POLAND: Holocaust survivor Miriam Schmetterling meets her Polish saviour after 60 years

Miriam Schmetterling, an 82-year-old Jewish woman, returned to Poland for the first time in 60 years, to take part in an emotional reunion with Jozefa Czekaj-Tracz, who as a 15-year-old risked her life to give sanctuary to Miriam. The event was part of a reunion of 60 Holocaust survivors and their rescuers in Warsaw, in the first such gathering in Poland. When Miriam Schmetterling left Poland in 1946, she had no idea if she would ever see her home country again or meet the people who saved her life during the Holocaust. On Tuesday (February 27), the 82-year-old Jewish woman, in Poland for the first time in 60 years, took part in a reunion of 60 Holocaust survivors and their rescuers in Warsaw, in one of the biggest such gatherings to take place in Poland. She met Jozefa Czekaj-Tracz, who as a 15-year-old girl helped hide Schmetterling from the Nazis for almost a year. People hiding Jews risked a death penalty under the Nazi occupation. "The six of us came to hide (in Jozefa Czekajs house). Her uncle was visiting us, he had to climb a ladder. He was telling us what was going in politics, where the Germans where and if something had changed. We always lived with hope, for us he was a window on the world," Schmetterling told Reuters as she toured the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw during heavy snowfall. "It required such courage (for Jozefa Czekaj) to keep this secret. That is real bravery. It's unforgettable," she added. Jozefa Czekaj's parents took Schmetterling and her family to their house in a town near the city of Lviv, now in Ukraine, to protect them from the Nazis, who invaded the city in 1941. "Germans were killing people and we knew that is what had to be done," Czekaj said after being reunited with Schmettering. "If I was in the same situation now, I would do it again," Czekaj added. At the start of World War Two, Lviv, with the largest Jewish community in Poland, was controlled by the Soviet Union after a non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin. Poland had the biggest Jewish population in Europe until the war but the murder of millions in the Holocaust by the occupying Germans and an anti-Semitic campaign by postwar communist authorities left only a few thousand Jews in the country. Since the end of communism, Polish governments have tried to rebuild relations with the Jewish community overseas and many thousands of Jews visit the land of their parents and grandparents each year. Many in Poland were incensed by accusations of complicity with the Nazis, who killed 3 million ethnic Poles and razed Warsaw to the ground. Polish officials have launched a campaign to remind the world that while some Poles informed on Jews to the Germans in return for money, others risked their own lives to save them. The biggest single group of the so-called "Righteous Among the Nations" at the Yad Vashem Institute are Poles. But many issues between Poles and Jews remain unresolved. On Wednesday (February 28), a delegation of Holocaust survivors will meet Polish government officials to press them to compensate them for property confiscated by the communists. Poland, the biggest post-communist EU member, is the only country from eastern Europe, besides Belarus, which has not enacted a programme for the restitution of property seized after the war. Several attempts to solve the issue after 1989 have failed, mostly on grounds of cost. Poland's ruling conservatives have promised to pass a new law to allow some compensation, but many claimants say that a government proposal to compensate only 15 percent of the lost property is inadequate.

ITN Source | February 28, 2007

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