One of the towns my family is from is Kazimierz Dolny. It is a Polish town that is a big art center. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it was a trading hub for grain along the Vistula but after the trade stopped it economically froze giving it a renaissance aesthetic to this day. There has been a Jewish community there from the 12th century to the Holocaust. Because of various laws that gave Jews rights the Jewish community flourished. In the 19th century, a Hasidic community was founded and in 1937 a Yiddish film called The Dybbuk was filmed. When the Germans came there was a Jewish community of 1800. The Germans made a ghetto, used Jewish tombstones for roads, and eventually gassed almost all of them and claimed it was Jew free. Less than 20 Jews survived the war.