Judaism in Poland After World War II and the Holocaust

Before the Holocaust, Poland's Jewish population numbered at around 3.5 million. Of the 6 million Poles that died 3 million were Jewish, and of the 6 million Jews that died, half were Polish. This did not become part of Polish memory for a long time. Under the Soviet Union, the Polish government emphasized that millions of Poles were killed and they failed to specify if a concentration camp was for Polish political prisoners or Jewish people. The lack of distinction between Polish deaths and Jewish deaths further damaged the already fragile relationship between Poland and the global Jewish community as Poland did not understand the extent of Jewish suffering. Every Polish person lost a family member, but if someone was a Jew in Poland at the end of the War, they were likely the last member of their family alive. 

Because of the Holocaust, approximately half a million Jews in Poland survived the War. Many of those surviving chose to leave Poland - some went to the newly-created Israel, other to the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, or Latin America. The small Jewish population that remained in Soviet-occupied Poland had very little say in commemorating or even acknowledging the Holocaust, and in many smaller towns and cities, entire Jewish communities were wiped out. Some towns chose to acknowledge the Jewish population that had once lived there and remember their history, but many others simply saw empty synagogues and chose to forget the people who had once lived there. This absence is reflected in the Jewish Cemeteries as the vast majority of tombstones erected for Jews who died during the Holocaust were built after the fall of Communism in 1989, and the vast majority of them either mark an empty grave or a mass grave. The tombstones that mark the graves of individuals are usually those of survivors who were young during the Holocaust and lived till the end of the twentieth century or the beginning of the twenty-first century.