We must remember 'Other Holocaust'

Mr. Coppel (Fence Post, Sunday), you remember your family's history. I remember mine.

We lived in eastern Poland before the Germans reached us. Russians had first dibs since they invaded Poland from the east three weeks after the Germans invaded Poland from the west.

All the so-called bourgeoisie (middle class people) and their entire families were forcibly taken away in the middle of the night in cattle trains to Siberia where the majority of them died in horrendous circumstances.

Their homes, their businesses were taken over by Soviet sympathizers. One of these, my grandmother's former neighbor, reported to the Soviet commander that my uncle, a teenager, was in the Polish underground. He was arrested.

Two years later when the Nazis reached eastern Poland, that same neighbor, now in hiding from the Germans, came to my grandmother begging for protection and food for him and his children. Poetic justice? You bet!

But my grandmother, like thousands of other Poles, had a conscience. She protected him and his family, sharing with them whatever meager provisions she had herself.

Had she been caught, the price Polish rescuers had to pay for their action was execution.

In Poland, unlike any other European country, the Germans executed not only the people who helped Jews, but their entire family as well.

Yad Vashem, The Righteous Among Nations title, is bestowed to thousands of Poles who sacrificed themselves and their families to save Jews.

Many more did it without fanfare, without public recognition, like Irena Krzyzanowska-Sendler who just passed away on May 12 in Poland.

During World War II, as an activist in the Polish underground and the Zegota Polish anti-Holocaust resistance in Warsaw, she helped save 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto by providing them with false documents and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes.

Even though we are Polish Catholics, in 1943, my parents and I, an infant, escaping from the murderous Ukrainian hordes, were thrown, along with thousand of other Catholic Poles, into cattle trains by the Germans in a deadly, agonizing, dysentery-filled journey without food or water into then occupied France to become slave laborers for the Third Reich.

So, Mr. Coppel, if not for justice then for historical accuracy's sake, please research the Other Holocaust, the Forgotten Holocaust of the Polish nation, where 3-million non-Jews perished, before you vilify Poland as a Nazi co-conspirator in the deaths of the Jews.

Barbara Wroblewski

Wheeling