BY STACY ST. CLAIR
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN HILL

These train rails run into Birkenau, a Nazi camp in southeastern Poland. The line ends at the crematoria and gas chamber where 75 percent of Jewish prisoners were sent to their immediate deaths.

KAZIMIERZ, Poland - Tourists wander through the Remuh Cemetery daily gazing at Jewish graves that date back 500 years.

The headstones tell stories of lawyers, bankers, doctors and teachers who helped make Krakow a revered cultural center for more than six centuries.

Visitors pull away the tall grass and read about men like Shmuel bar Meshulam, who died in 1552.

"Physician to Polish kings Sigmund I and Sigmund II," the weathered marker reads.

A few feet down the overgrown path is the burial plot of Israel ben Josef, a prominent merchant and banker.

The tourists read the headstones and then a realization dawns on them:

"There was once a thriving population here," Chicago lawyer John Pikarski says. "Poland really was a mecca for freedom and religious expression."

This country's Jewish history is more than just the atrocities of Auschwitz and the Warsaw Ghetto. It began long before the Holocaust and Birkenau.

The onset of World War II and the horrors of Hitler's Third Reich understandably haunt Poland's history. But also woven into its Jewish story are complicated chapters about religious tolerance and Judeo-Christian cohabitation. That part of the story, though, often is hidden by the Holocaust's shadow and the smoldering effect of Soviet propaganda.

Tourists turn away from the ovens at Auschwitz, which has been preserved as a state-run museum. An estimated 350 bodies were burned in the crematorium each day.

For decades, the then-Communist-run nation refused to acknowledge Jewish contributions to its past. Only since the Iron Curtain has lifted, have Poles begun to see the benefits - financial and otherwise - of acknowledging Jewish history.

"Schindler's List" has made the Krakow area, particularly the inner suburb of Kazimierz, a popular tourist attraction for movie buffs and Jews researching their family trees. The Polish government now underwrites a Jewish historical museum in Warsaw and maintains vital records.

The state-sponsored services have allowed Chicago-area Jews - 60 percent of whom can trace their roots back to Poland - to reconnect with the fatherland. It's a tie once thought impossible to reestablish given the tension between Jews and Christian Poles and the horror of the Holocaust.

Grayslake resident Robin Seidenberg faced the difficulty of finding her past.

"There are no relatives in Poland to ask," she says. "Hitler killed them all."

Seidenberg persevered and did discover her heritage. For the first time, the retired educator feels a bond with her grandmother's homeland.

"I definitely feel a deeper connection to Poland," she says. "I certainly didn't feel this way before I started the research."

Grayslake resident Robin Seidenberg looks over a map of Poland, which has the towns of her ancestors clearly marked. She has traced her Polish roots back five generations through online databases and Poland's state archives.

Pikarski, who also is chairman of the Polish-American Jewish-American Council, understands the dilemma for Jews like Seidenberg. "There are very few people who identify themselves as Jews of Polish extraction," he says. "But there is an increasing number who now recognize their roots."

On a whim, Seidenberg bought a genealogy computer program at Sam's Club a few years ago. She had only gone to the store for bananas, but left with an all-consuming hobby.

She decided to retrace her grandmother's roots, tracking Rose Waniewska's life from eastern Poland to Chicago. She began the project thinking she would simply type information into the electronic family tree.

But Seidenberg started asking relatives questions about the family and they recalled stories of aunts, uncles and cousins in the old country. She scribbled down names and logged onto the Internet.

Once there, she found several databases with genealogical information on Polish Jews. Subsequent searches continue to unearth birth, death and marriage records of relatives dating back six generations.

Each bit of information is like fitting in a piece to a giant puzzle. A great uncle's marriage certificate led her to her great-great grandfather's name.

Among the many documents Agnieszka Rzebowska, director of the Jewish Historical Institute, preserves is a collection of testimonials from more than 7,200 Holocaust survivors.

Her kitchen table is covered with documents and Polish maps to help find ancestors' villages. A former French teacher, she uses her linguistics background and translators to decipher documents written in either Polish or Russian.

Every document introduces her to other relatives, most of whom she never knew existed. She even discovered, and then called, distant cousins in Argentina, where they have been since just before World War II.

The documents provided her with enough information to write a 140-page history of her grandmother, complete with photographs and copies of birth certificates. Yet she still continues to comb the Internet, learning names of relatives who died 150 years before her birth.

"The more you know," she says, "the more you want to know."

Seidenberg locates most of her documents through Jewish Records Indexing, which has more than 2.3 million Polish records on file. The index organization was founded in 1995 to dispel the myth that all Jewish records had been destroyed during the Holocaust.

The group works with Polish State Archives officials to retrieve records from more than 260 towns. In 1997, the government agreed to index 5 million Jewish vital records that were not microfilmed by the Mormon Church, which possesses the world's largest collection of genealogy records.

Jewish Records Indexing, through member donations, pays for all the archiving and translating needed. The genealogy group also handles orders for hard copies of the records.

The Polish government spends nothing, but profits from giving unprecedented public access to its archives. It makes half of the $120,000 collected annually for copying about 12,000 records at $10 apiece.

"It's a win-win situation," said Stanley Diamond, the Canadian businessman who started Jewish Record Indexing. "The system benefits both the state archives and the genealogists."

Before World War II, 3.4 million Jews lived in Poland, representing 10 percent of the predominantly Catholic country. Many of their ancestors had migrated here between the 12th and 15th centuries to escape the Crusades and Holy Inquisition.

They found solace in the country where the 1264 Charter of Kalisz granted full security for Jewish communities and property.

As centuries passed, Jews wove themselves into Poland's cultural fabric. They held influential positions in banking, manufacturing and government. They started colleges and worked in the arts.

Anti-Semitism existed, but Jews experienced freedom and prosperity rare in other parts of Europe.

"Poland was a warm nest of religious freedom for 600 years," Pikarski says. "People often don't realize that."

The freedom died when the German army invaded Poland and began persecuting its Jews.

In Warsaw, where one-third of the population was Jewish, Jews were corralled into a ghetto and forced into labor. They withered on 300 calories a day. Many died of starvation.

Anyone who tried to help Jews faced the death penalty. Those who reported them or their Christian benefactors were financially rewarded.

The Germans destroyed 50,000 Jewish houses, factories and stores throughout Poland. The businesses that escaped razing were liquidated.

In the Bialystock region, where Seidenberg's family lived, the Nazis burned down the entire Jewish quarter. An estimated 2,000 Jews were hiding in the synagogue when it was torched.

The German rampage continued until the city's 60,000 Jews either were dead or sent to extermination camps. Seidenberg has found the names of several Waniewskis who died at Treblinka, a death camp 75 miles northeast of Warsaw where 750,000 Jews were killed.

"Anyone who was left in Europe," she says, "was killed."

As more databases become available, Seidenberg hopes to uncover the exact fates of her family members. Holocaust history tells her their stories will have a vile ending.

In 1941, Adolf Hitler embarked upon a plan to systematically kill all the Jews in German-occupied territories. He created a network of six camps in Poland, which detained Jews and other Third Reich enemies, including Gypsies, homosexuals and political prisoners.

The largest and deadliest site was Auschwitz-Birkenau, located about 37 miles west of Krakow. Though often referred to as a single entity, it actually grew to a massive 470-acre site with three distinct camps.

A solitary rail line, left, is one of those that runs into Birkenau, a Nazi death camp in southeastern Poland. Flowers and candles now line the tracks where Jew after Jew was taken to die.

Auschwitz was built in 1940 in the suburbs of Oswiecim, an industrial town annexed into the Third Reich.

It held 20,000 detainees, most of whom were slave laborers. A sign at the massive iron front gate carried an ironic promise: "Arbeit Macht Fret" or "Work Makes Free."

It was located two miles from Birkenau, where most Jews were murdered upon arrival. At its height, 90,000 prisoners and most of the Nazis' killing apparatus were housed there.

The third and final section was a cluster of 40 sub-camps where prisoners worked on farms and in factories.

In 1942, the Nazis began sending Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau and transformed the sites into the Third Reich's largest death camp.

The prisoners arrived at Birkenau by cattle car. About 75 percent were directed to the gas chambers and showered with the poisonous Zyclon B.

Nazi soldiers took their bodies to the crematorium to burn them. Ashes from the ovens were dumped in a nearby pond, which, today, remains a haunting shade of gray.

The Germans spared the remaining 25 percent because they seemed healthy enough to work. They were condemned to brick barracks with mud floors and wooden bunks.

More than 50 percent of the registered prisoners died in the camps. Historians estimate between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people perished at Auschwitz, most of them Jews killed in the gas chambers.

Worker Emil Slusarczyk, 30, died one year and nine days after arriving at Auschwitz.

As the Red army started to close in on the Germans toward the end of 1944, camp officers began destroying evidence of atrocities. They discarded records, dismantled some buildings and demolished others.

On Jan. 17, 1945, the Soviets reached Oswiecim and freed the few thousand prisoners the Germans left behind.

Roughly 300,000 Polish Jews, 10 percent of the pre-war population, survived. Within five years, only 45,000 Jews remained in Poland.

Many who stayed faced an escalated anti-Semitism. A year after the war's end in southern Kielce, residents murdered 46 Jews who had returned to rebuild their lives.

The Kielce Massacre survivors - like 250,000 other Polish Jews - fled, seeking refuge in Israel and the Americas.

Poland regained its independence following the war, but a secret deal among the Allies had left it under the Soviet Union's thumb.

Two years after the camp's liberation, the Polish parliament dedicated the site as a state museum. For the next four decades, the Communist government used it as an anti-fascist exhibit, spotlighting the 75,000 Christian Poles who died rather than the Jews who were killed en masse.

The train journey to Auschwitz-Birkenau ended in front of two crematoria, which the Nazis destroyed in January 1945, to hide evidence of their war crimes.

Schools taught a revisionist history for more than two generations. Tales of Jewish contributions to society, ethnic cleansing and Christian Poles helping their Jewish countrymen were rarely repeated.

"The Communist era exploited the situation," Pikarski says. 'They wanted unrest among the constituency so they could take over. The good word couldn't get out. The stories of heroism and kindness couldn't get out."

Only since Communism's collapse in 1989, has the Auschwitz-Birkenau story shifted. Now, both camps honor the martyrs and recall the genocide that occurred behind barbed wire.

The abandoned rail line, which carried Jew after Jew to their brutal death at Birkenau, is lined with votive candles and stones, a Jewish tradition indicating a gravesite visit.

The track ends at the crematorium, where more than 1 million Jews died in less than three years. The building has been reduced to rubble. The plot is strewn with flowers, most dyed to match the same blue as the flag of Israel.

The camp often is a stopping point for Americans traveling to Israel. The route flies them into Krakow, where they spend a day in Oswiecim before going to the Holy Land.

Pikarski's group is encouraging tour groups, especially youth organizations, to visit other areas of Poland as well. American Jews often frown at the suggestion, a reaction prompted by mistrust that has festered since the Holocaust.

Skepticism exists, largely, because Communism prevented an open dialogue between Poland and its emigrant Jews for more than 50 years.

"We're trying to ease the tension between the two sides," Pikarski says. "There were Poles who saved Jews and did help. There were Poles who did nothing. And there were Poles who collaborated."

Tourists walk, single file, through the grassy Remuh Synagogue cemetery in Kazimierz. The gravesite chronicles part of Poland's rich Jewish history.

Pikarski urges American Jews to visit Kazimierz, where the temples testify to a once thriving Jewish community. Most of Krakow's 65,000 Jews lived here at the start of World War II, but only 6,000 survived.

All seven temples survived the war, though only one, the Remuh synagogue, now hosts services for the area's 150 remaining Jews.

The suburb was neglected under Communism. Buildings fell into disrepair and its name disappeared from local maps.

The area has enjoyed a resurgence with renewed interest in Krakow's Jewry. As the only remaining relic of a once vibrant population, Kazimierz has benefited most. Investors are refurbishing decrepit buildings and tourists walk through the town square.

"The Jews in Krakow saw a quality of life that existed in few other European cities," Pikarksi says. "We want young people to see that."

The renewed interest in the Jewish district has translated into tourism dollars recently. The Jewish Cultural Center in Kazimierz, for example, went days without a visitor when it opened 11 years ago. Now it hosts between 20,000 to 25,000 tourists each year, director Robert Gadek said.

Pikarksi hopes Jews and Poles who see the rejuvenated suburb realize religious tolerance once existed in Poland. A better understanding of history, he says, will ease the mistrust of the past.

"It's a way to ease the tensions," he says. "It's a step toward setting the record straight."

Part 5: Wood Dale man relives his role in often overlooked 'Uprising.'