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Polish President Lech Kaczynski is seen speaking in front of memorial tablet at Warszawa Gdanska railway station during ceremonies commemorating the 40th anniversary of a communist anti-Semitic expurgation. From this station many of Polish families with Jewish roots were forced to emigrate. Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe prior to the Nazi Holocaust, that claimed the lives of six million European Jews, half of them from Poland.
Photo: AFP Copyright 2008
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WARSAW (AFP)---President Lech Kaczynski vowed Saturday to restore Polish nationality to the "forgotten people", those kicked out of the country for being Jewish long after the Nazi death camps had closed.
Some 20,000 people were rounded up and forcibly deported on trains, given travel papers entitling them to cross the globe -- with one cruel exception, the country they called home.
Kaczynski made his commitment at a ceremony Saturday marking the 40th anniversary of a crackdown on the 1968 student revolt -- which served as cover for anti-Semitic elements within the Communist Party hierarchy of the day.
Calling it Poland's "shame," Kaczynski told about 100 returnees from Israel and other countries that the communist campaign "took on an unimaginable dimension" and had "scarred Poland awfully."
"A stain was left on the reputation of our country, and Poland lost thousands of gifted, ambitious and entrepreneurial citizens," he said during the ceremony at a Warsaw railway station where the journey of many of the forced emigrants began.
A schoolboy in the same part of the city at the time, Kaczynski said departures from the station brought back the worst mental associations.
He spoke of the nearby Umschlagplatz, a Nazi assembly point for thousands of Warsaw ghetto Jews carted off to Holocaust death camps.
Those forced away from their homes in Poland spoke of their heartache."I cried all the way to the Czech border," said Elzbieta Karpinska, 22 when she and her family were told to leave "the city I loved so much."
She made her home in Grenoble, France, while her sister settled in Denmark. The vast majority, like Bralek Zeichner, made for Israel. "The UB (communist secret police) forced me to go," the former maths student added.
Many returned to Poland after the fall of communism in 1989, their 1968 papers entitling them to travel the globe, with the sole exception of Poland. Poland -- where Jewish civilisation dates back over a millennium -- was home to about 3.5 million Jews before WWII, but most of them were exterminated by the Nazis.