People
WARSAW, Poland — Oscar-winning filmmaker Roman Polanski returned to Poland, the country of his youth, and paid tribute on Thursday to a Polish couple who took him in and protected him when he was a child, saving him from the Holocaust.
Stefania and Jan Buchala were posthumously declared as “Righteous Among the Nations,” an honor bestowed by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, in a ceremony attended by their grandson.
The 87-year-old Polanski, who now lives in France, traveled to Poland for the occasion. That's one of the very few countries Polanski can travel to safely given that he remains a fugitive from U.S. law after pleading guilty to unlawful sex with a minor in 1977 and fleeing the United States the following year.
Polanski recalled Stefania Buchala as an “extremely noble and religious person” who had the courage to risk not only her own life in sheltering him, but also the lives of her children.
The couple's grandson, Stanislaw Buchala, received the medal and the diploma on behalf of his late grandparents from Israel's deputy ambassador, Tal Ben-Ari Yaalon, at a Jewish memorial center in Gliwice, in southern Poland. City authorities also attended the ceremony
NEW YORK — Lenny Kravitz is a man of extremes — as he readily admits.“I am deeply two-sided: black and white, Jewish and Christian, Manhattan and Brooklynite,” he writes about his first 25 years alive in his new memoir “Let Love Rule,” released last week and named after his 1989 debut album.“The book is about me finding my voice and finding my path and walking into my destiny, whatever that is,” he tells The Associated Press.The 270-page book written along with David Ritz explores his very special childhood and ends with Kravitz on the verge of stardom and deeply in love with actress Lisa Bonet.“I had such a childhood and experience growing up. That's what I want to spend my time on,” he says. “So let's stop there. And then we'll see if they'll be a second book in the future.”He's not exaggerating about that childhood. He alternated between the then-tough Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant and in a swanky building with carved cherubs on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He ate chopped liver on matzo as well as fried fish coated with cornmeal.The extremes continued during his life. For his sixth birthday, he was serenaded by Duke Ellington and his band at the famed Rainbow Room. Years later, his home was a Ford Pinto, which he rented for $4.99 a day.“The extremes really work for me. I felt them. I'm comfortable living in a car or a box or a tent or a trailer, and I'm comfortable living in a mansion,” he says. “The middle — obviously, that's fine, too. But what I'm saying is I don't feel it the same way. It doesn't feed me the same way. I like balancing extremes.”Kravitz, 56, dedicated the book to his mother, actress Roxie Roker, who was best known for her role in “The Jeffersons” as Helen Willis, half of one of TV's first interracial couples.love him when he was alive.”
