Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, descendants of survivors continue to bear great animosity toward Poles who collaborated with the Nazi regime during WWII, a recent survey by Sapir Academic College has found.

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The study, conducted in Israel by Dr. Villy Abraham in cooperation with researchers from the University of Florida, was published a week after Poland adopted a bill preventing Holocaust survivors and their descendants from reinstating property confiscated during the war, igniting the ire of Israeli politicians and Jewish organizations worldwide.

The survey included 240 people, who, as descendants of Holocaust survivors, were gravely affected by Nazi atrocities and, in some cases, continued to experience trauma to this day.

On a scale from one-to-seven, participants ranked their hostility towards Poland at four.

On a scale from one-to-five, they pegged their grief at 3.21.

On a scale from one-to-five, they ranked their curiosity to learn more about the Holocaust at 4.99.

The study revealed a peculiar pattern as to how descendants of survivors view traveling to concentration camps in Poland. It revealed that the greater the animosity among descendants, the less likely they were to visit the sites, even if, in theory, they would want to do so to learn more about the history of the Holocaust.

"Those who feel great hostility towards Poland are less likely to visit it," Abraham said. "The main takeaway of the study is that the trauma experienced by the second generation to Holocaust survivors is still tangible."

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The collection spans decades, from the late 19th century, just as the field of physical chemistry was emerging, to the 1930s and the horrors faced by the Jewish community as the Nazis rose to power. The archive has never been made public. This acquisition was made possible by the generous support of the Walder Foundation.

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"Bringing this collection to the Science History Institute fulfills Georg Bredig's wish that these documents be preserved so that future generations can study them," said Science History Institute president and CEO Robert Anderson.

"They are significant not only to scholars of the history of science but to Holocaust scholars as well."

As longtime funders of Holocaust education, Dr. Walder and I are proud to support the acquisition of the Bredig archive," said Walder Foundation president and executive director Elizabeth Walder.

"We know that this collection will provide history and science scholars alike a unique vantage point for uncovering some of the untold stories of this tumultuous period in world history."

Bredig introduced the model reaction methodology to catalytic research, discovered and explored new catalytic phenomena, and discovered and investigated asymmetric catalysis.

Moreover, he explored the relationships between catalytic activity and the physical state of metals. The earliest documents in the archive date from the late 19th century and provide a snapshot of the field of physical chemistry in its early years.

There is extensive correspondence with the founding fathers of the field, including many early Nobel laureates in chemistry, such as Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, Svante Arrhenius, Fritz Haber, and Wilhelm Ostwald.

The post-1933 collection items document a very different story. Bredig, along with his family and Jewish colleagues, struggled to survive under the increasingly oppressive Nazi regime. Some managed to flee to other countries, while others were not so lucky.

Their stories unfold through the letters describing their situations in detail, from requests for food and clothing for detainees to the desire to resume their work and their normal routines. Many of the letters and documents relate to Bredig's attempts to leave Nazi-occupied Europe. Included in the collections are his German identification papers and passport, both marked with a "J."

Bredig recognized the Nazis would likely destroy his personal library and archive, and his efforts to ensure its survival nearly cost him his life.

In a 1939 letter to his son, Max, Bredig wrote, "Yesterday I sent as a package to you the three green volumes I-III of my opera omnia. The rest IV-VII in green volumes will follow in the next week or so. … It is very dear to me that after my death the one and the other will end up in good hands (for an obituary and also for reference). In case you don't want to keep it, give it to a university library, preferably one abroad, or to a good friend. Under no circumstances do I want it to be wasted/lost, given away or tossed! It should give witness over my life's work."

The collection was smuggled out of Nazi Germany to the van 't Hoff laboratory in the Netherlands, where it remained for the duration of the war.

In 1946, it was shipped to the Bredig family in the United States.

Funding from the Laurie Landeau Foundation will provide for conservation and preservation of the archive. The Institute plans to make the collection available to researchers and to develop related public programming in the coming months.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Adama Dieng urged Europe's center-left to do more to oppose a resurgence of xenophobia, alluding to a spreading backlash over an influx of migrants since 2015 that propelled far-right populists into national parliaments across Europe.

"We cannot allow human beings to be treated the way they are being treated. The signs of the '30s are resurfacing," Dieng, a Senegalese lawyer, told a media briefing in Geneva.

"Unless we are blind or of bad faith, we should admit that it's time to stand up, it is time to speak out."

He cited damage done by "powerful states" pulling out of international commitments, and by anti-immigrant politicians in Hungary and Italy. But he also accused left-wingers of playing cynical political games instead of robustly pushing back against the far Right.

He praised three female leaders – Germany's Angela Merkel, Bangladesh's Sheikh Hasina and New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern – for taking political risks by standing up for migrants and ethnic minorities.

Dieng also took issue with critical remarks about Muslim burqas made last August by former British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, saying the comments had been taken seriously by extremists who assaulted British Muslim women.

"This shows exactly how dangerous it is when someone who is in a position of leadership, who can influence, is using a discourse which can impact terribly on the lives, the security and the safety of human beings."

Dieng was a strong critic of China's Tibet policy in the 1990s when he led the independent International Commission of Jurists. His tenure as the U.N. genocide envoy since 2012 has coincided with a rash of Middle East and African wars and refugee crises, and U.N. genocide inquiries in Iraq and Myanmar.

Asked about growing international condemnation of China's treatment of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang, where activists say more than 1 million people are being detained, Dieng said he hoped China would let him visit to find out for himself.

"So far … the position of the Chinese is that these are re-education camps, but I will certainly ask to visit and make my own assessment," he said.

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