Poland is fertile ground for a fantasy like Nachman’s. So much Jewish history, so little Jewish presence. The country is underpopulated by Jews and overpopulated with Jewish ghosts, towns and cities once shaped by Jewish life and culture now haunted by specters of a melancholic and brutal history that hover over trampled cemeteries and begrudging monuments, or as you find in Warsaw, a shimmering office building of mirrored glass built on the ground where the Great Synagogue once stood and the Chinese embassy that, many believe, sits on dirt where the final, undiscovered milk can of Emanuel Ringelblum’s Warsaw Ghetto documents is still buried.

In the early 1920s, Polish photographer Witold Chrominski took a panoramic shot of Szeroka Street, the central artery that leads into the main square of Krakow’s Jewish quarter, the Kazimierz. In the photo, the square is packed shoulder to shoulder with Jews, men in hats and long wool coats, women wrapped in shawls lugging stuffed shopping bags. It is a scene that bursts with life: you can hear the hum of conversations, the shuffling of weary feet, the shouts of vendors. Today, that same square bursts with a different kind of life and is mostly visited by tourists who’ve come to see the place that was once full of all of those Jews. It is a vibrant place these days, but when you stand in the middle of it and think of that photograph, the square’s enduring emptiness is stunning. The missing are everywhere. Instead of Jews, there are Jewish simulacra, walls covered with replicas of Jewish storefronts, kiosks selling wooden figurines of Orthodox Jews and Jewish violinists, “Jewish style” restaurants with names like Rubenstein and Babelstein, and Klezmer-Hois, a bohemian klezmer-themed cafe and hotel that sells old maps of Eastern Europe and vintage posters of Palestine and Israel. A restaurant that incredibly calls itself “Once Upon a Time in Kazimierz” advertises a trip “down memory lane” where you can eat your way back into a magical Polish past when Jews and Poles lived happily side by side. Under the seductive spell of selective post-Holocaust and post-Communist memory, Poland’s long, bitter history of anti-Semitism barely whispers its name in the sepia-toned shadows of vintage Judaica and colorful pre-Shoah nostalgia.

On our first day in Krakow—Roger Bennett, David Katznelson, Seymour Stein and I were in town for the annual Krakow Jewish Culture Festival—we were lucky enough to sit down in the garden of the Klezmer-Hois with Leopold Kozlowski, the iconic “last klezmer” of Poland and former musical director of the Jewish Theater in Warsaw who has preserved klezmer traditions from his pre-war days as a boy in the Ukraine through his post-war years as a Holocaust survivor. While Kozlowski spoke honestly of his ambivalence about the commercialization of Jewish memory in Krakow, he was also quick to emphasize just how important any shard of that memory still is to him. The Klezmer-Hois might not be an actual house for actual klezmers, but it’s still a place for him to sit in the breezy shade of trees, sip coffee, and pass on his songs and stories to new generations of Poles, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. Authenticity, he reminded us, is a complicated game in post-war Poland, and, at his age, knowing what he knows, a fake Jewish square can feel as real as anything else.

He told us that when he first came back to Krakow after the war he stood in the middle of the square and played his music for what he called the “mute stones” of Kazimierz. He wanted the stones to be reminded of the music they once knew, to ensure that memory would not fade into the silences of history.

The next day I visited Krakow’s Galicia Museum where an exhibition of paintings by Mayer Kirshenblatt, They Called Me Mayer July, was about to open. Among the work dedicated to memories of his Polish childhood in the ’20s is a painting of a “phonograph party,” in which a single phonograph blasts music from a living room window out to a town square full of people. When I spoke about the piece to the show’s curator—his daughter, the NYU professor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who is also directing the new Jewish museum being built in the Warsaw ghetto—she immediately unraveled more stories of Poland’s “mute stones.” Who talks of Poland’s own Tin Pan Alley from the interwar years when Polish Jews wrote pop and jazz tunes in Polish for national audiences? Who remembers the dashing Jewish star of Polish musicals, Warsaw’s own Adam Aston crooning songs like “Nikodem” and “Panie Janie”? Who remembers the tunes of Henryk Wars, the Polish Irving Berlin, who later reinvented himself as Henry Vars in Hollywood, where he composed the theme music to Flipper?

Since the 1980s, modern Poland has been working hard to grapple with its repressions of Holocaust memory and its often stubborn and cruel refusals to touch the scars of national witness. Cities like Warsaw and Krakow have become sites of intensive recovery and reconstruction efforts where once-forgotten names like Aston and Kozlowski, where the names of the thousands in Chrominski’s photograph, might receive some sort of memorial recognition as Jews, even if it’s only in tourist gift shops, cultural festivals, death camp tours, or on the walls of museums.

A key piece in this process has been the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival, mostly run by non-Jews for non-Jews, and which exists precisely to look memory in the face, to keep the stones from staying mute. The majority of this year’s performers came from the United States, where Jewish musical memory has long thrived alongside actual Jews, and historically the festival has, in a kind of reverse migration, imported Jewish music back into Poland. Which meant that familiar faces from the American scene like Frank London and Michael Alpert—leading New York lights of Jewish musical innovation and preservation—could play in Krakow’s only Reform synagogue on the same stage as both a crew of fellow New Yorkers (Sephardic-Mizrachi fusionists Pharoah’s Daughter, legendary Brooklyn cantor Benzion Miller, cantorial rock experimentalists The Sway Machinery) and The Other Europeans, a remarkable U.S.-Europe ensemble of Jewish and Gypsy musicians.

On the festival’s final night, Balkan Beat Box, the New York based band of Israeli brass devotees who manically meld Mediterranean and Gypsy styles through a hip-hop sensibility, commanded the coveted midnight slot. From the back of the Kazimierz square, you could barely see the stage. Well over 5,000 people had poured down Szeroka Street, dancing on cobblestones, cheering from balconies, and crowding restaurant tables. The square looked just like Chrominski’s old photo, packed and alive with people and culture not simulacra, only now the majority of the people were Poles who were not Jewish. Yet there they were, swept up in Jewish and Gypsy melodies, locked into the rhythms of history without presence, dancing with ghosts on top of mute stones.

Josh Kun is a co-founder of The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation and a professor in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. With Roger Bennett, he is co-author of And You Shall Know Us By The Trail Of Our Vinyl (Crown, 2008) and co-curator of Jews on Vinyl, currently on display at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.

The Krakow Jewish Culture Festival is a crazy, magical scene. A mixture of Eastern and Western Europe, music and culture, Jewish and not. The closest thing the Jewish world has to Glastonbury, the giant English festival that had ended just days before. The program is a carefully curated, loose yet contagious mix of Jewish sound, ranging from the infectious Sabbath chanting of the Benzion Family, who are like the Jonas Brothers but old and Hasidic, to The Other Europeans, a troop of klezmer and Roma gypsy musicians who spar with their instruments to explore the connectivity of their respective musical cultures.

The only shame is that the festival is such a well-kept secret in the United States. Young Jews in particular would flock to this creative cacophony if only they knew it existed and there are no doubt thousands obliviously Eurorailing in the vicinity. In their absence, the festival is left to an audience of predominantly young Catholic Poles who lap it up voraciously. The majority were born four decades after the atrocities of the Second World War, coming of age in a post-communist Poland. Faced with myriad identity issues, they appear to be using the festival to work out their questions one song at a time.

Krakow is a town in which the Holocaust is everywhere—thanks to the battery of brightly colored wagons, little bigger than golf carts, that litter the streets, energetically competing to lure visitors onto a series of niche tours they market via menus emblazoned on their sides. Trips to Auschwitz, “Kazimierz Ghetto,” and “Schindler’s Factory” are advertised alongside “Pope’s Krakow” and Wawel Castle as if they are all great days out for the whole family, despite the fact that while the last two are national jewels, the former are scars that stretch across the heart of the city. 65,000 Jews lived in Krakow before the war, amounting to 25 percent of the population. They now number a mere 200. Their absence hangs heavy, and if these tour carts were the sole custodians of their memory, they would surely soon be forgotten. But over the past 19 years, the Krakow Jewish Culture Festival has provided a critical public space for its audience to grapple with the stains of their history. This tangled phenomenon has been well-documented by the remarkable Ruth Ellen Gruber in her book Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe and our first encounter with it on this evening served to underline just how complex a task it can be.

In the club, the crowd was baying for the band to take the stage, eager to see the musicians ply their trade at close quarters in this intimate setting, but in their stead, a lone American emcee stumbled on, sporting a curly-haired-yet-balding look, like a younger, leaner, less successful Richard Simmons. His attempts to foster witty banter with the crowd fell on deaf ears, as the audience was largely Polish-speaking. This ersatz Simmons floundered until an anonymous American voice from the back of the club reminded him that it was music they had come to see. Relieved to have an English-speaking foil, albeit a hostile one, Simmons relentlessly baited his heckler, demanding he “come up here and tell us what kind of a bad day you have had that gives you the right to be Mr. Rude and bring us all down like that!” The crowd split as the mystery American was goaded to the stage. With the microphone shoved suddenly in his face, the interloper took a deep breath, calmly leaned forward, looked his nemesis straight in the eye and with measured words intoned: “I have had a bad day…because…I went to Auschwitz.”

The room turned still and silent. The scrawny emcee, flustered, was frozen for a beat as his quarry slipped back into the audience, leaving him alone in the spotlight. He staggered to one side and attempted to segue into an awkward monologue about how harsh trumpet playing can be on both your lips and cheeks before limping off, crushed, to exit stage left.

If that performance was appalling, we did not have to wait long for the innate beauty of the festival to reveal itself. Daniel Kahn, the Berlin-based purveyor of Radical Yiddish Song ambled onto the stage armed only with a well-worn ukulele and his low-affect, mischievous charisma, effortlessly using both to make the sorrows of the past speak to the turmoil of the present. He wasted no time in calling New York based songstress Judith Berkson to duet with him, even while confiding that the two had only met an hour before. As he framed the song they had chosen to perform, a Yiddish ballad called “Dem Milners Trehren” (The Miller’s Tears), a lamentation sung by Jews who had been driven from the land they had lived on and farmed for generations, he added that its message felt especially pertinent in the light of the grinding economic woes we face today. The duo launched into a simple yet haunting rendition of the song, conjuring a sound which would not have been out of place on a Jens Lekman album. As they traded harmonies and verses, Kahn occasionally switched into English to lull the audience with the song’s lyricism as well as its tenor, reaching back into the past and hauling it into the present with a ferocity and an emotional power that silenced the room once more. This time, for all the right reasons.

Roger Bennett visited the festival as part of a delegation from Reboot and the Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation.