Babi Yar, who has heard about it? It is here, in the suburbs of Kiev, near the old Jewish cemetery, on September 29, 1941 —Yom Kippur day — that the Einsatzkommando headed by Paul Blobel, an SS colonel, with the help of the Ukrainian police, used machine guns to exterminate the Jewish inhabitants of this centuries-old town.Read More
Hiroshima. I heard the name for the first time when I was 9, in Kokand, Uzbekistan.Just three months earlier, we had celebrated the victory over Nazism. Stalin had spoken. I heard him on the radio. “I promised you that there would be a celebration in our street, too,” he reminded us. “Here it is.” Adults had to admit that he had beenRead More
FORWARD FORUM I met Pope John Paul II in 1985. We were introduced by his personal secretary, confidante and fellow Pole, Stanislaw Dziwisz.“Hello, my dear compatriot!” the pope greeted me in Polish.“Good morning, Holy Father,” I answered in Polish.“So we are both from Warsaw, aren’t we?” he said.“No,” I replied. “I am fromRead More
I did not go to Auschwitz. I did not go to Majdanek or Treblinka, or to any other Nazi extermination camp. I remember only the skeletal children agonizing on the sidewalks of the Warsaw Ghetto, their stomachs swelled by hunger.I only discovered Auschwitz later, after the war. I went there with my parents, like you visit the grave of someone veryRead More