GENEALOGY PROJECT
He was an older man who came to the Jewish Historical Institute suffering from various ailments for which the medications he was taking were becoming unaffordable. He had heard that the Swiss had set up a Humanitarian Fund that would pay a lump sum to each individual who could document that he or she was a Jew subjected, at least for a time, to Nazi occupation.

His financial hardship had overcome his hesitancy, so he decided to come forward to see if he might qualify. His problem was one of documenting the necessary facts, for he had been living under an assumed identity since 1940 when he fled Nazi-occupied Krakow to join the Red Army, never to see his family again.

After the war ended, he soon confirmed what he had most feared -- his entire family had been exterminated by the Nazis -- he was alone with no material trace of his roots. Determined to go on, he put his energy into a new life in the Polish army and quickly rose in the ranks, first as an officer and eventually as a General. No one questioned or cared about his background -- a Jewish boy from Krakow.

Or so it seemed, until the anti-Semitic campaign broke out in Poland in 1968 in the wake of Israel's victory over the Soviet-backed Arabs in the Six-Day War. Despite his impressive credentials and adopted Polish name, the General was stripped of his commission thereby forcing him to spend the rest of his career, ironically, teaching German in a foreign-language high school.

Now he sat in the Jewish Historical Institute telling his story. He described his family's life in Krakow -- where they lived, what they did, whom his sisters had married. The staff at The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation Genealogy Project listened intently, then rushed away to retrieve a box of documents from the Krakow Jewish Community Archives. The box contained ID applications from the summer of 1940, only months after the future General had run off to enlist. The applications, physically restored and conserved with funds contributed to the Project, bore photographs and signatures of the General's mother, father, sisters and brothers-in-law! For the first time in nearly 60 years, the little boy from Krakow gazed upon the faces of his closest family members. He examined the photos for a long while and there was a tremor in his voice when he asked if he might obtain copies.

Whether this proud General receives any money will ultimately be a Swiss decision, but thanks to The Ronald S. Lauder Foundation Genealogy Project, his visit to the Institute yielded him a valuable, if unanticipated, reward...a restored identity.