J Ó Z E F   L E W A N D O W S K I
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When I’m going trough the list of people who helped me trough the labyrinth of documents and fulfill the task I took on me, it looks like a grave yard list on some cemetery. Therefore it is quite natural that in the common consciousness Second World War has become history – something that has been, something that exists no more. The rings on the water are disappearing, the ashes and the bones of the offers of Holocaust and mass murders on Poles, Russians, Southern Slaves and all others are becoming one with nature.

It took long time to fulfill the task given me for over thirty years ago by the old Julia Zielinska, that I’ve told about in foreword to this book. The reality I’m describing here is indeed complicated and demanded a lot of research and a lot of thought. The reality would not open so easily, it fought against intrusion and simplified conclusions. But now my task is completed, here I’m making an end of it. There are some questions that are still unanswered but I leave them to researchers much younger that myself. However I’ll not hide that I’m emotionally involved in everything that is connected with the subject. I belong to the few that managed to escape the Holocaust in which almost all my family, almost all my friend from of my youth and childhood, all my surroundings, were wiped out. To put brutally: were murdered.

I’m constantly thinking about my schoolmates, this twenty eight children with whom I began my school in 1930, in the small town of Konin. How many of them could stay alive had the world listened to Sven Norrman, Sigge Häggberg, Carl Herslow and – as Prime Minister Sikorski asked for – tried to stop the Nazis and their rampage? But they were talking to deaf ears, all that were dear to me perished. I myself and a very few others that survived are just an exemption in the statistics.

Soon even my time will be over, that’s why I’m in the hurry with this book. I have written to fulfil my duty- The least I could do was to bow my head to the powerless Swedes in Warsaw, who heartbroken by the Holocaust desperately tried to save a nation.

This is the least I should do but also all I could do: to try to keep their memory alive, for they deserve it. In Sweden, for they were Swedish, in Poland, where they acted and nourished the resistance with their shipment of money, among the people of Israel whom they tried to save from the Holocaust. And in Germany as warning and reminder. For ever! Yizkor! Translated it means: Do not forget them!