A visit from Poland.

I have had the pleasure to host a beautiful Polish teenage girl for the last three days.
My oldest daughter is participating in the Rotary youth movement activities and they have visitors from Poland.
Last year a group of Israeli youth went the other way. My daughter was one out of fifteen who spent a week travelling in Poland.
The Israeli schools are on vacation until after the Jewish holiday of Passover. Usually the kids get up late during holidays, but these visitors have made a change to that. The bus leaves for days trip at 06.30 or 07.00 every morning. They have been to the north and to the center of Israel and by the time they return they can hardly keep their eyes open.

Today Jerusalem is on the itinerary. When I was told that they will start by visiting Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, I felt a heaviness coming over me.
It was the German invasion of Poland that marked the beginning of World War 2 . Hitler didn’t have any high thoughts about the Polish people as they were not Aryans and really didn’t consider them as worthy to have their own land especially not when they came “in the way” for German access to Prussia.
Hitler related to Poland as a “war dump”. Many of the concentration camps were built on Polish ground and most of them were of a kind that could not be survived. Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Krakow, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Lodz and many more, were all in Poland. 6 million Polish were killed during the war and half of them were Jews.
No doubt the Polish people suffered from Hitler…..

What saddens me is to know that Poland has been known as one of the strongest anti Semitic countries in the world. The “pogroms” were a fact long before the Nazis were even invented and the anti Jewish attitudes were based on teachings from the Catholic Church. The Church has a strong grip on the people even today and it seems that they still present the Jews as the “ones that killed Jesus”.
Pope Paul II was from Poland. He was the one who expressed the need for the Catholic Church to reconcile with both the Jews and the State of Israel. I hope his countrymen are following in his footsteps…..

What that this have to do with Olga? Nothing else than the fact that she has grand parents…..

Elin Elkouby