Almost seven decades since Nazi Germany decimated Poland's Jews in death camps like the notorious Auschwitz, Europe's former Jewish heartland is reconnecting with a lost part of its identity.

The communists who took over after World War II imposed a wall of silence on a century of Jewish life here, but this has steadily crumbled since the regime's collapse in 1989.

Today, cultural festivals, cemetery restoration programs across Poland, school Jewish history classes, national commemorations and burgeoning academic research are reclaiming the past.

"Actually the fact there was silence for 50 years, 20 years later many people have a greater appreciation of the role of Jews -- that's a very fast change," Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich told AFP.

On the eve of the German invasion in 1939, Poland was home toEurope's largest Jewish community -- around 3.2 million people, representing 9-10 percent of the country's total population in the 1931 census.

Half of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish. Most died in camps set up by the Germans in occupied Poland, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, which has come to symbolize Nazi genocide, and whose January 27, 1945 liberation is being commemorated this week.

By early 1946, a year after the end of the war, Poland's Jews numbered only around 200,000, according to the Polish statistics office.

Most emigrated amid the creation of Israel in 1948, or during anti-Semitic campaigns by the communist regime in the 1950s and 1960s sparked in part by power struggles within the ruling party.

"Up until the 1990s there was no way to have an