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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Déjà View| Letter from Poland
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Déjà View| Letter from Poland

There are dozens of Polish Jews all over the world today who owe their lives, in some part, to the good maharaja of a tiny Indian kingdom

A view of the Auschwitz Museum’s main gate. Photo: ReutersPremium
A view of the Auschwitz Museum’s main gate. Photo: Reuters

This week’s column, as the title suggests, has been mostly written on the road. Your writer has spent the last week on a road trip across Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany.

It has been great fun indeed, full of the inevitable adventures that come from travelling in foreign countries bristling with histories. (Not to forget the unfailingly bizarre Airbnb apartments we’ve been spending nights in, between long drives, cold beers and starchy meals. One flat had several bales of hay placed in the bedroom with an old cycle next to it. I believe this is some form of contemporary interior decoration.)

Poland, in particular, has a history that just… boggles the mind. On a walking tour of Warsaw’s Old City, a guide took us into the courtyard of Warsaw’s Royal Castle. He pointed to the buildings on one side of the yard: “This is in the Lithuanian style…", then the other, “this is in the Venetian style", then the other, “this is in the Renaissance style…" Most of which, mind you, is a reconstruction, because the castle was burned down after the Second World War.

Oh yes. Then there is the small, messy business of the Second World War and how it devastated Poland.

One Pole I spoke to at the Massolit bookstore in Krakow confessed with not a little bitterness that he wished his little country had a little less history: “Too much has happened here. Too much. Enough."

Which is understandable—Poland has not, it seems, completely come to terms with its past. Polish-Jewish relations, in particular, are somewhat troubled. Nobody I spoke to on the trip—including the guide at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum—seemed to know how many Jews still live in Poland today. Estimates varied from 1,000 to 8,000. (Which means that a country that had 3.5 million Jewish people before the Second World War, now has around as many as India does.)

Nobody seemed to know for sure.

Still, one must be careful before jumping to conclusions.

When I asked him about anti-semitism in modern-day Poland, a staffer at Massolit put it like this: “The situation is worse than most Poles like to admit. And it is better than most outsiders think it is." The burden of its history also has unfortunate economic effects. Take the case of the local economy in and around Auschwitz, or Oświęcim, as it is known to Poles. A local woman told me that few companies want to invest in the area—they don’t want to have the stigma of its history associated with their brand. She told me how the opening of a new restaurant near the visitors’ parking area was met with outrage. “People were asking how can you open a shopping mall near Auschwitz! Is it not disrespectful? But then what will the locals do? Where will we get jobs? People living here today had nothing to do with what happened in this terrible place," she said, pointing to the camp gates.

It wasn’t all bad news. The past is not utterly bereft of glass-half-full stories. Some 6km southwest of the royal castle, in the Warsaw suburb of Ochota, is a little piece of park with benches and trees named Skwer Dobrego Maharadzy, or the Square of the Good Maharaja. The square is named after Sri Digvijayji Ranjitsinhji, the Maharaja of Nawanagar from 1933 to 1947.

This is a particularly poignant moment to think about this good maharaja and why he is something of a Polish hero.

In 1941, Stalin released around a million-and-a-half Poles who were then imprisoned in slave labour camps in Soviet Russia. Few governments anywhere in the world were inclined to receive these refugees, many of them orphaned children. The Poles approached the British Indian government to take in at least a few hundred Polish refugee children. The government remained intransigent.

Which is when the Maharaja of Nawanagar is believed to have stepped forward. Being a princely state with diplomatic independence, Nawanagar didn’t have to worry about British-Russian equations. An initial group of 173 Polish refugees arrived in Mumbai in April 1942 and then onwards to Balachadi in Gujarat, which was Nawanagar’s royal summer camp. Where the king received them with the words: “You are all now Nawanagaris and I am Bapu, father to all Nawanagaris, including you."

Over the next few years, the camp would house as many as 500 children, according to scholar Anuradha Bhattacharjee. Buoyed by the Maharaja’s enthusiasm, charitable donations were raised all over India to help these and other Polish refugees put up in Indian camps. In 2013, Naresh Fernandes wrote a detailed piece on The New York Times website titled A Reunion for War Survivors Who Escaped to India that spoke of the Balachadi camp and the lives of the children housed there. “We had good and dedicated guardians. Some wanted to substitute for our lost parents," Fernandes quotes erstwhile refugee Franek Herzog as writing in his memoirs.

At a time when dead children wash up on our shores, let us not forget that simple humanity does not always require large economies, standing armies or cultural affinity. There are dozens of Polish Jews all over the world today who owe their lives, in some part, to the good maharaja of a tiny Indian kingdom.

Every week, Déjà View scours historical research and archives to make sense of current news and affairs. Comments at views@livemint.com.

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Published: 04 Sep 2015, 08:25 PM IST
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