but to really understand the impact the war had, one needs to go to the countryside -- I've been to small villages in the mountains where you go in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a forest and you'll see this marker
History is divided into "before the war"and "after the war". Jews are remembered as a part of the body of Poland -- Poles who were Jews and you can see little signs of how it has changed the lives of this nation forever.
I can't imagine it -- 20% of your people wiped out, and one entire community erased. Because most Jews here were not in the ghetto, they were your tailor, your barber, your friend, the shopkeeper etc. integrated or hasidic, they were a part of the landscape. And then, erased, wiped out
Shocking.
On reading history - before the partitions of Poland in the late 1700s, nearly 60% of world jewry were in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. It was the Israel of that time.
And today, a handful. A vibrant color in the cloak that was Poland was ripped away and though the hole is stitched together the tear still shows...