Poland's eastern frontier — Branicki Palace, Jewish heritage, and the Białowieża gateway
Białystok is the largest city of eastern Poland — a city whose 20th-century history encompasses extraordinary trauma and resilience. Before WWII, it was a predominantly Jewish city (Jews made up over 40% of the population, with a thriving textile industry and Yiddish cultural life); the Nazi occupation and subsequent liquidation of the Białystok ghetto in 1943 destroyed most of that world. Today the city's Jewish heritage is remembered through the Białystok Great Synagogue (destroyed 1941; commemorated by a plaque on the parking lot that stands in its place), the preserved pre-war Jewish ceme…
Białystok was granted city rights in 1749 by Jan Klemens Branicki, the Polish magnate who built the Branicki Palace as a statement of aristocratic power rivalling Warsaw's royal court. The city industrialised rapidly in the 19th century under Russian rule (as part of the Russian partition of Poland) — its textile mills attracted Jewish workers from across the Pale of Settlement, making it one of the great Jewish cities of Eastern Europe and a centre of the Bund (the Jewish socialist trade union). The 1906 Białystok pogrom, in which over 80 Jews were killed, was one of the worst in the Pale. W…