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memory of the young children, who were caught in hiding and murdered,
and in honor of those children who lived under assumed identities and survived,
most of whom thanks to the help of the Righteous of the Nations, and later returned to their people and built their home here,
the fourth torch will be lit by Mrs. Leah Balint.
For most of the children, the end of the war was the beginning of being an orphan.
It meant leaving the monastery or the adopting family, and going first to one orphanage, then to another, and so on and so forth
I will never forget the moment when my cousin appeared at the monastery.
A beautiful blond woman, with blue eyes – as if she was a real Polish woman – came to take me.
I remember that before I left I made her come with me to the small chapel which was located inside the monastery, and I told her to kneel.
She was a religious Jew, and she didn’t know how to react to this.
Very slowly she knelt, and together we prayed – for her, her very first Christian prayer, for me, well…
it was hardly my last Christian prayer, because I remained devotedly Christian even after the war.
The process of returning to Judaism took… many years.
I devote most of my time helping people who lost their parents at a very early age, and have no idea who they are.
I sit in the archives in Poland and in Israel, and I discover their past.
To date I have helped some 20 people find their past – they now know who their parents are,
when and where they were born, some of them now know how they survived the Holocaust, who rescued them…
I think this is a very significant thing for them. Many of the children who were hidden in monasteries stayed in Poland.
Today they are Christians, some of them know they were born as Jews, and some do not.
It’s very simple, no one ever came to pick them up.