THE UNTOLD
Chapter 1 – Why Poland?
The chilling photograph that caught my attention stared at me from the front of a paperback, and became the pivotal moment I was first aware of the Holocaust. It was in the summer of 1956.
I was stunned. My feet froze to the ground. My eyes glued onto gaunt faces, living skeletons and striped clothing surrounded by barbed wire, pictured on a book for sale on the newsagent’s rack, found as I browsed on my way home from school.
My parents had never mentioned the atrocities, but nothing important or newsworthy was discussed with us, so, aged 14, I was ignorant of the facts. Family loss in the atrocities and its emotional rawness only eleven year’s after the war ending may have been the reason.
I knew that our grandparents came from Russia, but as a youngster it had not occurred to ask why they’d lived there or why they’d left, and knowing nought about the Holocaust there was little reason to connect the dots between Poland and this abominable persecution.
Holocaust was a word derived from the Greek word holokauston. A burnt sacrifice offered whole to God. The word had been chosen because whole victims were consumed in crematoria in a systematic extermination and ethnic cleansing of six million European Jews, Romans, Homosexuals and Jehovah Witnesses, executed under Adolf Hitler’s leadership.
Hitler had been dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. A fanatical anti-Semite he rose to power as the leader of the Nazi Party to become one of the most reviled figures in history. He orchestrated both World War II and the Holocaust, events that led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.
The knowledge that three million of these Jews were murdered in Poland made me question why on earth had so many Jews lived in Poland having left the warm Mediterranean climate in the land of Israel? The answer lay many centuries earlier, around 66CE.
Circa 45 BCE Julius Caesar recognised Judaism as a legal religion. Henceforth, Jews lived peacefully until 66 CE when Judeans rebelled against taxation laws, and that led to the first Jewish-Roman war. After they crushed the Jews, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and enslaved or murdered large numbers across the Roman Empire.
In 135 CE, after Emperor Hadrian crushed the Jewish revolt led by Simon bar Kokhba, he expelled Jews from Judea, and renamed it Syria Palaestina. The Jews and the Jewish diaspora dispersed around the globe and were persecuted in most places until King Casimir the Great invited them to live in Poland in 1343. Henceforth the country became known as a ‘Paradise for the Jews’ until eventually 75% of the world’s Jewish population lived there.
Jewish life is reliably depicted in the musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, a story that’s set in the Pale of Settlement around 1905, a region of Imperial Russia that was home to our families, so if you’re of Jewish heritage, look deep inside the narrative for your ancestors.
The assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 triggered over 200 anti-Jewish events throughout the Russian Empire, and caused the death of thousands of Jews. Two million left the country over the next 35 years to escape the anti Semitism, and migrated to America, South Africa and the United Kingdom. The men usually travelled first to find employment, their wives and children followed once their husband found a place to call home.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland, three million were murdered, and the remainder mostly left the country. In recent times the population has grown and expanded to an estimated 30,000.
