestnuts, did I feel the shudder of an old longing. It seemed to me that I could see with my very eyes the superimposition of my two different times. Stumbling, unsure, I crossed through the narrow border between these two times. At some moment, at some square, I felt as if I was exposed to the falling stones of all of the surrounding houses. Could I expect, coming here, that all these unchanging, but as if slightly smaller and uglier houses would stone me, painfully, with their dead and heavy silence?