Who lived in Lublin before WWII? The short answer is that we will never know. Like much of eastern Poland, the Jewish population was probably about 50% of the town. Post WWII, it was well under 1%. Who were those people who disappeared? It is too late now to answer that question. Even people who were children during the war are in their 80's now.
We went to a museum that is dedicated to chronicling who lived where in Lublin before the war. The walls are lined with notebooks, one for each individual dwelling on each street. They have a picture of that house, and then whatever information is known about the inhabitants. I picked up notebook after notebook, and not one of them contained any data. Those people are gone forever, anonymous to the inhabitants of Lublin today. Instead of being a source of comfort, the museum is a stark reminder of how completely Hitler and Germany wiped a group of people off the earth.
Who lived in Lublin before WWII? The short answer is that we will never know. Like much of eastern Poland, the Jewish population was probably about 50% of the town. Post WWII, it was well under 1%. Who were those people who disappeared? It is too late now to answer that question. Even people who were children during the war are in their 80's now.
We went to a museum that is dedicated to chronicling who lived where in Lublin before the war. The walls are lined with notebooks, one for each individual dwelling on each street. They have a picture of that house, and then whatever information is known about the inhabitants. I picked up notebook after notebook, and not one of them contained any data. Those people are gone forever, anonymous to the inhabitants of Lublin today. Instead of being a source of comfort, the museum is a stark reminder of how completely Hitler and Germany wiped a group of people off the earth.
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