Debunking the myth of the 'ungrateful’ Holocaust survivor
In Poland, they were known as the ungrateful Jews. These were Jews who survived the Holocaust because of the selfless acts of thousands of Polish rescuers who put their lives on the line for them but were never properly thanked. As soon as the war was over, these Jews headed out to greener pastures overseas, never again to establish contact with those who served as their guardian angels.
Its one of the popular narratives that emerged in post-war Communist Poland, but according to Holocaust scholar Joanna Michlic, its a big myth.
Yes, its true that many Jews broke off contact with their rescuers, she says, but that was done deliberately to protect them because anti-Semitism was so rampant at the time that had suspicions been raised that they had saved Jews, they would have been punished by their neighbors for being traitors. So while many Jews would have like to stay in contact with their rescuers after the war, they decided it was best to stay away.
Michlic, a visiting Fulbright scholar this semester at the University of Haifa Strochlitz Institute for Holocaust Research, is currently working on a book about relations between Polish rescuers and the Jews they saved in the post-war period. Her findings are based on a large cache of letters she discovered at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. It includes more than 500 letters written by Jewish survivors to Jewish organizations on behalf of their rescuers, and by Jewish survivors to their rescuers in the first several years after the war.
more: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/1.599683
PATRICK
(12,228 posts)maybe they did not, could not, return to homes confiscated by the majority non-rescuing populous. Thriving communities might still have handfuls of Jews still living there but I doubt many of their neighbors want to regrow the population as it existed there for centuries. And contact during the Iron Curtain anti-semitic Russian regimes??
That myth was always ludicrous on its face, all too similar to a lot of the absurd slop Americans are led to believe about a large number of things.