Published: 3 September 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
MELBOURNE DOCTOR ANN DRILLICH, the daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, is a rare kind of Jew who owns a Catholic church. The brick structure, Our Lady of the Scapular, stands on Drillich’s ancestral property in the medieval town of Tarnów, near Kraków.
Her late mother, Blanka Drillich née Goldman, inherited the land at the end of the second world war. Aged 18, Blanka was the sole living heir to the Goldman estate, all others perished in the town’s ghetto: she found her mother shot dead in her bed.
But Drillich has never been inside her church.
“I tried to enter it once,” she recalls. “It was locked.”
The reason: in 1987, with the help of a trusted friend of the Drillichs, the Catholic Church in Poland effectively stole the land and built the house of worship on the site.
“At first it took a while to settle in, the shock of the betrayal,” she says. “And the idea that behind the injustice is a church.
“My mother’s family was one of the most prominent in town. It was like they had stolen not just our land, but my family’s history.”
And so after the shock settled, she sued.
FULL STORY: One Holocaust descendant's fight for justice: 'They stole not just our land, but my family's history' (Guardian)
Photo: Ann Drillich (Christopher Hopkins)
