The same happened in Chmielnik, where suddenly people wanted to know more about their history. Aside from anti-Semitism, there also emerged a discussion on the cultural heritage of Polish towns and the lost identity of some of those places.
Only in the early 1990s, right after the fall of communism, did Poland see a public debate about that part of the country's past. There's been centuries of Jewish history in Poland The last wave of emigration was in 1968 when - after an anti-Jewish government campaign - around 30,000 of the country's Jews left. Many left immediately after 1945, because of the anti-Semitism in the Polish population. Partly also because the tragedy had been a taboo for decades.Īfter the end of the war, most of the 200,000 survivors of the Holocaust left Poland.
You'd have to imagine what happened to a town that over two days lost 80 percent of it's population," Weintraub explains. "In 1942, the Germans came and brought the Jews to the Ghetto in Sandomierz. With the Holocaust, Chmielnik lost that part of the town's identity. Before the Second World War, some 80 percent of the then 12,000 inhabitants were Jewish. Over centuries they were part of the societies and created a unique culture."Ĭhmielnik in the southeast of Poland used to be a typical shtetl. "Most Jews lived in large communities, mostly for religious reasons. Katarzyna Weintraub is a Berlin-based journalist who researched the history of the Polish shtetls and published a book on it. Kielce was the site of the worst post-war pogrom in Polandīefore the Second World War, there were some 1500 shtetls with vibrant Jewish communities who even had their own judiciary and school systems.
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