Of all the three and a half million Jews who once lived in Poland, two hundred and forty thousand survived the Nazi period. Anti-Semitism was flourishing long before the German invasion. Yet some three to four hundred thousand Poles risked their lives to save Jews. Of the sixteen thousand Aryans remembered in Yad Vashem, the central Jewish place of remembrance in Jerusalem, one-third were Polish. Why work it out so accurately? Because everyone knows how horribly the infection of anti-Semitism traditionally raged among ‘the Poles’, but few know that at the same time no other nation hid so many
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