Stella visits the Polish President

I stayed alive thanks to people who helped me during the Shoah. It grieves me that those Polish heroes have been neglected and have not received the recognition that they should for saving Jews during those days of horror. I decided to study their situation and to correct it as best I could. For this reason I published my book “Suppose it happened to your child” (read the book here). In recent years, American Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors from Poland, accuse Poles of anti-Semitism. In order to clear the name of the Poles and repair relations with Poland, the Poles invited me to a premier screening of the movie “Stella”, a film that documents my experiences during the War.

A first question that I was asked in Poland was: “How can we better relations between Israel and Poland?” I answered: “Send us your youth”. I thought to myself: after all, we send you our youth and this has the exact opposite effect. The film “Stella” received a first prize in a film festival. The premier screening was in October 2015 in a festival in the port city of Gdynia. After that, two weeks before Easter, the President’s Office invited me for a premier screening in the Presidential Palace.

Before the screening, I was asked to say a few words. I knew that I was speaking to Poles who knew the novella of the writer Maria Konopnicka, who loved the Jewish people and was a national hero. I also quoted Antek Zukerman, who said: During the Shoah, in order to save one Jew you needed one hundred Poles but one word from a silly boy was enough to bring about the execution of those who were saved and those who had saved them together”. I add in this context that today 15 dollars are enough to save a child from poverty in the Third World and give him the opportunity to finish school and get an occupational education. Where are we when it comes to this? The Polish President came back to this thought in his introduction to the film.

When I was in Warsaw, standing where the ghetto had once been, these wods echoed in my ears: “Whoever saves one life it is as if he has saved the entire world”.