Peres makes emotional speech before the Polish parliament

In an emotional speech to Poland’s parliament, the Sejm, the Israeli president Shimon Peres evoked the memory of his grandfather who was burned alive by the occupying Nazi Germans during World War II. Peres said: "I was myself born in Vishniev, a village which was then in Poland, and which was home to a thousand Jewish families. I have come to Poland in the name of the dead and the living, to look history in the eye.”

Peres was born in 1923, and in 1934 emigrated with his family to Palestine. His grandfather was among the relatives who remained in Vishniev, which was then part of the Polish territory taken over by Soviet Union in 1939 and invaded by the Nazis in 1941. Most of the village's Jewish population died in 1942 when the Nazis forced them into the synagogue and set it alight. In the wake of post-war border changes, the village is now in Belarus, and lies around 50 miles northwest of the capital Minsk. Peres also spoke of the centuries of history binding Polish Jews and Catholics. "This heritage cannot be destroyed. It will live on in contemporary Israeli culture," he said.