The Forward runs a lengthy article about non-Jewish Poles who preserve and protect Jewish heritage. The focus of the article, by Don Snyder, is on the work of the “School of Dialogue,” a project of the Polish non-profit Forum for Dialogue Among Nations, which fights anti-Semitism and works to foster better relations between Poles and Jews.
Warsaw — Every Polish town and village had its own Holocaust. That’s what Zuzanna Radzik wants Polish children to learn.
Her task is not easy. Although Polish children are taught about the Holocaust, they don’t learn what happened in their own towns.
The killing did not just happen in the death camps that they are taught about, such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. It also took place in little known towns like Stoczek Wegrowski where 188 Jews were shot to death on Yom Kippur of 1942, September 22.
Jews comprised as much as 70% of the population in some towns and villages in prewar Poland.
“We bring history to children in towns and villages who have never met a Jew or seen a synagogue,” Radzik said in a telephone interview with the Forward. “When we show them where the ghetto was in their town and that Jews were killed there, it all becomes real.”
Radzik represents a vanguard of Poles who believe that the Jewish heritage in Poland is an integral part of Polish history and that Poles must learn about it to understand contemporary Poland. In Poland today, she is far from alone.
Another Pole in search of Poland’s lost Jewish history, Beata Chomatowska, is restoring the memory of the Warsaw ghetto in the city’s Muranow neighborhood, which is built on the rubble of the former Jewish quarter.
Read more: http://www.forward.com/articles/148975/?p=all#ixzz1ihlLBp8n
The people profiled in the article follow in a tradition that began in the 1970s or even earlier, of non-Jewish Poles caring for, documenting and discovering Jewish heritage and history. Each year the Israeli Ambassador presents certificates of honor to a number of such individuals, and there have even been conferences dealing with this work.