Michał Rapta

In 2011, I participated in the organization of “Towards Reconciliation” session, in the course of which together with Grzegorz Moskal and Krzysztof Podgórski I presented the history of the School for SiPo and SD commanders that existed in Rabka’s “Tereska” mansion and recounted the history of murders committed on Jews in the area on the order of the management of the school and by its ‘students’. “Towards Reconciliation” is a meeting with pastor Werner Oder, son of wartime criminal Wilhelm Oder, who taught in the school for SS groups and Gestapo candidate. For many years now, Werner has engaged in investigating Nazi crimes and reconciliation between the victims and nations of the perpetrators.

“I came to Rabka in a completely different way than my father did. He came to prove that Germans are better, I – to show that God has created us all as equal and that Germans nor Austrians are no better than Poles” he said. He called for mutual respect, reconciliation, forgiveness and fight against anti-Semitism. “I am to make sure that the world never forgets what we did to the Jews”, he added, lighting a candle in memory of those murdered in World War II. The pastor was accompanied by dr Robert  O’Neil, a Scotland Yard investigator, who had studied the history of Jewish deportations to concentration camps after the war and on that occasion visited Rabka.