I don’t love the cinema; phones are lighting up mid-plot twist, chip packets are rustling, the final puddle of cola is slurped through ice. Each is a small assault on the soul.
Even so, my wife and I got along to attend a couple of Jewish International Film Festival screenings this year, with me clinging to the hope that I might yet uncover some magic. At one screening, the trailer for A Real Pain lit up the screen. Encouragingly, it featured Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, yet it was not this star power that grabbed me. The film followed two cousins who trek from the USA to Lublin in Poland to uncover their grandmother’s Holocaust story. My own late Bubba had grown up in Lublin.
When we finally watched the film, coincidences piled up. When the cousins in the movie called their grandmother “Dory”, I nearly dropped my choc-top; my Bubba was Dora. When a shot of the Lublin city gate lit up the screen, I leaned over to my wife and whispered, “I need to see where Bubba lived.”
Turning 50 can do odd things to a person. Somewhere, in the recesses of my mind, a switch was flicked and my DNA yelled out, Go there.
Luckily, a conference was drawing me to London. So adding a Poland leg felt as natural as consuming caviar with vodka. My older sister, living in London and unquestionably Bubba’s favourite grandchild, answered my invitation to join my Poland trek with, “If you’re paying, I’m in.” Typical.
Next came detective work. Serendipitously, we have an American second cousin, Anat, who now lives in Israel and guides tourists for a living. As the granddaughter of Bubba’s much younger aunt, Anat inherited many family papers and she knew the addresses of Bubba. With excitement, she said, “Did you know your Bubba’s house was shown in A Real Pain? She lived above the city gate!”
In her later years, whilst ensconced in Sydney, Bubba had remarked that she stood at her apartment window in Lublin and watched people stream into the city below. Now we had our marker; to look out a real pane of 21 Grodzka Street, right above the city gate that divided Christian Lublin from the Jewish quarter.
In 1928, Bubba’s father, my great-grandfather Redelman, was forewarned of ominous clouds gathering and sailed to Australia to establish a textiles business. He left his wife, Pearl, and four small children behind in the Grodzka Gate. After establishing a shop in Sydney, he returned to Lublin in 1930 to collect his family who had patiently waited out his gamble on a new life on the other side of the world. That two-year head-start ultimately saved the family from the nationalist horrors against Jews that were accelerating into the ultimate catastrophe. In 1942, Lublin’s Jewish quarter was razed, yet the Grodzka Gate survived, an architectural antiquity that neither the Nazi nor the communists’ regimes tore out.
In the 1990s, after the fall of the communist bloc, a troupe of young Polish theatre-makers found 21 Grodzka abandoned. While breaking through plaster and clearing rubble, they unearthed Jewish remnants: a siddur, tiny glass tiles that turned out to be old photographic negatives and documents in a script they couldn’t read. What they discovered was a building that straddled the lost frontier between two communities and eras. Learning that a third of pre-war Lublin had been Jewish, they changed their mission and abandoned plans for a pure art-house theatre, creating the Grodzka Gate NN Theatre Centre, dedicated to preserving Jewish memories that whisper through the town. Learning the historical links to the modern incarnation of our previous family home was a truth much stranger than fiction. The Grodzka Gate is yet again filled with stories and storytellers.
Rabbi Yaakov of Trento, in 1475, dreamed of a hill-ringed town where Jewish learning would thrive. When he arrived in Lublin, he recognised it from his dream and stayed. Walking the city cobbles centuries later, I understood the appeal. The town glows in late evening and quiet corners still murmur. It was, for years, a place people understandably chose to live and learn in before history took that choice away.
Before the trip, I had envisaged Poland as grey, damp and perpetually cold. Despite the sense of foreboding, Lublin greeted us with latte art cafés, contactless payment and enough vodka to keep spirits soaring. Nestled amongst my inherited unease, the city buzzed with students and street musicians. History, it turns out, can coexist with modern youth.
We approached the Grodzka Gate NN Theatre Centre expecting a sleepy volunteer and a dusty plaque. Instead, staff bounded over as though they had been waiting all week for two Australians with a Polish grandmother. “Do you have stories from your Bubba?” My sister and I exchanged a look that said, Not nearly enough. When we mentioned her address, their eyes lit brighter. “Your grandmother lived in this gate,” they beamed. In that moment, it was like the archives climbed off the shelf, pulled up a chair and wrote a preface. Yet, thinking about what would have been witnessed out these windows, I didn’t get that winning feeling.
According to family lore, heard at Shabbat tables, monks once bought supplies from Bubba’s parents. As we stood in the theatre, we told our guide that the monks used to come in via the front, then the side, later the back, then quietly warned, “You need to leave. Things will get bad for Jews.”
Hearing this, our guide pointed through a window to a monastery less than 20 metres away. In that moment past and present overlapped like tracing paper. We were then led up some chipped stone stairs, the very steps my great-uncle climbed on a tentative return visit in the early ’90s. Halfway up the worn stairs he suddenly halted, pointed at the ground and proclaimed, “I lived here.” Only now, standing in these same stairs, did I grasp the weight of those words.
The Grodzka Gate NN Theatre Centre is part museum, part detective agency, part soul-repair workshop. NN stands for No Name, symbolising the erased identities they now recover. Most of the staff are not Jewish, yet they sift archives, interview elders and digitise photographs with skill and devotion. Their work is painstaking, always heartbreaking, yet occasionally exhilarating. They sought a stage and found a story, many stories, and turned the building into a lantern for Jewish memory.
Inside Bubba’s old flat we looked through each windowpane. The light felt strangely familiar as it spilled into our eyes as it once did hers. The view has widened, trees are neatly trimmed and tourist groups drift past, but I easily visualised her small silhouette peering out into the 1920s, hesitant, yet ready to depart for a new life that would one day include two grandchildren pressing their palms to the glass.
My Bubba never talked much about Poland. She used to say that when the family arrived in Australia, her father told her, “We’re Australian now.” There was no looking back. The old world stayed behind, not erased, but quietly sealed into recipes and family lore of which my older sister and I may have just written a new vignette.
Photos: Supplied
In 2023 the Grodzka Gate NN Theatre hosted the Lubliner Reunion, the third international gathering of Jewish Lubliners and their descendants. More than 250 participants came from around the world. Anat delivered our family talk in the upstairs apartment (now a small theatre), returning stories, after nearly a century of family silence, to the very air that first held them.
If your family came from Lublin, or you suspect it did, please write to the Grodzka Gate NN Theatre Centre. They rebuild family trees from scraps, a rent roll, a business directory a residential address. They are salvaging names and faces before they fade from view. Their archive runs deep, thousands of family fragments from pre-war streets around the gate have been indexed, and staff will happily search for details if you give them names and dates.
Believe me, every morsel helps. A single photo has the power to write a whole other story or fill in the blank spaces for other families. Perhaps we will meet at the next Lubliner reunion.
We travelled to Poland in search of a house. I don’t know if we found spiritual nourishment, but we found enough: proof that a few kilometres of wandering can retire decades of restless wondering. My sister still owes me for the theatre tickets, but, in truth, I owe her for looking through that pane of glass with me and the memories that now shine through it.
Tony Simmons is a Melbourne businessman. Contact the Grodzka Gate NN Theatre Centre – teatrnn.pl/zwiedzanie-lublin/en
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