Jewish man shelters refugees to honor those who saved his own family from the Holocaust

It was days after “It’s our time to do what we needed to have done for us 80 years ago … If we still have, somewhere in our hearts, a sadness that more people didn’t help, it needs then to push us to do more to help now, rather than becoming angry or turning inwards, it needs to motivate us to even do more.”Most Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust left the country after the war. Today, there are fewer than 10,000 Jews in Poland, according to the World Jewish Congress. Schudrich said the Ukrainian refugee crisis hit home differently to members of the Jewish diaspora, including those of Polish origin, because of that history in addition to the Jewish tenet of helping those in need at any cost. He said global Jewish philanthropies, mainly in the US, have raised about $100 million to help Ukrainian refugees.Even though he is surrounded by his family’s sometimes painful history, Gebert says he tries not to dwell on the past. But asked what life could have been like if more of his relatives had been saved from the Nazis, he sounds almost wistful. “If someone had helped those, my ancestors, my cousins, during the Holocaust, I will have much greater family next to me,” he said.”That would be wonderful — to have a great big family in Warsaw, a Jewish family which survived the war, that would be the most beautiful, beautiful thing.”CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled Jan Gebert’s last name.CNN’s Kyung Lah and Sarah Boxer reported and wrote this story in Warsaw, and Rachel Clarke wrote in Atlanta.