Grey yarmulke and family photos spread out on the table, Krzysztof Janowski's office bears witness to a great discovery three years ago: His grandfather's name was Velvke and he was born a Jew. While his parents, brother, sister and close family were killed in the Treblinka extermination camp's gas chambers, in 1942, Velvke Janowski escaped deportation by hiding in a field in what is now western Belarus. He reappeared in 1946 in western Poland, where he rebuilt his life with the non-Jewish-sounding first name Wladyslaw, married a Polish Catholic and had his children baptized.

Krzysztof, his grandson, who knew him well, might have known nothing of this story if an uncle hadn't confided in him one day that he thought his grandfather was Jewish. What followed was a family quest with many twists and turns, which led, in January 2024, after DNA searches on the MyHeritage website, various archive consultations and contact with Polish associations, to a moving video meeting with part of his family settled in Israel – Velvke also had an older brother who had immigrated to Palestine in the 1930s.

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