NEW YORK -- While Israel recently marked its annual Holocaust Remembrance Day dedicated to the 70^th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, it’s hard to imagine that anyone could still just be learning the fate of their loved ones from that tragic era.

But that’s exactly what happened to Amos Cohen, a shipbuilder living in Haifa, Israel. He only recently learned the fate of his long-lost relative Rose Kobylinski, who died in a German death march and was buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery in a small village in Poland.

For decades Rose was only a name circled in black on a family tree, meaning she had died in the Holocaust. 

The genealogical chart had been drawn up by Cohen’s mother, Rose’s cousin. Other than Rose’s name on the tree, all that Cohen, 64, knew about her was that she had lived in Berlin before being deported to a German death camp.

Nothing else was known -- there had been no news about Rose since the Holocaust.

Then, one day, Cohen received a call from Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.  

“We think we found your relative,” the caller said. “And she is buried in the cemetery of St. Anna’s Roman Catholic Church in Swierklany, Poland.”

---

The search for Rose began in 1990 when Cohen’s mother made a formal inquiry, hoping that Yad Vashem might have information about her fate. No information was available.

“It was sad that my mother died never knowing what happened to her cousin, Rose,” said Cohen.

When Cohen went to Swierklany, a small village in southwest Poland, in April 2010 he pieced together what had happened to her. He recited Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer, in the church cemetery where Rose is buried in a mass grave with nine others, all murdered by the Germans on Jan. 18, 1945.

Konstanty Dolnik, the local undertaker, buried the victims in the cemetery in defiance of German orders to bury them in a forest to erase their memories. Dolnik also recorded the numbers tattooed on their forearms.

In 1948, the town erected a monument with a cross to mark the mass grave. Only the numbers recorded by Dolnik identified the grave’s occupants. There were no names. 

The breakthrough in the search for Rose came when Yaki Gantz, a former member of Israel’s domestic security force (the Israeli version of the FBI), became involved. Gantz heads a project called “For Every Number There is a Name.” 

“Their relatives now know that their relatives didn’t just become ashes at Auschwitz,” he said in a phone interview. “They know there is a place where they can come to say Kaddish.”

When Gantz learned about the grave in Swierklany, he sent the numbers to Yad Vashem with information from the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.

The museum had just obtained documents that the Russian troops seized when liberating Auschwitz in 1945. This Auschwitz data recently obtained from Russia proved critical in matching many numbers to names.

Krystyna Manka, the now 75-year-old daughter of Dolnik, the undertaker, wept as she remembers the sub-zero January night when the prisoners arrived from Auschwitz during an ice storm.

“It’s hard for me to talk about that night,” she told NBC News through a translator.

Manka was seven years old in 1945 when the Germans, losing the war, began marching concentration camp prisoners in Poland to Germany in what are known as death marches.   

Wearing rags and clogs that bloodied their feet, the prisoners were often shot to death when they could not walk fast enough. They were guarded by German SS men and barking dogs. The Germans spent the night in the village of Swierklany. One of the female prisoners stayed in Manka’s home that night – although she doesn’t know if it was Rose.   

“I still remember her beautiful blond curly hair,” Manka said. “Her feet were torn by the wooden shoes and the long walk in the freezing cold.” They had walked 40 miles, the distance from Auschwitz to Swierklany, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Manka’s father applied ointment to the woman’s feet and dressed the wounds. Manka’s mother, fluent in German, convinced an SS guard that treating the wounds would make the woman walk better and not slow the march.

It didn’t really matter. The next day, 10 prisoners were shot to death outside the village, including the woman who had stayed in Manka’s home.

The residents of Swierklany mark this massacre with an annual remembrance service on Jan. 18, and also during religious holidays, most recently on Good Friday.

“The fact that the Jews are buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery helps us to recognize that we are brothers,” said Father Jan Klyczka, a priest in the village for the last 40 years, in a phone interview.

Local teenagers maintain the grave and learn about a massacre that’s hard for them to imagine, said their history teacher, Iwona Barchanska.

Gantz continues to scour the dirt roads and churches of rural Poland, seeking to restore the names of the murdered.

“When a person finishes life, he has a name. He is not a number,” said Gantz.

Now, beneath the 1948 monument where there were once only numbers, there is a new memorial plaque with names that include Rose Kobylinski.

 

 

 

 

 

 

BUDAPEST - Hungary deployed tanks to reach thousands of motorists trapped in heavy snow on Friday as a sudden cold snap and high winds struck parts of the Balkans, Slovakia and Poland, leaving at least two people dead.

Snow stranded people in cars, buses and trains through the night and conspired with strong winds to cut off dozens of towns and villages in Hungary.

"The situation is most critical on the M1 motorway (linking Budapest and Vienna) where hundreds of cars are stranded in the snow, most of them for 18-20 hours now," said Marton Hajdu, spokesman for the National Directorate for Disaster Management.

Reuters photographer traveling with a rescue convoy said high winds had caused snowdrifts on the motorway up to three feet high.

People took to Facebook to appeal for help.

---

"At the Gyorszentivan exit on the motorway I have friends stranded since yesterday evening," wrote Ibolya Csukovics. "Can anyone help? They've run out of food and drink."

The government said it had sent in tanks and other military vehicles with caterpillar tracks.

The weekend's premier league and second tier football fixtures were canceled, with night-time temperatures expected to drop as low as 5 degrees Fahrenheit).

After a relatively mild winter for much of the region, almost 200,000 people in Hungary, Bulgaria and Slovakia were left shivering without electricity on Friday. Heavy rain hit parts of Serbia and Bosnia.

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

Polish Catholics are hoping for a new pope with fresh vision.

In Poland, widely considered the most Catholic country in Europe, the church has been plagued by dwindling attendance, surging secularism and increasing alienation among young people.

"Well-educated young people from the cities are leaving the church," said Marej Zajac, a writer for the Polish Roman Catholic weekly magazine Tygodnik Powszechny.

---

According to Poland’s Statistical Institute of the Catholic Church, weekly church attendance has dropped from 53 percent of the population in 1987 to less than 40 percent in 2011. It’s the lowest number ever recorded, said Bruce Porter-Szucs, a history professor at the University of Michigan who writes extensively about Poland.

This is a far cry from 1978, when Poland’s Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became Pope John Paul II, imbuing Poles with pride – and the Polish Catholic Church with unprecedented energy. That was evident in 1979 when John Paul conducted an eight-day pilgrimage to Poland. Approximately 13 million people — one-third of Poland’s population — came out to greet him.

After John Paul’s death, the commanding role of the papacy in Polish life diminished.

And, as in other parishes around the world, priests in the Polish Catholic Church are facing allegations of sexual abuse. These abuses, often concealed, are seriously damaging the church — especially because critics say the Catholic leaders in Poland are not dealing aggressively with the problem.

Growing secularism is another issue the Polish Catholic Church faces. Church observers say the Vatican must focus on contemporary issues and that there needs to be a Christian renewal to counter the secularism.

"Benedict XVI’s thinking was shaped by the problems of the 20th century,” said Zbigniew Nosowski, editor-in-chief of the Catholic monthly Wiez. “But now we need a pope who will help us face the rapidly emerging problems of the 21st century."

Nosowski said the church lacked a strategy to deal with mounting contemporary problems throughout Benedict’s papacy. He foresees the church accepting a married priesthood this century as a way to counteract the decline in men seeking the priesthood.

"We will need more priests to fulfill our basic ritual demands — like performance of the Eucharist," he said.

Some religion writers say the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI could provide an opportunity for other equally bold changes, such as open discussion of birth control, civil unions and in vitro fertilization.

"If we can accept the resignation of a pope, we should be able to accept other big changes," said Adam Szostkiewicz, a writer for Polityka, a secular liberal magazine. "People here are prepared for deeper changes and a more democratic style of managing things."

Liberal church leaders supporting change are a dwindling minority, and the Polish church is tilting to the right.

The Polish Catholic Church openly supports the conservative Law and Justice party, which aggressively opposes the moderate coalition government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his Civic Platform party. Overt church involvement in politics has alienated moderate Catholics.

"It could destroy the identity and unity of the Catholic Church in Poland," said Zajac. "We are Christians because we believe in Jesus Christ and not because we vote for a political party favored by the church."

Christian moderates are also angered because many Polish bishops support Radio Maryja, an ultraconservative Catholic radio station run by Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, a Catholic priest and Redemptorist. 

Radio Maryja’s broadcasts have been accused of demonizing Jews, gay men and lesbians, and of opposing Polish membership in the European Union as a corrupting influence. Critics say it has become the voice of the Catholic Church. Others challenge that claim.

A new pope must distance himself from the Polish church’s swing to the far right, said Stanislaw Obirek, a professor of anthropology at Lodz University and an expert on the church. He was a member and teacher in the Jesuit order until 2005.

Obirek said the Polish church started to support radical right-wing groups after the death of Pope John Paul in 2005. The new pope must counter this trend by promoting further democratization of Polish society, he added, stressing that the church cannot continue to cling to its traditional role in a rapidly changing world.

"Polish Catholicism has to radically change itself to adapt to social, religious and political conditions," he said. "Or else condemn itself to marginalization."

Don Snyder, an NBC News producer for more than 25 years, is a special correspondent for NBCNews.com. 

Related:

PhotoBlog: Polish faithful continue worship in increasingly secular world

Full coverage of the papal abdication from NBC News

This story was originally published on Tue Mar 5, 2013 4:41 AM EST

WARSAW — Nobel Peace Prize laureate Lech Walesa has provoked outrage in Poland by suggesting homosexuals in parliament should sit behind a wall.

Walesa, the deeply religious former president of post-Communist Poland, was speaking during an interview on Saturday broadcast by news channel TVN 24 in which he was asked about homosexual rights.

---

Asked where homosexuals should sit in the parliamentary chamber, he said: "No minority should climb all over the majority. Homosexuals should even sit behind a wall, and not somewhere at the front.

"They must know they are a minority and adapt themselves to smaller things."

Ryszard Nowak, a former conservative member of parliament, reported Walesa to the prosecutor's office late on Saturday, accusing him of promoting hatred of sexual minorities.

"The report was filed on Saturday, when the office is closed," prosecutors' office spokeswoman Barbara Sworobowicz told Reuters. "We will examine it, starting on Monday, if it meets the legal definition of a crime."

Robert Biedron, Poland's first openly gay deputy, appealed to Walesa to discuss homosexual rights with him.

"Walesa was a hero. I dream of meeting Walesa and talking to him about it," Biedron said in remarks broadcast separately by TVN 24.

"I think Walesa doesn't realize the kind of society we are now. Walesa went astray somewhere."

"Lech Walesa up until now was known for tearing down walls, not building them," said Janusz Palikot, leader of the anti-clerical
pro-gay rights Palikot Movement, to which Biedron also belongs.

"Walesa's words contradict democracy because that form of government is based on protecting minorities."

Walesa, who became a world-famous dissident when he campaigned for human rights and freedom in Poland's communist era, expressed his views weeks after parliament defeated draft laws that would have given limited legal rights to homosexual couples.

Poland has been struggling with issues such as gay rights, abortion, legalization of soft drugs and the role of the church in public life
as younger Poles seeking a more secular society clash with a deeply religious older generation.

 

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

A statue of Adolph Hitler kneeling in prayer in a courtyard in the former Warsaw Ghetto – where hundreds of thousands of Jews were forced by Nazis to live in inhumane conditions during World War II – has upset those who say the statue's placement is offensive.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish Advocacy group, described the decision to place the statue in the former ghetto as “a senseless provocation which insults the memory of the Nazi’s Jewish victims,” according to the Guardian of London.

Before World War II, Warsaw had the largest Jewish community in Poland and Europe; worldwide it was second only to New York City, according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia. During World War II, about 300,000 Jews in the ghetto died – most of hunger and disease and after being sent to concentration camps where they were killed.

---

Organizers argue that the statue is intended to be thought-provoking, according to The Associated Press. The exhibition’s catalogue says art “can force us to face the evil of the world.”

The statue, made by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan in 2001, is titled, “HIM” and has drawn thousands of viewers since it was installed in Warsaw last month.  

The body of the statue is of a schoolboy kneeling in prayer, and the head is made to resemble Hitler’s. Before being installed in Poland, the statue was shown in galleries, usually at the end of a long hallway with its back to viewers. Only when viewers approached could they see Hitler’s face. Reviewing an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum in 2011, The New York Times described the statue as “Hitler as a kneeling schoolboy possibly asking forgiveness.”

Cattelan created a similar effect in the former ghetto, where the statue is visible only through a hole in a wooden gate. Cattelan, who is based in New York, has been described as a satirical artist who produced another piece that generated controversy in Warsaw -- an effigy of Pope John Paul II being crushed by a meteorite. Titled “La Nona Ora,” or “Ninth Hour,” the work was also displayed in Poland, a deeply Catholic country.

Zofia Jablonska, 30, told The Associated Press that she thought the best spot for the statue was in “the place where he would kill people.”

Poland’s chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, was consulted about the installation, according to the Guardian, and said he believes it has educational value. Rather than support Hitler, Schudrich told the Guardian it shows that even evil lurks in the shape of a “sweet praying child.”

More world stories from NBC News:

• India gang-rape victim dies in hospital; case focused attention on sexual violence
• Putin signs law banning American adoptions
• Video: Elephants play soccer at Nepal festival
• US sailors sue Japan's TEPCO for post-quake radiation exposure

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

WARSAW, Poland — Foreign companies flock to invest. Its balance sheet is the envy of Europe. Top university programs crank out graduates whom everyone wants to hire.

Such is the current reputation of Poland, which has continued to grow during the global financial crisis as neighboring countries decline, lining itself up for a strong run to become the continent’s next economic powerhouse.

General Electric officials say they haven’t for a moment regretted basing one of their global design centers here, where Polish engineers helped create the new GEnx engine for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. (NBC News is owned by NBCUniversal. Comcast Corporation owns a controlling 51 percent interest in NBCUniversal, with General Electric holding a 49 percent stake.)

“In 2000, we ended the year with 11 engineers,” said G.E.’s human-resources director in Warsaw, Kinga Zalucka. “Today, we have 1,300 engineers. I think it was a good choice.”

---

How has Poland pulled off this feat of economic magic? Observers say it’s not just about the low labor costs compared to neighboring Germany, or the boon of a currency freed from the struggling Euro. They point to an impressive, decade-long campaign to raise the quality of secondary and university education.

As early as 1999, policymakers were planting the seeds for growth, adding a year of secondary education and extra language instruction for all students before tracking them onto professional or vocational paths. By 2003, Poland had vaulted past the United States and most of Europe on the reading section of the Programme for International Student Assessment exam.  

“Students needed more in general education, including subjects like math, in order to help them stay flexible and navigate the labor market later on,” said Nina Arnhold, a senior education specialist at the World Bank, referring to Poland’s strategy. “It made a huge difference.”

University enrollment has quintupled since the 1990s, with private-university enrollment now accounting for around 25 percent of the total. According to Eurostat, the proportion of Polish young people (aged 25 to 34) with college degrees has jumped from 15.0 to 37.4 percent since 2001.

Those reforms have helped Poland gain a clear edge in the global race for engineering talent. In one survey by McKinsey & Company, human-resources directors said the proportion of Polish graduates prepared to work in multinational environments was at least double that of their peers in China and India.

“It’s a modern, dynamic system,” said Arnhold. “They did many things right.”

These days, Polish universities are increasingly exercising their newfound autonomy under the country’s higher education laws, particularly in the fast-growing energy sector. And the central government continues to provide a boost for key industries such as nuclear power.

“Especially in the last two or three years, the state is paying fellowships to students to enter these studies,” said Marek Kwiek, director of the Center for Public Policy Studies at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. “It’s an enormously popular movement.”

The challenge now is to keep the ball rolling, despite a host of potential problems. Birth rates have plummeted since the 1980s. While the Polish economy grew by 4.3 percent in 2011, virtually all of the country’s European trading partners are slipping into recession. Unemployment stands at nearly 13 percent, and many investors still complain of stiff bureaucratic hurdles.

More from The Hechinger Report

• Despite gains, US students lag behind Asian peers
• Survey: US higher education must change to remain globally competitive
• Economic reality marries age-old idea — apprenticeships — with college

Kwiek said officials “took very seriously” the criticism in 2007 from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that Polish universities weren’t adequately preparing graduates for the labor market or helping to retrain existing workers.

“The relationships, the links with industry are [now] very close,” he said, citing the growth of the information-technology industry in cities like Poznań and Kraków. “But there are also bad examples such as the arts and humanities, where universities are still offering curriculums that are not providing good jobs.”

And even within the IT sector, some say universities must do more. It’s one thing to attract offshore investments, but quite another to develop homegrown industry and brands with global appeal.  

“Universities should be closer to business, and there should be much more project- and team-work,” said Piotr Wilam, an Oxford-educated partner with Innovation Nest, a $12 million seed fund for IT startups in Kraków. “They are very stagnant.”

Boom town
In many ways, Kraków is a microcosm of Poland’s promise.

The city has been a hotbed of innovation since medieval times. Copernicus himself walked these cobbled streets, crafting mathematical formulas by candlelight and inspiring countless other scholars to make their livings by wit rather than brawn.

Today, that flickering light comes from laptops, and math skills are often parlayed into software code.

Foreign-based employers say they’ve been delighted with the quality of Polish graduates, who leave university with a strong base in mathematics and basic programming. Google, Motorola and IBM are just the biggest names in the rush of Western companies to open development labs here.

But lately those companies are competing for graduates with a flurry of homegrown startups.

“There is lots of energy, and there is a community,” said Wilam. “What is really happening right now is people are starting to think more globally. Five years ago, the Polish market was big enough.”

Sitting in his company’s sleek offices overlooking the Vistula River, it’s easy to imagine Kraków as the sort of place where ideas flow. But Wilam said Polish secondary schools and universities need to reach beyond the outsourcing model for inspiration. That means lecturing less, revamping courses and finding more professors with real-world experience.

Piotr Nedzynski, a 30-year-old software entrepreneur in Kraków, said he learned nothing about “source control” — tracking different versions of software code — while studying at the well-regarded AGH University of Science and Technology. It wasn’t until he started working abroad for a Danish software firm that he picked up that critical knowledge, and saw firsthand how Western European students had been trained to think on their feet.

“In Poland, when a teacher asks a question, everyone is silent,” Nedzynski said.

Full international coverage from NBC News

Szymon Piwowarski, a group leader at G.E.’s Engineering Design Center in Warsaw, said it would be helpful for universities to add a half-year of practical work to their programs, or to make greater use of case studies.

“For many years, they’ve been teaching the same material — without much connection to the manufacturing process,” he said. “Have they ever talked to the guys on the shop floor?”

Some university officials say they’re working to correct that problem, with prompting from a new higher-education law that forces them to specify learning objectives — an approach also gaining traction in the United States — and make curricula more relevant.

“The university is producing people who don’t know how to cooperate with other colleagues,” said Andrzej Mania, vice-rector for educational affairs at Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

Senior professors can be just as resistant, he said. But the university is taking the long view and focusing its reform efforts on professors in their 30s and 40s.

“Something has to be done, and we are doing it,” Mania said. “We are transforming our system to define education in a completely different way.”

Uncertain targets
Some corners of academia are changing at a speed that would have amazed Poland’s old Communist Party bosses.

“We have increased the number of students by 50 percent compared to 10 years ago,” said Stanisław Nagy, head of the gas engineering department at AGH University. “Generally, about 100 students graduate from the department per year. This is a large number. Maybe next year we will open unconventional gas engineering also, and grow to 125.”

That boom is being driven by shale gas—Europe’s largest potential reserves, enough to fuel Poland’s growing economy and free it from a troublesome dependence on Russian natural gas.

Foreign companies like Chevron have jumped at the opportunity, signing training or research deals with AGH and hiring many students in the midst of their studies. The university is also planning new programs to help mid-career workers—the parents of current students—update their skills.

There is reason for caution, though. ExxonMobil abandoned its shale gas hopes in Poland after two exploratory wells failed, and a government survey concluded that much of the country’s reserves will be difficult to exploit.

“There are lots of obstacles,” Nagy said. But even if Poland’s more than 100 exploratory wells don’t pan out over the next few years, the university will gain expertise in areas like coal-based methane gas technology, he said. “We definitely plan to be a big innovation center in this area.”

Poles speak passionately of the need to free themselves of dependence on Russian natural gas imports, which supply 13 percent of the country’s energy needs. In 2009, and briefly again in 2011, those supplies were disrupted in a dispute with Ukraine. Poland also faces pressure under European Union agreements to develop renewable energy sources and wean itself from a dependence on carbon-intensive coal.

More Europe coverage from NBC News

Even nuclear power is on the table, despite the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan and neighboring Germany’s decision to close all of its nuclear plants within the next decade. Poland is still moving forward with plans to build its first reactor by 2024.

At the Warsaw University of Technology, about 80 students have graduated over the last two years with degrees in nuclear engineering, said Miroslaw Lewinski, director of the nuclear energy department at the Ministry of Economy. And it’s the central government that is doing the prodding, offering student scholarships and training in France for professors.

“This is the way to push the higher-education system to react to the needs of the market,” Lewinski said.

He predicted a “disaster” if politics or a series of anti-nuclear referenda derail the country’s latest attempts at energy self-sufficiency. (Residents of Gąski, a village on the Baltic Sea coast, voted overwhelmingly against building a nuclear plant in their backyard earlier this year.)

“We have to install nuclear power stations in Poland,” said Tomasz Szmuc, vice rector for science at AGH University. “There is no chance to go back from this way.”

But officials say some students are hesitating to enter the field out of fear the government may change its plans.

“We need a clear declaration from our government,” said Szmuc. “Studying is an investment in the future.”

Tomasz Wisniewski knows all about such investments. As a newly minted graduate in nuclear engineering back in 1983, he thought his career plans were rock-solid. But six years later, with the end of Communist rule, Poland’s partially built nuclear plants were mothballed.

These days, he’s an associate professor in heat engineering at the Warsaw University of Technology, and at the forefront of efforts to develop renewable energy sources. He still supports nuclear power, but thinks more attention—and funding—ought to be devoted to wind, bio-gas and other sources.

Wisniewski has sent dozens of students to Iceland in an EU-funded partnership with the School for Renewable Energy Science there, and many have found good jobs back in Poland. Research shows huge potential in Poland to develop local bio-mass boilers to heat buildings, allowing agricultural areas to use refuse efficiently. But so far, policymakers have paid scant attention.

“The system is not so flexible,” Wisniewski said, describing the country’s scattered university offerings.

One of his students, Martin Bugaj, is crossing his fingers. The 25-year-old will soon finish his own degree in nuclear engineering. But in recent months he has begun exploring other options like renewable energy and heat-pump technology, just in case Poland changes course.

“I am nervous, but not about my future,” Bugaj said. “I have two ways to go, nuclear and renewable. Now, yes, I am developing both plans.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University. It is one in a series focused on what the United States can learn about higher education from other countries. 

More world stories from NBC News:

• Analysis: Egypt is rapidly approaching its own 'cliff'
• Nelson Mandela suffers recurrence of lung infection
• Banking giant HSBC to pay record $1.9 billion in money-laundering case
• Suspect in US envoy's killing in Libya arrested in Egypt
• Parents: US Marine detained in Mexico for bringing shotgun across border
• Cuba's jailing of American contractor 'arbitrary,' UN panel concludes
• Nearly 900 left missing by Typhoon Bopha in the Philippines
• Video: Penguins in Tokyo take over as Santa’s elves

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

When Polish journalist Beata Chomatowska walks the streets of Muranow, she can’t stop thinking about the horrible things that happened there.

“It’s a daily trauma,” she said.

Present-day Muranow, a district of Warsaw, Poland, is built on rubble and the remains of Jews who perished there during World War II, but many residents are ignorant of the area’s past.

So Chomatowska started a website to educate them called “Stacja Muranow,” which means “Muranow Stop.” And in October she published a book by the same name, chronicling the haunted past of the former Jewish ghetto.

---

“It’s a metaphor for Poland after the war, which largely erased the memory of its Jews,” said Chomatowska, 35, who is not Jewish but has long been fascinated by the history of Jews in Poland. A native of Krakow, she moved to Muranow in 2005 to start working at Rzeczpospolita (The Republic), a leading Polish newspaper, and was shocked by the silence and emptiness of her new neighborhood.

“How do people live in houses made of ghetto bricks?” she asked. “The houses looked artificial and so did the hills. It was scary.”

During World War II, the Germans packed 400,000 Jews into the 1.3 square-mile area that became known as the Warsaw Ghetto, where Muranow is located.

Some 300,000 Jews were deported to the killing center at Treblinka. The final deportation, on April 19, 1943, became the prearranged signal for an armed uprising against German forces. After the Jewish resistance was crushed on May 16, 1943, most of the remaining Jews were sent to death camps and the Germans razed the ghetto. Thousands were buried in the ruins. Many hid in cellars and were killed when the buildings were flattened.

Poland’s post-war communist rulers, who were faced with the challenge of building housing for its many citizens left homeless by the war, found the rubble of the ghetto too extensive to clear. Buildings were constructed on the ruins using bricks from the ghetto. Built on this rubble, the street levels are uneven and often hilly.

Communist rulers touted Muranow as a utopia for workers and purposefully erased its Jewish history, leaving subsequent generations in the dark. In her book, Chomatowska tells the stories of some of the Jewish dead and laments the fact that most of today’s Muranow residents know little of the neighborhood’s history.

That is starting to change. Thirty residents have joined Chomatowska’s Muranow education project, meeting in an unfurnished office with no hint of the past. She’s particularly proud of one of the murals painted by members of the group in the entry way of an apartment building. It features prominent Jews who lived in Muranow before the war, such as the creator of Esperanto, Ludwik Zamenhoff, who hoped his universal language would unite people of different cultures.

Restoring memories of the Holocaust
In her book, which is in Polish, Chomatowska tells the stories of former Muranow residents such as Jakub Wisnia, a Warsaw Ghetto fighter who survived the Holocaust.

After researching Wisnia’s life, she described what he saw in August 1942 when Jews were being herded into trains destined for the Treblinka death camp.

One passage reads: “The streets of the ghetto were hell. Women wept. Children held their mothers tightly, and the men clenched their teeth nervously, looking for a moment when they could escape. Anyone who stepped out of line was beaten unconscious, or shot.”

Wisnia fought alongside fellow Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising until the Germans arrested him and sentenced him to death. The Polish underground rescued him, and in August 1944, he joined Poles, Jews and non-Jews, in their abortive revolt against German rule. He avoided arrest by hiding in the city’s rubble for 108 days. He lived into his 80s, and was buried in Warsaw’s Jewish Cemetery in 1983.

‘Haunted’ by Muranow
The area’s tragic past have led to claims of ghosts and feelings of dread. For example, Audrey Mallet, a French researcher who wrote a paper on Muranow, said some current inhabitants fear that Jews will come back and kill them.

Holocaust historian Barbara Engelking moved out of Muranow because she said she was haunted by its past.

“It was not like living in a graveyard,” she said during an interview with NBC News at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw in October 2011. “It was like living with ghosts, and my research made them real.”

Muranow residents should not be mired in the past, Chomatowska says, but it should inform their view of the present.

Her book, centered on the oblivion surrounding Muranow, is about “how people forget,” she said. “And how the place doesn’t let them forget.”

To learn more about the book Stacja Muranow, please visit the publisher’s website: www.czarne.com.pl

Don Snyder, a veteran NBC News producer for more than 25 years, is a special correspondent for NBCNews.com.

More world stories from NBC News:

• Amid the ruins, Gazans say pity the living, not the dead
• ‘Nail house’ holds up traffic as homeowners fight local government
• China's latest supermodel? A 72-year-old farmer
• Despite US woes, Twinkies reign supreme on the Nile
• Analysis: Why Hezbollah sat out the Gaza conflict

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

WARSAW -- A huge cargo of elaborate marble stonework that sank to the bottom of Poland's Vistula River four centuries ago has re-appeared after a drought and record-low water levels revealed the masonry lying in the mud on the river bed.

Archaeologists believe the stonework was part of a trove that 17th-century Swedish invaders looted from Poland's rulers and loaded onto barges to transport home, only for the booty to go to the bottom when the vessels sank.

Researchers knew about the artifacts, on the river bed where the Vistula passes through the Polish capital, but before the drought retrieving them was a painstaking task because they were under several feet of water.

---

Now though, the masonry -- large blocks of carved marble used in the columns, fountains, and staircases of Polish palaces -- is lying exposed apart from a coating of foul-smelling yellow mud.

"The drought helped us a lot because what had been lying underneath is now at the surface," said Hubert Kowalski, deputy director of the University of Warsaw Museum, which is leading the effort to retrieve the marble stonework.

Speaking at a police building where some of the stonework is being temporarily stored, he said historians' knowledge about what happened four centuries ago had previously been sketchy.

"Now we have evidence, the best material evidence of the Swedish invasion so far." 

Low rainfall over the past few months has brought the Vistula, Poland's longest river, to its lowest level since regular records began 200 years ago.

Navigation along the river has already been affected and officials say if water levels do not recover soon, power stations in Warsaw that use river water for cooling may be forced to close down.

Jewish artifacts from WWII also found
The receding water has also revealed relics from Warsaw's bloody history during World War II. During that period the city was occupied by Nazi Germany, the Jewish population was wiped out, the city rose up against the occupation, and then the Soviet Red Army arrived and imposed its own rule.

Unexploded World War II ordnance was found on the river bed in one part of the city last  weekend. Kowalski said on the stretch of river bed he had been studying, a few pieces of Jewish matzevah, or gravestones, had been discovered.

He said they would be handed over to the city's Jewish Historical Institute. Finds of Jewish artifacts are quite common in Warsaw, the legacy of successive Nazi and Soviet schemes to demolish traces of the city's Jewish community.

Historians believed that the Swedes who invaded Poland in the 17th century planned to move the looted cargo up the Vistula to Gdansk, where the river joins the Baltic Sea, and from there transport it home. There is still no firm explanation of why the boats sank on the way.

Kowalski said he and his team had so far located up to 10 tons of stonework, but this was only the beginning. "The boats had a capacity of 50-60 tons (each), so we think that we should find much more," he said.

Once it has been removed from the river bed and cataloged, the plan is to take the masonry to Warsaw's Royal Castle, one of the sites from which, historians believe, it was looted by the Swedish invaders.

For now though, the low water levels that revealed the artifacts are hampering efforts to retrieve them. Regular lifting equipment would sink into the mud, but the river is too low for the researchers to bring in floating cranes.

"We need to wait until it gets higher," Kowalski said.

More world stories from NBC News:

• Pakistan cops open fire on film protesters on 'Day of Love'
• US soldier who refused to go back to Iraq arrested on return from Canada
• Australian deputy PM: 'Cranks and crazies' in GOP threaten US economy
• Iran seen behind cyber attacks on US banks
• White House: Libya consulate siege that killed four was 'terrorist attack'
• Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi calls for release of Russian punk band Pussy Riot
• Stay informed: Sign up for our newsletter

Follow World News from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.