One of my most treasured possessions is an old photograph. Taken in 1910, in Krakow, Poland, it shows five generations of my ancestors on my mother's side, beginning with my great-great-grandfather, Joseph Pinkus Krengel, who was born in 1818.
Due to the unusual nature of the surname, Krengel, it isn't hard to trace the history of my family. In fact, we know that they left Spain for Poland at the end of the 15th century, just when the interrogators of the Inquisition were polishing their twisted metal with Jewish blood.
It was lore in my family that Poles were not well disposed toward their large Jewish population. In 1966, when I told my great-aunt Sylvia that I had learned Polish and was going to Poland to do postgraduate research, she said, "Poland? It's the biggest country of anti-Semites in the world."