A healing Polish memory

Stefan Nowak was 14 when the Polish Solidarity Movement took power in 1989, beginning the demise of communism  in Eastern Europe. "You cannot understand the difference between then and now", he remarked pensively while guiding our small group around Warsaw. The economic remedies and the flush of freedoms that followed were as sudden as they were welcome, and communist society was soon forgotten.
 
How much more so then must recollections of the Nazi era have dissolved in many years of generational change? If Polish people have forgotten the last 'fear-society' , then they must surely have forgotten the one that preceded it.  

Yet memory is strong. Particularly concerning the holocaust, which was detestably carried out largely on Polish soil. Just this month, a 97-year-old former social worker named Irena Sendlerowa was honoured for smuggling 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Empowered New York City Rabbis are being drafted in to bolster new, organic communities. Catholic poles are discovering their Jewish roots, hidden for decades by timid generations under communist rule. And last week, Poland's foreign ministry begun funding a weekly 30-minute radio show broadcast in Hebrew.

This once-unthinkable resurgence is explained by estimates that there are more than 20 000 people with Jewish ancestry living in Poland today. Since Mrs Sendlerowa's beneficiaries during the Nazi occupation were mostly placed with Polish families and Catholic convents, incredibly, she is to thank for making possible most of their lives.

Jewish gratitude has been reciprocated with respect, and Polish sensitivity with understanding. Today, in the context of an open Polish society, this modest Jewish reappearance may offer a valuable lesson for the worlds' many Diaspora communities: The effects of a long memory can be as uniting as they can be divisive.