Holocaust survivors meet their Polish saviours

WARSAW, Feb 28 (Reuters) When Miriam Schmetterling left Poland in 1946, she had no idea if she would ever see her home country again or meet the people who saved her life during the Holocaust.

Yesterday, the 82-year-old Jewish woman, in Poland for the first time in 60 years, took part in a reunion of 60 Holocaust survivors and their rescuers in Warsaw, in one of the biggest such gatherings in Poland in recent years.

She met Jozefa Czekaj-Tracz, who as a 15-year-old Polish girl helped hide her from the Nazis for 10 months.

''She was a little girl then but she already knew that she had to do everything not to let anyone discover the six Jews hiding in her house's attic,'' Schmetterling told Reuters.

''Jozefa played the piano each time visitors came to make sure they couldn't hear noises which came from the attic. She knew we could have all died.'' Jozefa Czekaj's parents took Schmetterling and her family to their house in a town near the city of Lviv, now in Ukraine, to protect them from the Nazis, who invaded the city in 1941.

At the start of World War Two, Lviv, with the largest Jewish community in Poland, was controlled by the Soviet Union after a non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin.

Poland had the biggest Jewish population in Europe until the war but the murder of millions in the Holocaust by the occupying Germans and an anti-Semitic campaign from postwar communist authorities left only a few thousand Jews in the country.

Polish governments since the collapse of the Soviet-led regime in 1989 have tried to rebuild relations with the Jewish community overseas and many thousands of Jews visit the land of their parents and grandparents each year.

Many in Poland were incensed by accusations of complicity with the Nazis, who killed 3 million ethnic Poles and razed Warsaw to the ground.

Polish officials are trying to combat such opinions and have launched a campaign to remind the world that while some Poles informed on Jews to the Germans in return for money, many risked their own lives to save them.

The biggest single group of the so-called ''Righteous Among the Nations'' at the Yad Vashem Institute are Poles.

''Such meetings should show the world what great things these people have done,'' said Schmetterling, who lives in Wiesbaden, Germany. ''These are the real heroes of the Second World War.'' REUTERS SBA RN0409