Jan Czekanowski

[lethargic_man]

aviva_m and I just spent an overnight trip in Szczecin, which is just over the Polish border from Germany; for both of us it was our first time in Poland. Whilst we were there to do tourism, at the back of our minds we were conscious of the fact Poles have a reputation for a rather unreconstructed attitude towards Jews.

When we went on a tour of a wartime air raid shelter—which was fascinating for me, to see a glimpse of the wartime experience on the other side—aviva_m was struck by the fact that, though it talked a little about the general wartime conditions, not a single mention was made of what happened to the country's Jews. For me, following the guide in a printed English translation, the line about the air raid shelter having guards at the entrance to deny foreigners access (including, apparently, Poles whose ancestors had been living in what had been German territory since the eighteenth-century Great Northern War), had the addition "and Jews", but that was all.

By chance we came across a plaque on a wall marking where the synagogue had been, and that the community, dating from 1812, had been murdered in the Holocaust, but the plaque was not put up by the authorities (and was up a grassy bank, such that you couldn't read it from the pavement).

Then, in a park, we came across a statue of Jan Czekanowski:

There was no explanation of who he was, but on Wikipedia afterwards I read that he was "a Polish anthropologist, statistician and linguist, known for having played an important role in saving the Polish-Lithuanian branch of the Karaim people [Crimean Karaites] from Holocaust extermination. In 1942 he managed to convince German 'race scientists' that the Karaim were of Turkic origin although professing Judaism and using Hebrew as a liturgical language. This helped the Karaim people escape the tragic destiny of other European Jews and the Romas."

I'd vaguely heard of this before, but hadn't known who was responsible, and thought I'd take the opportunity to bring it to your attention.