Three million Jews had been murdered in occupied Poland by the Nazis — half of all the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Their assets were taken over by Germans and in many cases, after the war, by Poles who were conveniently helped by laws about abandoned property. “It seemed,” Rakowsky notes, “like decades of suppression of facts and enduring self-interest of those who benefited from Jewish property had sealed off this dark history.”Some former neighbors do talk. This was no isolated incident; it was a relatively common event in wartime and early postwar Poland. “Jews had a 1.5–2.0 percent chance of surviving the Holocaust in Poland,” Rakowsky writes, “due not only to actions by the Germans but also their own neighbors.”Certainly, many Poles hid Jews and their families from the Germans during the war.

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Persons: ” Rakowsky, “, Rakowsky, Sam, Judy Rakowsky Locations: Poland, America