Poland: Secret Jewish heritage converts neo-Nazi

Pawel sits in the synagogue learning the Torah, praying and getting advice from his rabbi. He appears to be enjoying a happy life married to his childhood sweetheart and the mother of his two children.

But he and Ola have traveled further than most -- from hate-filled neo-Nazism through the shock and anger of learning their heritage was Jewish to taking their place in the synagogue as Orthodox Jews.

They met at school in Poland's capital, Warsaw, when they were 12, but as their teen years passed Pawel first and then Ola grew into the neo-Nazi scene. At 18 they married and a few years later Ola was nagged by a conversation with her mother that she barely remembered -- something about Jewish roots.

She found her answer at the Jewish Historical Institute, which says it has collections documenting 10 centuries of Jewish experience in Poland. While there she said she felt compelled to also check Pawel's family history -- and he too came from a Jewish background.

"Something told me to... It was unbelievable -- it turned out that we had Jewish roots. It was a shock. I didn't expect to find out that I had a Jewish husband," she said. "I didn't know how to tell him. I loved him even if he was a punk or skinhead, if he beat people up or not. It was a time in Poland when this movement was very intense."

Reeling from the news, she had to return home to her neo-Nazi husband and tell him of their Jewish heritage.

There were 350,000 Jews in Poland after World War II -- about 10 percent of the Jewish population before the war. In the 25 years after WWII ended the overwhelming majority left to escape persecution by the Soviet-controlled government.

For those who stayed, their Jewish heritage was hidden often even from their own children. It provided a culture where anti-Semitism could thrive and in 1980s Poland, Pawel was embracing the hate festering in the concrete tower blocks of Warsaw.

When Ola brought home the documents to show Pawel his own history, he rushed to confront his parents, and they told him the family secret.

"I was a nationalist 100 percent. Back then when we were skinheads it was all about white power and I believed Poland was only for Poles. That Jews were the biggest plague and the worst evil of this world. At least in Poland it was thought this way as at the time anything that was bad was the fault of the Jews..." he said.

"Emotions, it is difficult to describe how I felt when I found out I was Jewish... my first thought was what am I going to tell people? What am I going to tell the boys? Should I admit it or not? I was angry, sad, scared, unsure."

Over time, Pawel's anger and confusion subsided and he approached Chief Rabbi of Poland Michael Schudrich.

Speaking in the synagogue where he now worships, Pawel said: "The mirror was a big problem. I couldn't look at myself. I saw a Jew. I hated the person in the mirror then I grew accustomed to it, came to terms with it somehow. I came here to the rabbi and said, "listen, they are telling me I'm a Jew, I have this document in my hand, my mom and dad have said something. Who is this Jew and what is it? Help me because I am going to lose my mind otherwise.'"

In the years that followed they became friends with the chief rabbi and he has been a mentor to them.

Pawel, now 33, said: "I'm not saying that I don't have regrets but it's not something that I walk around and lash myself over... I feel sorry for those that I beat up... but I don't hold a grudge against myself. The people who I hurt can hold a grudge against me."

Today, they're active members of the Jewish community in Warsaw. Pawel is studying to work in a slaughterhouse killing animals according to the Jewish Kosher requirement and Ola is working in the synagogue's kitchen as a kosher supervisor."

Schudrich said: "The fact that they were skinheads actually increased the amount of respect I have for them. That they could've been where they were, understood that that was not the right way, then embraced rather than run away the fact that they were part of the people who they used to hate."

"I think also it says on a personal level, never write somebody off. Where they may be 10 years ago doesn't have to be where they are today. And the human being has this unlimited capability of changing and sometimes even for the better."

CNN (with video)

Marek Edelman, Last Leader of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Has Died

SS officers walking through the destroyed Ghetto after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Marek Edelman, the last living leader of the uprising by Jews incarcerated in the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, has died in Warsaw. He is thought to have been 87.

Edelman was imprisoned in the Warsaw Ghetto, an area walled off by Poland’s Nazi occupiers in 1940 to separate the city’s Jews from the rest of the population. As a member of the Bund labor organization that worked underground to spirit Jews into hiding or out of the country, he was one of the masterminds of the plan to resist the Ghetto’s liquidation.

Edelman, who had suffered from ill health for many years, died in Warsaw late yesterday. His death was confirmed by a friend, Paula Sawicka, whose family he had lived with in recent years.

“He fought for his country more than anyone else,” Michael Schudrich, Poland’s chief rabbi, said in an interview. “He wasn’t fighting for himself, but to show that the Jews in the ghetto weren’t passive, that they wouldn’t go like sheep to the slaughter.”

The Ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943, the eve of the Jewish festival of Passover and the day Nazi commanders planned to have the remaining people in the ghetto killed. With few weapons, Edelman and his colleagues forced the Germans to retreat. When the operation’s leader, Mordechai Anielewicz, died during the uprising, Edelman took his place. The fighters kept the occupiers at bay for almost a month in total.

By the end of the uprising on May 16, almost all of the Ghetto’s 50,000 to 60,000 remaining inhabitants had been killed or deported, mainly to the Treblinka extermination camp. About 350,000 people were locked into the Ghetto when it was built; only a few thousand survived its liquidation. Edelman was one of the few fighters who escaped, through underground sewers.

In contrast with many Jewish Poles who survived the war, Edelman decided to stay and settled in the central Polish city of Lodz, where he became a cardiologist. In an interview, he said his work as a doctor enabled him to save lives, which he was unable to do in the ghetto.

“The Lord already wants to blow out the candle, and I have to hide the flame quickly when his attention is distracted for a little while,” he said.

Edelman was probably born on Jan. 1, 1922, in Homel, a city located in present-day Belarus. His birth date and place of birth are disputed, and Edelman refused to confirm his age in interviews.

The family soon moved to Warsaw, where his father died when Edelman was young. He was left an orphan at about the age of 13.

In 1946, a year after the end of the war, Edelman moved to Lodz, where he remained for the rest of his life. There he married Alina Margolis, also a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. He finished his medical studies there and became a cardiologist, working until an anti-Jewish campaign in 1968 instigated by the communist authorities led to his dismissal.

While his wife emigrated that year to France, taking the couple’s two children with her, Edelman refused to leave Poland. He later explained his decision by saying “someone had to stay here with all those who died.”

In the 1970s, Edelman became involved in the anti-communist Solidarity movement and was interned after the imposition of martial law in 1981. He was released after a few days thanks to protests by Western intellectuals, and continued his resistance until the fall of communism in 1989.

Edelman was a leading member of the Freedom Union, the party of Poland’s first post-communist prime minister, Tadeusz Mazowiecki. He reflected on his experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto in a book-length interview by the Polish journalist Hanna Krall in the 1970s that has been translated into several languages. In 1998, Edelman was awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration.

Praise from Czech Leader

Vaclav Havel, leader of the Czech opposition movement and the first democratically elected president of the Czech Republic after the fall of communism, wrote to Edelman after a biography by Witold Beres and Krzysztof Burnetko was published in 2008.

“I deeply respect everything that you have done in your life, your uprightness, your courage,” Havel wrote. “For me, you are an example of a true Pole, the authentic personification of all that is best in Poland.”

In April 2009, Edelman joined leading Polish filmmakers and writers in a protest to the government after a former neo-Nazi took over the running of the country’s public television network.

“People who publicly support racism and anti-Semitism shouldn’t be allowed to play a role in public life,” he wrote in an open letter to Prime Minister Donald Tusk. “Don’t forget that evil can grow bigger.”

Edelman is survived by two children, Aleksander and Anna. His wife died in 2008.

Bloomberg

I'll bring Nazi to justice

The ID card for hell: This document allowed John
Demjanjuk into his training camp in Trawniki in Poland

Kurt Gutmann was only a boy when he was spirited away from the horrors of Sobibor to seek refuge among kind strangers in Scotland. His mother and brother were among those left behind, soon to become victims of an atrocity that would claim tens of thousands of lives.

But more than seven decades after his escape aboard the Kindertransport, Mr Gutmann is to realise his life's ambition by testifying in one of the last Nazi war criminal trials.

The German Jew, who went on to fight alongside the Black Watch in his occupied homeland, has been chosen as one of eight co-plaintiffs who will take the stand against John Demjanjuk, a former guard at the Sobibor extermination camp. There, it is alleged, Demjanjuk helped to preside over the murders of 27,900 people.

The 89-year-old was extradited from the US earlier this year after a legal battle that lasted decades. He continues to deny the charges, claiming he spent much of the war as a PoW. Prosecutors in Munich, however, say they will present a wealth of evidence at October's trial, placing Ukraine-born Demjanjuk at the camp in occupied Poland.

For Mr Gutmann, the trial presents a final opportunity to find justice for those loved ones he parted from long ago.

"It is the last thing I wish for," said the 82-year-old, who has had three heart bypass operations. "Perhaps I don't have much more time. But I still want to experience one more thing – just punishment for John Demjanjuk. He and his cohorts killed my family. I despise the man because he was a willing accomplice to murder and later dreamed up all sorts of excuses about what he did. I want to look into those eyes and tell him what he took from me."

The former translator was not yet a teenager when he stood on the platform of Mühlheim railway station in Germany's industrial Ruhr on 23 June, 1939. It was the scene of his last farewell to mother, Jeanette, and elder brother Hans, 21. His father had died when he was just one.

Mr Gutmann said: "I remember my mother kissing me, wrapping me in her arms and then saying, 'Look after yourself, my son, and please try to get us over there'. They were the last words I ever heard from her. She got me away because I was under 16. The Nazis wouldn't let Hans go."

With no choice, the 12-year-old embarked on a journey made by about 10,000 Jewish children between 1938 and 1939. His other brother, Fritz, had travelled the same route and was by then at the Getrude Jacobson Orphanage in Scotland's largest city.

He recalls: "The Scottish people were so lovely to me. I had come from a country where I was a fifth-class citizen, kicked out of grammar school because I was a Jew, unable to sit on park benches, spat at in the street. These strangers took me to their hearts. I will forever be in their debt."

The teenager spent a year at the orphanage before moving to Annan in Dumfriesshire and then on to Skelmorlie in Ayrshire, where he lived for two years at a Jewish hostel, before returning to Glasgow. Around the same time, in 1942, it later emerged, Jeanette and Hans were transported from Germany to a labour camp called Izbica, near Lublin, Poland. Some time before the end of the year, both were murdered there.

Back in Scotland, Mr Gutmann, now 17, had volunteered as an infantryman with the Black Watch. He was based in Lockerbie, before going to Germany in 1945 as a member of the British forces. He later settled in Berlin.

Mr Gutmann, who this week visits Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen on holiday, acknowledges that this autumn's trial will be a test.

"It won't be easy," he said. "My wife thinks it might be too much. But I have to do this. I am doing it for my mother and brother. I want to see the last great criminal of that war get what he deserves."

Scotsman

Bid to deport alleged Nazi guard stalls

An attempt to deport an 89-year-old alleged former Nazi death camp guard from the United States was last night blocked by an appeal court.

US immigration agents removed John Demjanjuk from his home in Ohio to take him to Germany. Demjanjuk was carried out of the house in a wheelchair and placed in a waiting van. His son, John Demjanjuk Jr, had filed motions earlier in the day asking the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals for a stay of deportation. The government objected.

German prosecutors claim Demjanjuk, a native of Ukraine, was an accessory to some 29,000 deaths during the war at the Sobibor camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. Once in Germany, he could be formally charged in court.

In 1988, Demjanjuk was sentenced to death in Israel for crimes against humanity after Holocaust survivors identified him as the notorious "Ivan the Terrible", a guard at the Treblinka death camp. Israel's highest court later overturned his sentence and freed him, after new evidence showed "Ivan the Terrible" was a different man.

Yorkshire Post

Germany gets go-ahead to prosecute 'Ivan the Terrible' in last Nazi trial

Germany is preparing for what could be the last Nazi war criminal trial as the country's highest court ruled a former death camp guard known as 'Ivan the Terrible' can be tried in Munich

Ivan Demjanjuk, alleged to be Ivan the Terrible, moved to
America in 1952 and changed his first name to John Photo: AP

Ukrainian-born Ivan Demjanjuk, 88, is alleged to have been involved in the murder of over 29,000 Jews when he served as a guard in several Nazi prisons including the death camp Sobibor in Poland during World War II.

Demjanjuk moved to America in 1952 and changed his first name to John, and now lives as a retired car worker in Ohio.

Last month, a court in Munich ruled that Demjanjuk, who was dubbed Ivan the Terrible for his role in the mass murder, could not be charged in Germany. But Germany's Federal Court of Justice has overturned the verdict, making it possible for Demjanjuk to be indicted and tried in Munich, where he lived before emigrating to America.

The court ruling read: "Demjanjuk, who is accused of involvement in the killing of at least 29,000 Jews in the Sobibor extermination camp in Poland in 1943, lived for several months in 1951 in a camp in the current jurisdiction of the court."

The office of the German Federal Prosecutor indicated that new evidence that surfaced after Demjanjuk trial in Israel in 1986 would be sufficient to charge him with war crimes. Demjanjuk always denied having served in the Nazi army and claimed to have been fighting in the former Soviet armed forces.

German authorities are now expected to seek extradition and put Demjanjuk on trial, which is likely to be the last high-profile process of an alleged Nazi war criminal. Demjanjuk was already extradited to Israel once where he was sentenced to death in Israel in 1986, but a higher instance court overturned the verdict for lack of evidence and he was allowed to return to America.

Demjanjuk's relatives in America repeatedly said that he was too old to stand trial, but Charlotte Knobloch, president of Germany's Central Council of Jews, urged authorities to "do everything legally possible to accelerate the process so that Demjanjuk can be held responsible for his crimes during his lifetime."

"Demjanjuk and all other Nazi criminals still alive should know that for them there is no mercy," Mrs Knobloch said.

Telegraph

Poland rejects populism and xenophobia in favour of pro-Europe liberal conservatives

· Tusk government aims to join euro within five years
· Defeated leader's twin retains veto as president

Poland yesterday stepped into a new era of greater European integration, more influence abroad, and more tolerance and liberty at home in the wake of a surprisingly solid election victory by the post-Solidarity liberal conservatives of Donald Tusk's Civic Platform.

"A Platform Triumph", read the huge frontpage headline on the country's bestselling newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, celebrating the demise of the two-year experiment in isolationism, nationalism, and intolerance engineered by the outgoing prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, and twin brother Lech who remains in office as president until 2010.

"It was a plebiscite," wrote Stanislaw Kurski, the paper's deputy editor. "The Poles rejected populism, fear, and the playing of one social group against another. They rejected megalomania, arrogance, and anti-German phobias. They rejected blackmail, snooping, and provocation."

Sunday's turnout of almost 54% was the highest since the beginning of the modern democratic era in 1989, indicating Poles' awareness of the high stakes; Mr Tusk's Platform, taking 42% of the vote, fared better than any single party since 1989; where two extremist parties took 18% of the vote only two years ago, on Sunday they mustered merely 3% between them and failed to enter parliament.

The result puts Polish politics in the most coherent shape ever. The new parliament will see the dominant liberal conservatives with more than 40%, Mr Kaczynski's nationalist populism with around one third, and centre-left social democrats and former communists with 13%.

After a year in which Mr Kaczynski repeatedly sought to block and veto EU policy-making and made Polish diplomacy the laughing stock of the continent, the Tusk camp yesterday promptly signalled a sea change. Poland will be the first country to ratify the EU's new reform treaty, pledged Bronislaw Komorowski, a Platform deputy leader, while José Manuel Barroso, the European commission chief, singled out the "European spirit" of the Polish electorate. The new government will also loosen Mr Kaczynski's welfarism, embrace the free market, and pursue tighter fiscal policies aimed at entering the euro single currency within five years.

Mr Tusk is expected to form a coalition with the small Peasants' party which took 9% of the vote. Between them they will have a comfortable majority of 240 seats in the 460-seat Sejm or lower house. That, however, is less than the 60% they need to override vetoes on government legislation by President Kaczynski who can be expected to try to make life difficult for the new government.

Mr Komorowski also said a priority was to construct as broad as possible a coalition to defeat any Kaczynski vetoes, meaning that Mr Tusk is likely to offer the centre-left something in return for support.

Lena Kolarska-Bobinska, director of Warsaw's institute of public affairs, says that prime minister Kaczynski's model for Poland was Israel. He sought to turn Poland into a combative, nationalist, and aggressive place ruled by a siege mentality, surrounded by perceived enemies, and utterly committed to the closest possible security relationship with Washington.

Mr Tusk will be more demanding of the US and keen to reach a much smoother modus operandi with Berlin.

But senior Platform figures, such as Jan Rokita or Radek Sikorski, are also critical of the EU and hostile to Moscow. Mr Sikorski, tipped to be the new foreign minister, is pro-America but increasingly critical of the Bush administration and demands that the Pentagon supply Poland with $1bn (£492m) worth of missiles in return for being allowed to deploy its missile defence facilities in north-west Poland.

Mr Kaczynski has been a highly divisive figure and on Sunday became a casualty of his own talent for confrontation and polarisation. His power base is the small town and the countryside, the elderly, the less educated and the poor. On Sunday Poland's burgeoning middle class, the young, the successful, the cities, took revenge.

Guardian

Jewish cemetery cleaned of Nazi symbols

Poland's chief rabbi and a town mayor joined students cleaning gravestones Tuesday at a Jewish cemetery that vandals had desecrated with Nazi symbols.

Rabbi Michael Schudrich said that he and Tadeusz Wrona, mayor of the southern city of Czestochowa, joined about 20 Polish art students who spent two hours scrubbing black paint off some of 100 gravestones at the city's Jewish cemetery.

Police discovered Sunday that the letters SS, swastikas, and the slogan ''Jews Out'' were written on the gravetones in German. They are still searching for the culprits.

''The fact is, there is anti-Semitism everywhere. But what is also important is the reaction of the rest of society,'' Schudrich said. ''Too often the rest of society tolerates these things. But in this case, the mayor and the young people didn't sit at home and wait for someone else to come clean it up. They came out and made a physical - not just verbal - reaction.''

The group donned gloves and used strong chemicals to remove the oil-based paint. Due to the difficulty of removing the paint, and the risk of damaging inscriptions with the chemical, the efforts would have to be continued by professional cleaners, Schudrich said.

Poland was home to about 3.5 million Jews - Europe's largest Jewish community - until World War II, when most were killed by Nazi Germany. Today there are an estimated 30,000 Jews living in this predominantly Catholic country.

Yahoo News

Pupils get a glimpse into nazi past

Pupils from Woodhouse High School saw history bought to life during a harrowing trip to the former concentration camp at Auschwitz.

Staffordshire County Council issued an open invitation to sixth form students to take part in the Lessons from Auschwitz project, run by the Holocaust Educational Trust charity. A total of 32 pupils from schools across the county took part, flying to Poland for a one-day visit to Auschwitz Birkenau.

Roger Emmett, history adviser for the county council's School Improvement Division, said:

"This was an important opportunity which we felt should not be missed, hence our invitation to schools to participate. Students and staff attended a seminar in London for a talk from a person who survived incarceration at Auschwitz Birkenau. Her story was a powerful one and really brought to life the horrors of the camp."

Tamworth Herald

Anger at EU talks as Germany hit by Nazi jibes

Talks on a treaty to replace the European Constitution got off to an angry start last night, after Poland launched an astonishing verbal attack on Germany over its Nazi past and Tony Blair threatened to walk away from the negotiations.

European Union leaders have gathered in Brussels hoping to agree an amended form of the constitution rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2004.

But the new form of the document is proving intensely controversial, particularly its proposals to change member states' voting weights and enshrine a "Charter of Fundamental Rights" in European law.

Many major British employers fear that the charter would give their workers new rights to strike, and Mr Blair yesterday signalled he was ready to "walk away from a deal" that gives the charter legal force in Britain.

That is one of the four "red lines" Britain laid down before the talks began. Mr Blair also said he would refuse any move to extend EU powers over UK policy in foreign affairs, criminal justice or social security.

Arriving in Brussels for his last EU summit before stepping down as Prime Minister next Wednesday, Mr Blair predicted "tough negotiations".

He said: "We have laid down four areas where we have to have significant change and we will have to see that change - it will have to be done. The four areas we set down we do need satisfied in full."

Mr Blair's insistence on Britain's demands being met "in full" infuriated other EU leaders, who believe Britain must be ready to compromise. Jose Manual Barroso, the European Commission President, yesterday said Mr Blair was not being "sensible" about the talks.

But if Britain's position is generating tension in Brussels, it is a minor row compared to Poland's spectacular rhetorical offensive.

The draft treaty would revise the EU's decision-making process with a new voting system giving countries power according to their population.

That would reduce the power of Poland - which has 38 million people - at the expense of Germany, which has 82 million. The Polish government has reacted with fury to the proposal, threatening to veto a new treaty and badly straining relations with the German government, which is chairing the Brussels talks.

As part of the escalating war of words over voting reforms, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the Polish prime minister, broke the greatest taboo of the modern EU by raising Germany's actions in the war.

Poland lost 6.5 million people during the Second World War, more than a fifth of its population.

Mr Kaczynski said that death toll explains the size of his country's population today. "We are only demanding one thing - we get back what was taken from us. If Poland had not had to live through the years of 1939-45, Poland would today be looking at the demographics of a country of 66 million. Germans inflicted unimaginable injury, terrible harm on Poles, incomprehensible crimes."

Despite that painful history, he claimed, "Poles like Germans, while Germans do not like Poles".

The origins of the modern EU lie in an attempt to reconcile Germany with its wartime enemies, and even to mention the conflict is almost unthinkable to many EU officials.

Publicly, the German government did not respond to the Polish provocation. As the summit began, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, said: "Each country will be taken very seriously as regards their concerns."

But privately, German officials were stunned by the verbal assault. "This just shows the character of the man," said one. Another accused Mr Kaczynski of seeking "confrontation".

Other EU nations also criticised the Poles. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister, described the Polish position as "absurd" and Romania called the comments "a step backwards".

After the summit's acrimonious start, diplomats were last night resigned to the talks dragging on into the early hours of tomorrow morning.

Scotsman

Holocaust denier David Irving expelled from Warsaw book fair

British historian David Irving, a convicted Holocaust denier, was escorted out of an international book fair in Warsaw where he was planning to display his books, Polish organizers said Saturday. Irving, who was arrested in Austria after his arrival on a visit in November 2005, spent more than a year in an Austrian jail for denying the Nazis organized mass murder of six million Jews during World War Two.

"We asked him to leave," said Grzegorz Guzowski, the book fair organizer. "Our employees helped him pack up his things, and our car drove him to the address he specified."

He said Irving's publishers did not send materials detailing his work to the fair until a few hours before the deadline, giving organizers too little time to prevent the self-taught historian from setting up a table at the exhibition. Unlike many European countries, Polish law does not expressly forbid Holocaust denial, Warsaw University law professor Piotr Kruszynski told Reuters.

"Polish laws prohibiting the promotion of fascism and defamation of people on racial and religious grounds could conceivably be extended to include Irving's writings," he added.

Irving plans to remain in the country for a few more days to visit Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps in Poland.

"It's ironic that it's come to a situation like this in Poland, which fought against restrictions on speech for such a long time," Irving was quoted by daily Zycie Warszawy as saying.

Haaretz