During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Polish sci-fi author Stanislaw Lem was forced to reckon with a difficult fact: He was Jewish. As he later explained in The New Yorker, before the occupation he had only the loosest understanding of Jewish religion and culture. The irony of the invasion for Lem was that “it was, strictly speaking, only the Nazi legislation that brought home to me the realization that I had Jewish blood in my veins.”
