open, public and broad discussion on these issues, because of communism," said French academic Jean-Yves Potel, author of the 2009 work "The End of Innocence: Poland Facing its Jewish Past".

The Holocaust wiped out centuries of shared history between Jews and non-Jewish Poles. Jews first emigrated to Poland from western Europe to escape persecution there in the Middle Ages.

"Jews have been in Poland for almost 1,000 years. Jews were part and parcel of Polish existence, of the culture, of the intellectual life, of the economic life, of the political life," said Schudrich.

'Return of Jewish memory'

No one knows exactly how many Jews there are in the population of present-day Poland, a country of 38.5 million people, said Schudrich.

"Estimates are anywhere from 20,000-50,000 and the criteria is anecdotal," he explained.

Warsaw secondaryschool history teacher Robert Szuchta is a pioneer in Holocaust education in Poland who has also built an international reputation.

He regularly takes his pupils around Warsaw's former Jewish quarter -- mostly razed by the Nazis during a failed revolt in 1943 -- to help them empathize with the past in what before the war was the city with the second-largest Jewish population in the world, after New York.

"Look around you," he tells the youngsters. "One resident in three in the town where you live, where you were born and go to school, spoke Yiddish. Where's that world gone?"

"I don't have any family reason for doing this," he told AFP, noting that he does not have Jewish roots. "My personal reason is that this all hurts me everywhere."

Polish-Jewish and