Scale

Steelyard balance owned by Herszla from Staszów.

It is a simple steelyard in the form of an arm (a kind of a double lever) with a movable hook at one end (for hanging the object to be weighed) and a fixed counterweight in the form of a sphere with a diameter of 5 cm on the other end. Decorated with a slightly blurred image of a scale (dotted?). The steelyard is made entirely of metal.

The instrument used to have a leather strap in the middle part, which was used to determine the weight (the strap was moved along the rod to level out the two ends – balance the counterweight and the weighed object, in this case usually meat). The strap was destroyed or eaten by rodents in an abandoned house in Oględów from which Krzysztof Magiera recovered the object years later (when donating it to the Museum collection, he attached a string to the steelyard for reference; this provisional string has since been removed).

The steelyard is one of the traces of the trading Jewish community of Staszów and of Herszla’s family. As mentioned by Krzysztof Magiera, such weighing devices were used by Jewish and Polish women trading in front of the town hall in Staszów’s market square in the interwar period.

First and foremost, however, it is a memento of Herszla and his escapes from the ghetto to Oględów. He used to take it with him as a means of defence. From the interview with Krzysztof Magiera: He had to sneak away to come to us. The ghetto in Staszów was next to the Czarna river, so he jumped into the bushes and went through them almost the whole way along the river. When he came near our colony, he looked out of the ditch to make sure there was no one around, and then he ran across the Staszów-Chmielnik road and the field, the cottage was some 500 metres away. At first, the dog greeted him, but it did not bark, because it knew him… He had taken a steelyard, a hand scale, from his mother, so that he would have something to defend himself, so that no one would attack him in the bushes.” (Midrasz 2016, no. 6, p. 67).