JCC Krakow : Agnieszka, you've been a volunteer for how long? Yeah, I started in so about 14 years. Almost at the beginning of the JCC. Yeah, the JCC was less than a year old when I started volunteering. Why did you become a volunteer?
It's actually a very funny story. In , Kazimierz was not as popular as it is now. It was the part of Krakow where there was nothing interesting. But I started high school in the neighbourhood and this was actually my first contact with Kazimierz.
I started walking around, and one day, on Miodowa Street, there was a piece of white paper on which someone had written by hand that they were searching for volunteers at the JCC. This was at a time in my life when I wanted to be a volunteer everywhere: I was in the hospital, at festivals.
I had no idea about Jewish life. I learned from school basically that Jews were here, there was the Holocaust, and then, they were just gone. That was my only information. I don't know how it is now, but when I was in school, education about Jewish life in Poland was not great.
But I came to the JCC and started to discover the reality for myself. I was fascinated that there was this part of Krakow where I was living with so many Jews, on top of the rich Jewish background in Polish history and literature. I had no idea about this. And I felt that, as a person from Krakow, it is my duty to know this. So I started volunteering, and it was very funny because, at the beginning, it was just eight people volunteering at the reception.
