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Jews Still Emerging from the Woodwork in Poland

(Ha'aretz) Benny Mer - Traveling in Poland by train earlier this month, I met Ewa, a woman who worked as a translator guiding French tourists in Krakow interested in the Holocaust. She told me that her mother had been Jewish. After the war, when she realized she was almost the only person from her family who had survived, she decided to stick to the false identity she had assumed and was baptized under that name. Only when Ewa was 18 did her mother reveal the secret. I had heard many other tales about Jews who remained in hiding after the Holocaust. It is well known that Poles did not welcome the survivors. About 1,000 Jews who sought to return to their homes were murdered. The Kielce pogrom, in July 1946, in which Poles murdered 42 Jews, drove home for many people that there would be no revival of Polish Jewry. It was obvious that the Communist regime, too, was not interested in encouraging a renewal of Jewish life. A change began in the 1980s with the labor movement Solidarity and gained momentum after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. "Poles who did not tell their children that they were Jewish decided to tell their grandchildren," explained Yale (Yechiel) Reisner of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw.
2010-08-27 08:23:05
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