P knieta Struna ( Le lien rompu )

After World War II, the surviving Polish Jews helped to rebuild the destroyed country and restore whatever was left of the earlier so flowering Jewish culture in Poland, be it in Yiddish or Polish. Unfortunately, the motherland turned out to be a wicked stepmother and so waves of Jewish emigrants followed, mostly to Israel in the years 1945-1948, especially following the Kielce-pogrom of 1946, and in 1956-57 in the so-called Polish “Thaw-weather” due to anti-Zionist campaign after the Suez War. This wave of emigration is unjustly forgotten, other than the final post-War wave of emigration after March events of 1968, which cleansed Poland of its Jewish inhabitants. The post-War emigrants were very closely attached to Poland and the Polish culture, but for them there was – at that time – no way back. Facing the hardships of exile, suffering of lost illusions and personal mortification, some of them, like Henryk Dankowicz and Aleksander Klugman whose texts will be discussed here, wrote their “J’accuse !” but many of them felt that their “string” was suddenly “torn”. How did they cope with the new situation and how ?