In Poland, ‘a Narrow Window to Do Justice’ for Those Robbed by Nazis

Miriam Tasini and her sister, Alisa Sorkin, were toddlers in 1940 when they were loaded onto cattle cars bound for a gulag in Siberia, just two of the one million Polish citizens, including 200,000 Jews, deported by the Soviets to labor camps.

Their parents were allowed to take only what they could carry, including gold coins sewed under the buttons of their daughters’ winter coats, which were later traded for food.

But the real fortune was left behind when the family fled east from their native city of Krakow to Lviv after the war in Poland first broke out: the family’s large house overlooking the Vistula River and a lucrative bakery business that was seized by the Nazis and then nationalized by the Communist government after the war.