Popiela was shocked when he began to learn as an adult about how in 1942 nearly 12,000 Jewish residents from Nowy Sącz--then one-third of the city's population--were transported to the neighboring Belzec death camp run by the Nazis. Many spent their final night in the city huddled on the same riverbank nestled between those two bridges that Popiela had passed every day. "They saw this same view. They heard the same river voices and sounds," he says, as we stood alongside the town's riverbank in May. But he was never taught any of it. "How is that possible?" he asks.

Jewish Galicia and Bukovina

'Sapere aude'