Anyone else looking at Polish citizenship through ancestry?

[speakingwoman]

We are exploring this option but have no documents so I’m about to pay for a search for the birth certificates.

Anyone else?

I understand Reasontobelieve. There is a similar tale about dh's family's home town - a post-Holocaust pogrom. I had a vague sense that the story went that they actually returned to their home town but I don't think that can be true as grandfather was on the death march out of Auschwitz and I think that headed west, into Germany? Then after liberation I think he would have needed to stay "inside the system" in order to get the US citizenship that he got.

I discovered today that his tatoo worked as a datestamp showing what "batch" of Auschwitz arrivals he belonged to. Nobody can accuse Brexit of not bringing history to life I suppose!

SpeakingWoman, it is possible that your DH's relatives did go back to Poland. I think that many survivors wandered around Europe immediately after the war, as without the benefit of modern communications, it was a way of finding out what had happened to other relatives.

We are lucky enough to have copies of some interviews that were conducted with my dd's grandfather. From memory, I think that he was taken to a DP camp in Germany after his liberation and it was at some point after this that he and a friend went back to Poland to see if anyone from their families had survived. I have read other accounts and I think that this was fairly common at this time. At this point he was also deciding where to live. He was offered Swedish citizenship, but wanted to go to the USA, where he had relatives. As he couldn't get a visa - and was contacted by his relatives in Israel, he made his way there. He later became a UK citizen and had held three different citizenships by the age of 30!

I always thought that there were essentially no Jews in Poland after WW2. Actually quite a lot of them returned but were then expelled in 1968

www.jpost.com/Opinion/48-years-since-expulsion-of-Polands-Jews-449256

So, I may be thick here, but if you cannot have dual Polish-British citizenship, why are you even looking into this? If I understand correctly, to gain the one, you have to let go of the other? Or does it not work both ways?

No you can have dual polish british citizenship, nobody said you couldn't. Poland just doesn't recognise your British citizenship, treating you as if you are only Polish. Britain recognises both.

Thank you, that makes sense. Does the same apply in all EU countries, which don't allow dual citizenship?

I don't think so wormy I think they all have their own rules.

Every country is different. And as I said, its not that Poland doesn't allow dual citizenship, they do.

Just by coincidence, an article came up on my FB newsfeed that says that record numbers of Israelis are obtaining Polish passports.

www.timesofisrael.com/poland-gives-out-record-numbers-of-passports-to-israelis/

I am wondering how this is possible, as they must have broken the ancestral link to be citizens of Israel?

it depends when.