PART II

Poland

WORLD WAR II officially began on September 1, 1939, when German tanks and planes stormed into Poland with a new type of warfare called blitzkrieg, or “lightning war,” in which an enemy was quickly overwhelmed by the simultaneous use of aircraft, tanks, and armed soldiers. Poland’s military leaders had known that a German invasion was likely, but they didn’t prepare their military defenses sufficiently. Poland’s military allies, France and Great Britain, who had promised to come to Poland’s aid in the case of an invasion, had urged Polish leaders not to aggravate Germany by openly preparing for a defensive war. When Germany did invade, France and Great Britain did nothing to help. After one month of fighting Germany alone and waiting in vain for assistance, Poland’s armies officially surrendered to Germany.

The Polish army surrendered to the Soviet Union, too. Several weeks after the German invasion of Poland’s western border began, the Soviets invaded Poland’s eastern border. Josef Stalin, the Soviet leader, believed the eastern section of Poland should be part of the Soviet Union since it had belonged to the Russian Empire before World War I. Hitler had agreed to his request before the invasion. Poland no longer existed; it was now divided between the Soviet Union and Germany.

The Soviets and the Germans both slaughtered or deported Poles by the hundreds of thousands, beginning with the leaders of the following groups: the church, the military, the government, business, and education. They believed that once these Poles were gone, the rest would be easy to control. Eventually, several million Poles were either sent to slave labor camps built especially for them or killed immediately.

The Germans were surprised to discover that many Polish children had Germanic features. These children were forcibly separated from their families and subjected to a series of racial tests to determine how Aryan they were. If they passed the tests, they were assumed to be of Germanic descent and sent to special homes to be “Germanized” so that they could be adopted by German couples. Children who didn’t pass the tests were sent to concentration camps.

Poles who were allowed to remain in Poland in the German section were segregated from the new German population—Germans who had moved into homes previously owned by Poles—and were treated with cruelty and disdain.

As badly as these non-Jewish Poles were treated, Poland’s Jews were treated even worse. They were squeezed into tiny ghettos where living conditions were horrible and where many died quickly from disease, exposure, and starvation. But the worst was yet to come. Toward the end of 1941, the Nazi occupiers began to build camps that could kill large numbers of Jews very quickly. Jews from Poland, and later, Jews from all over occupied Europe, were shoved onto cattle cars destined for these camps, where they were starved and worked to death, or immediately killed.

ZOFIA KOSSAK

Zofia Kossak was a prominent conservative Catholic writer living in Warsaw who was openly anti-Semitic in her views. But after witnessing the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, she wrote and distributed an angry leaflet called Protest, in which she graphically described conditions in the ghetto and then demanded that Catholic Poles do their Christian duty by helping the Jews. Heavily involved with Jewish rescue and the Polish underground press, Kossak was eventually captured and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and later released. But when the Allies gave the Soviets control of Poland after the war, Kossak was one of the first people to be labeled an enemy of the state. She escaped after a person whose family she had rescued gave her a secret exit visa to Great Britain.

Zofia Kossak.
Yad Vashem

Although some Christian Poles were either too anti-Semitic or too focused on their own survival to help the Jews around them, many groups and individual Christian Poles did try to help. Two women—Zofia Kossak and Wanda Krahelska-Filipowicz—were the first to try to merge these groups into one. The eventual result was Zegota. A secret organization based in Warsaw that was solely devoted to helping Poland’s Jews, Zegota was the largest organization of its kind in all of Nazi-occupied Europe. Of the 40,000 to 50,000 Polish Jews who survived the war, almost half were helped in some way by Zegota.

Catholic nuns, often working with Zegota, also did a great deal to rescue Jews in Poland, especially children. The German and Soviet slaughter of Poles had created many orphans, and Polish orphanages run by orders of nuns were generally safe places to hide Jewish children. Polish nuns were known to travel great distances to rescue Jewish children, so much so that many Poles assumed any children traveling with nuns must be Jewish.

Before the Polish military surrendered to Germany and the Soviet Union, many Polish servicemen escaped to serve side by side with Allied troops in most major battles of the war. (Nearly 20 percent of the British Royal Air Force were Polish, and they were renowned for their daring courage.) And while the official Polish army had surrendered, the Armia Krajowia (the Home Army), or the AK, had not. The AK was the largest rebel army in all of Nazi-occupied Europe and participated in acts of sabotage (explosive destruction) and assassination against the Germans and Soviets. It also worked hand in hand with Zegota, sometimes by assassinating szmalcowniks, whom Zegota had named the Great Plague. Szmalcowniks were Poles who were responsible for the betrayal and death of many hidden Jews and the people who sheltered them. Zegota often hired AK members to assassinate szmalcowniks so that their traitorous work could be stopped.

Toward the end of the war, the AK also made valiant efforts to take back Poland from the retreating Germans before the Soviets could. Nonetheless, after the war, the Allied powers handed over control of Poland to the Soviet Union because Stalin, the Soviet leader, insisted on it. The new Communist Polish government, carefully supervised by the Soviet Union, declared members of the AK, Zegota, and other Resistance workers to be enemies of the state. Thousands were executed, as were many Jews. Poland would have to wait another 40 years before it would be free.