During the height of the German occupation of Poland, 1941 to 1943, the Poles were reduced to living in conditions of abject poverty and subjected to a systematic German policy of terror. Yet, for all the sufferings of the Christian Poles during this period, they were not being subjected to the unprecedented policy of calculated and deliberate extermination that the Polish Jews faced. Between June 1941 and the end of 1943, 90 per cent of Polish Jewry died – by gas at purpose-built extermination camps, by mass shootings in eastern Poland, and through starvation and shootings in the ghettos. The sheer speed of the Holocaust was in itself deeply shocking as many thousands died each day with honed Germanic efficiency, and this speed overwhelmed the Jews and Poles alike, making an effective response virtually impossible. It was also a policy difficult to comprehend: why in the midst of a world war would a supposedly civilised nation embark on the mass murder of a people, many of whom were capable of work, solely on the grounds of their race? The Jews, the Poles, the world outside, could not comprehend the logic of the policy, and their disbelief and consequent inaction made the job of the Germans easier. Nor could the Jews easily escape their fate: unlike the small number of Danish Jews, they had no neutral country a few miles away prepared to receive them. The principal phase of the Holocaust, in 1942, took place at the height of German power, at the time when German armies were driving deeper into the Soviet Union and the western allies were in retreat in the Western Desert and all across the Far East, and therefore there was no chance of outside intervention.
When the Germans invaded Soviet-occupied Poland, they entered a territory in which 1,350,000 Jews had lived before the war, mainly concentrated in the cities, including Lwów, Wilno and Białystok. Some had fled east as the Soviets had retreated, and some had been deported by the Soviets deep into the Soviet Union: the exact numbers are unknown but it is certain that the vast majority were still in their homes when the Germans arrived. The Einsatzgruppen which accompanied the Wehrmacht into Kresy deliberately encouraged or even organised pogroms against the local Jewish population. The Ukrainians needed little encouragement: in Lwów a witness, Philip Friedman, noted: ‘The mobs were on the rampage, the howls of the killers mingled with the screams of the victims, and the slaughter in the streets continued.’1 Felix Landau, a German soldier, saw Jews leaving the main prison in Lwów:
The Ukrainians had taken some Jews up to the former GPU citadel. These Jews had apparently helped the GPU persecute the Ukrainians and the Germans. They had rounded up 800 Jews there, who were supposed to be shot by us tomorrow. They had now released them.
We continued along the road, there were hundreds of Jews walking along the street with blood pouring down their faces, holes in their heads, their hands broken and their eyes hanging out of their sockets. They were covered in blood.2
In Drohobycz the Germans stood back and ‘let the Ukrainians run wild and start the first pogrom’.3 In some cases ethnic Poles also assisted in the murders of local Jews. In Jedwabne, 40 miles from Białystok where the Germans had already murdered over 2,000 Jews, a minority of ethnic Poles turned on their Jewish neighbours and murdered over 300, though some say 1,000 were killed there. Jedwabne was not a spontaneous pogrom but a massacre deliberately encouraged by the Germans and one in which many of the perpetrators were not, as has been alleged, neighbours of the Jews, but had come from nearby villages to take part. One possible motive for taking part in the pogroms could have been revenge against the perceived prominence of the Jews in the Soviet administration.4
In general the Germans were disappointed with the results, because once the initial chaos and viciousness unleashed by the Soviet defeat had worn off, the population of Kresy seemed unwilling to continue in German-sponsored ‘spontaneous’ massacres. Indeed, the report by Einsatzgruppe B from Belorussia in early August 1941 gives probably the most accurate representation of the situation: ‘In addition, as we have found in Minsk and the former Polish areas, there is no real anti-semitism here. It is true that the population feels hate and fury towards the Jews and approves of the German actions … however, it is incapable of taking the initiative into its own hands in dealing with the Jews.’5
By November 1941, the Germans had stamped their authority over Kresy and two policies towards the Jews had emerged: confinement into ghettos and a programme of mass shootings. The two policies ran side by side with no particular logic to them. The shootings were begun by the Germans but soon continued with the assistance of Ukrainian, Belorussian and Lithuanian auxiliaries recruited specially for the purpose. Every town with a Jewish presence had a ghetto established. These were normally no more than a few buildings and some ground surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by a few Germans and local auxiliaries. The sheer number of Jews to be processed caused problems. In Słonim, Gebeitskommissar Gerhard Erren reported that because there were 25,000 Jews in the area, he did not have the manpower nor the barbed wire available to establish a ghetto.
I thus immediately began preparations for a large-scale action … The Jews were then registered accurately according to number, age and profession and all craftsmen and workers with qualifications were singled out and given passes and separate accommodation to distinguish them from the other Jews.
By the end of November 1941, the numbers in Słonim had been reduced to 7,000.6 Mass murders took place throughout Kresy; for example, in Stanisławów alone 20,000 Jews were killed in October 1941.7 Throughout 1941 and into early 1942 the shootings continued, and the number of victims has been estimated at around 300,000. Sometimes the Germans utilised facilities created by the previous occupiers. The Soviets had dug a fuel base for a planned airfield in the Ponary Hills: ‘They dug enormous holes and paved them with stone. The “caverns” were from forty-five to sixty feet in diameter and up to twenty-five feet deep.’ The SS took advantage of these ready-made graves and the nearby railway station to kill 70,000 Jews, mainly from Lithuania but also other places: even from as far away as France.8
The Jews in the ghettos of Kresy were poorly guarded and had ample opportunities for escape. Yet many did not attempt this, because the Soviets had given no publicity to the nature of anti-Jewish measures already in operation in the General Government, and so they lacked the sure and terrible knowledge to flee. A German report noted in July 1941:
The Jews are remarkably ill-informed about our attitude toward them. They do not know how Jews are treated in Germany, or for that matter in Warsaw … Even if they do not think that under German administration they will have equal rights with the Russians, they believe, nevertheless, that we shall leave them in peace if they mind their own business and work diligently.9
Some did escape successfully and took to the forests, where the Germans hunted them down. Others received assistance. The Hungarians were the first Axis force to occupy Stanisławów, warned the Jews of the fate that would befall them and offered them help to reach the Hungarian border where they would receive new documents giving them ethnic Polish names that did not reflect their Jewish origins. The Committee of Polish Citizens in Hungary raised an outcry over this because the Hungarians had given too many Jews the only Polish surnames they knew, ‘Mickiewicz’ or ‘Piłsudski’, which was about as likely as giving all British émigrés the surnames ‘Shakespeare’ and ‘Churchill’. The matter was settled by the Poles providing the Hungarians with a longer list of plausible Polish surnames.10 The Jews who took up the offer were not, however, usually the native Stanisławów inhabitants but refugees from other areas or other countries such as Czechoslovakia, who had had experience of German conduct. The Hungarian record on the Jews is not untarnished: the Jews from Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia were not offered Hungarian citizenship when Hungary occupied the region but were expelled into German-occupied Ukraine where they perished at Kamianets-Podilskyi.11
Life in the ghettos continued to be one long struggle for survival. As the rations for the Christian Poles fell to barely subsistence levels, the negligible rations allocated to the Jews condemned them to a slow death from starvation. Indeed, it has been estimated that 100,000 Jews, or about 20 per cent of the Jews in the ghettos, died before the deportations even began, mostly from starvation.12 They survived through the work of their welfare agency, Żydowska Samopomoc Społeczna, which operated under the auspices of the German-sponsored RGO throughout Poland and distributed aid sent from abroad,13 but its operations ceased after the major deportations. The smuggling of food into the ghetto assumed an ever-increasing importance: in December 1941, the head of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków, recorded in his diary the calculation: ‘we received legally 1,800,000 złotys’ worth of food in the ghetto monthly, and illegally 70–80,000,000 złotys’ worth’.14
Even though the Warsaw ghetto had been sealed in October 1940, trade continued between the Jews and the Poles. One inmate, Danny Falkner, wrote that the large number of Jewish artisans meant: ‘They were now all concentrated in the ghetto and the Poles were deprived of their products: leather goods, woodworks, tailoring. So a two-way traffic developed: raw materials were being smuggled into the ghetto and ready-made articles smuggled out. By these activities people managed to make a living.’15 The Lower Court had two entrances: the gate on Ulica Leszno opened into the ghetto and the one on Ulica Ogrodowa into the Polish section. Both gates were guarded but the Poles and Jews could arrange to meet there to trade food for finished articles:
Therefore parcels and bundles changed hands inside the building and certain elegant Aryan women accustomed to their old dressmakers and tailors made appointments just there. An obliging usher let the back room be used for trying on overcoats and dresses, top-boots, girdles and brassieres in exchange for a few złoty.
The courthouse was also a meeting place for those couples separated by religion. Abraham Lewin recorded in his diary:
Someone who has been witness to these reunions described them to me. There is in these meetings an overflowing of human tragedy and suffering. A Christian woman comes and kisses her Jewish husband. She brings him a small parcel of food. They talk for a few minutes, move away to one side, kiss again and separate. He back to the ghetto and she to the Aryan part of Warsaw.16
One enterprising Jew even managed to keep a cow hidden in the ghetto, and milk was sold in return for fodder and cash. When a German owner of a factory in the ghetto found out, he provided an official ration for the cow.17
The Jews in the ghettos were a mixture: ‘There were orthodox Jews, assimilated Jews, a few Zionists and Socialists, and even some baptised Jews.’18 According to the statistics compiled by the Judenrat in Warsaw in 1941, there were 1,540 Catholics, 148 Protestants, 30 Orthodox Christians and 43 members of other non-Jewish religions.19 Three churches remained within the confines of the Warsaw ghetto to cater for those Christians who were considered Jewish under the Nuremberg Laws: they ‘wore armlets with the Star of David and prayed to Jesus Christ’. Father Marceli Godlewski remained in his church of All Saints in the ghetto to care for his Catholic Jewish parishioners.20 Many Jews felt sympathy for these ‘Christian’ Jews who had often not even realised that they had Jewish ancestry until the Germans informed them of the fact.21 They did not know the Jewish customs or the Yiddish language, and ‘their suffering took on a different quality. For us it was an inevitable adjunct of our heritage; for them it was an additional burden, an unrelieved trauma. The only privilege which remained to them was to leave the whirlpool of the ghetto for the quiet Catholic cemetery on the Aryan side.’22 The languages used were also diverse: most Jews spoke Yiddish but many assimilated Jews preferred to communicate in Polish or German; adherents of Zionism also started to use Hebrew.
The Germans extended their use of Jewish forced labour and established vast work camps such as the one at Izbica Lubelska, midway between Lublin and Bełżec. The outsourcing of Jewish labour to local landowners and farmers gave the Poles the opportunity to provide assistance. For example, the family of Ralph Smorczewski took the maximum quota of Jews allowed: ‘They had to appear working in the fields and on the farms to convince the Germans that they were properly employed, but all this was fictitious. The main purpose was to give them proper food and decent living conditions.’23 The Kiciński family ‘employed’ Jews for the same reason. But the Jews needed to do some semblance of work to survive: Mieczysław Kiciński urged the Jews to give the impression of doing work in case the Germans checked up on them, but they were not working when the Germans paid a surprise visit and they were taken away to be shot.24 In Stanisławów, Leon Kochański, who was working for the Underground Government, put a large number of Jews on the payroll of the sawmill where he was employed as an accountant, specifically to keep them out of harm’s way.25 As the Final Solution began the purpose of the labour camps changed. For example, Izbica Lubelska became a holding camp for the Jews until the gas chambers of Bełżec were ready to receive them. Other labour camps became concentration camps, utilising the last dregs of the Jews’ ability to work in industries geared towards the German war effort before despatching them to be exterminated when they were no longer capable of work. Examples include Janów near Lwów, Plaszów near Kraków and Poniatów and Trawniki in the Lublin province.26
However desperate the situation was in the ghettos and forced labour camps, however many Jews were shot and deposited in mass unmarked graves in Kresy, nothing could have prepared the Polish Jews for the unprecedented operation the Germans would launch in 1942 – Endlösung – the Final Solution, the extermination of virtually all Polish Jews. The origins of the German decision are too complex to be repeated here. Probably the most important conference on the subject of the destruction of European Jewry was held at Wannsee, on the outskirts of Berlin, on 20 January 1942. The extermination of the Jews would begin in Poland since that was the region with the greatest concentration of Jews, with Polish Jews as the very first victims. The representative from the General Government, Jozef Bühler, stated:
Jews should be removed from the domain of the General Government as fast as possible, because it is precisely here that the Jew constitutes a substantial danger as carrier of epidemics and also because his continued black market activities create constant disorder in the economic structure of the country. Moreover, the majority of the two and a half million Jews involved were not capable of work.27
The Germans had already experimented with methods of carrying out large-scale exterminations. They had used gas vans to kill mentally deficient patients in East Prussia and, at Auschwitz, had carried out an experiment in a rigged-up gas chamber to kill 250 Poles and 600 Soviet prisoners of war with the industrial pesticide Zyklon-B.28
The first death camp, Chełmno, had been operating gas vans before the Wannsee conference convened. The camp had begun life as a labour camp and was situated 9 miles from the town of Koło, which was on the main railway line between Łódź and Poznań, with a spur line leading to the camp. The local inhabitants were expelled, which is why, according to the post-war compendium of German crimes in Poland, ‘only a very few people in Poland ever knew of its existence’. The camp was a deserted manor house. The Jews were told that they were being sent to Germany to work but, after having undressed in the house, they were put into trucks in groups of 50 to 70 and gassed with exhaust fumes. The victims were 100,000 of the 450,000 Jews in the Warthegau. The Gauleiter, Arthur Greiser, had specifically asked Himmler for permission to kill them because the Łódź ghetto was so overcrowded and these Jews were unfit for work. The gassing operation began on 8 December 1941 and continued until March 1943. It was used again in June–July 1944 to help speed up the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto. There were only two or three survivors from this camp.29
Chełmno had begun life as a labour camp and then became an extermination camp but, as a result of the decision to exterminate the Jews taken at Wannsee, the construction of purpose-built extermination camps began at Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Bełżec was situated 47 miles north of Lwów on a main railway line but again with a spur to the camp. The camp itself was extraordinarily small, being about 300 yards long and containing three gas chambers into which carbon monoxide would be pumped. Bełżec began operating in March 1942. In May 1942 two further camps were opened. Sobibor was situated 50 miles east of Lublin and again was small: the Jews had to walk along a 100-yard-long ‘Road to Heaven’ from the undressing stations to the gas chambers. Treblinka also began operating in May 1942. It was situated near Małkinia Górna, halfway between Warsaw and Białystok, and at the beginning there were only three gas chambers, but this was soon increased to thirteen. With the facilities ready Himmler issued the orders on 19 July 1942: ‘that the resettlement of the entire Jewish population of the General Government be carried out and completed by 31 December. From 31 December 1942, no persons of Jewish origin may remain within the General Government, unless they are in collection camps in Warsaw, Kraków, Częstochowa, Radom and Lublin.’ The extermination of the Polish Jews was known as Operation Reinhard, named after the recently assassinated Reinhard Heydrich.30
The extermination camps were brutally efficient: on arrival under 2 per cent of the Jews were selected to work on retrieving the dead from the gas chambers and burying them. About 600,000 Jews died at Bełżec – the majority of Jews in the whole of Galicia and in the Lublin district – before it ceased operation at the end of 1942. Sobibor accounted for 250,000 Polish Jews and Jews from all over Europe before it closed following an uprising by the Sonderkommando in October 1943. The largest number of Polish Jews were exterminated at Treblinka, around 900,000 of them taken from Warsaw and the Warsaw region.31 Because these were extermination camps there were by definition few survivors: an estimated 110 Jews from the four extermination camps, most at Treblinka.32 This is why much of the knowledge of the killing process comes from the evidence of the Treblinka survivors. The Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman interviewed them and local Poles when the Soviet armies overran the site in early 1945.33 The commission on German crimes in Poland took evidence from thirteen Jews who had escaped during a revolt in Treblinka in August 1943.34 One of these, Jankiel Wiernik, wrote a short work, ‘One Year in Treblinka’, which was published in Polish in May 1944 and smuggled out of Poland to the Polish Government in London. He described the arrival of the Jews at Treblinka:
They took us into the camp yard, which was flanked by barracks on either side. There were two large posters with big signs bearing instructions to surrender all gold, silver, and diamonds, cash and other valuables under penalty of death. All the while Ukrainian guards stood on the roofs of the barracks, their machine guns at the ready.
The men and women were separated and taken to the gas chambers. There carbon monoxide was pumped in after the doors had been sealed and the ‘speed at which death overcame the helpless victims depended on the quantity of combustion gas admitted into the chamber at one time’. At least 10,000 Jews could be killed per day. Treblinka continued in operation until November 1943 but the bulk of the victims had been gassed in 1942.35
The sites of the extermination camps had been chosen because they lay near main-line railway routes and could be concealed from prying eyes. For example, the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Rudolf Höss, noted that the location was chosen: ‘first because it was situated at a junction of four lines, and second because the area was sparsely populated and the camp could be completely isolated’.36 It was also in the area of Upper Silesia that had belonged to Poland before the war, but that had been incorporated into the Reich after Poland’s defeat. Attempts at concealment were not always successful. Professor Stanisław Bohdanowicz, living close to Bełżec, noted that the local inhabitants:
were complaining about the stench which increased day by day. Everyone understood that in some way the Jews were being killed there. In the end, passengers travelling through Bełżec by train also started to complain that the stench of rotting bodies was unbearable and was even penetrating to the interior of the carriages through tightly shut windows.37
Zdzisław Rozbicki lived on a farm by the railway leading to Treblinka and was frightened of the fields near the railway line:
I was terrified of the transports carrying victims to Treblinka: the faces, on which there still flickered the hope that someone would help them avoid their fate, looking out through the small windows through the barbed wire. This was a daily sight for all of us who worked in the fields. Some tried to escape by tearing through the barbed wire or smashing holes in the floors of the wagons. Most of these, however, were killed by the machine guns mounted on the train. Many nameless graves were dug on both sides of the track – in our fields, as well.38
After the Germans discovered the graves of the Polish officers at Katyń, Himmler realised that the graves of the Jews could also be discovered one day and the extent of the German crimes made public. He ordered that the mass graves in the extermination camps should be dug up and the bodies burnt. There were so many corpses that the burning of them was carried out on massive griddles. When the mass graves of the early killings at Auschwitz-Birkenau were dug up and the bodies burned, ashes spread as far as Kraków.39
Over 1,300,000 Polish Jews perished in the Operation Reinhard extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka; they had a negligible chance of survival once they had been rounded up for deportation. It may seem strange that being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau represented a chance of life, given that over 1,000,000 Jews were gassed there, but this was because Auschwitz-Birkenau was not an Operation Reinhard extermination camp but was, like Majdanek, a combined labour and extermination camp. On arrival the Jews were subjected to a selection and those deemed unfit for work were slated for extermination. The remainder would enter the main camp, where they would be forced to undertake hard labour on such low rations that they were destined for a slow death through overwork and starvation. Some could not cope with the conditions:
The name Musselmann was well known. It referred to those who had given up the will to live. Hunger and despair, the giving up of hope, something about the eyes, something about the way these people walked, dragging their feet with their heads lowered. Once you looked into their eyes, you could see quite clearly that they hadn’t got long to live.40
Selections were carried out regularly to weed out those deemed no longer capable of work and to ease the overcrowding caused by the arrival of more Jews from the whole of German-occupied Europe. ‘The key to survival was instant adjustment, and having a sixth sense of where danger came from, and finding a way of being totally invisible, hiding behind in crowds so that your face would never be known to anyone in charge.’ Prisoners had to develop the ability to ‘organise’, the camp term for bartering for food, for bribing or bartering their way into the work parties with the least sadistic kapos, for obtaining work sheltered from the elements if possible, in the kitchens, hospital or best of all in ‘Canada’, the giant sorting house for the clothes and luggage of the arrivals, most of whom had already been gassed.41
Majdanek, on the outskirts of Lublin, was another vast labour and extermination camp where the Jews were also subjected to selection on arrival. The population of Majdanek was not exclusively Jewish: there were around 2,000 Soviet POWs, who mostly perished from the harsh conditions or from a typhus epidemic in summer 1943, and over 1,000 ethnic Poles, including those seized from their homes during the Zamość clearances. No one segment of the mixed population was specifically targeted for extermination until October 1943. Then, at a meeting between Frank and his police chiefs, it was agreed to carry out Himmler’s orders:
The Jews in the Lublin District have developed into a serious danger. This state of affairs must be cleared up once and for all. I have charged the ‘unit Globocnik’ with the execution of this matter. The Higher SS and Police Leader East, and the SS and Police Leader Lublin, are requested to assist Globocnik with all resources at their disposal.
Operation Erntefest (Harvest Festival) began on 3 November 1943. Over a period of three days, Polish Jews were brought from camps in the Lublin district, Trawniki and Poniatova, and then, along with the Jewish population of Majdanek camp, were taken to previously prepared large pits and shot. At the end of the process 42,000 Polish Jews were dead.42
Two ghettos survived for a little longer, though their numbers had been scaled down. Both were engaged in manufacturing goods for the German war economy: the population of Białystok ghetto was about 50,000 and of Łódź ghetto around 80,000. Białystok would be finally liquidated in November 1943, and Łódź in August 1944. Poland was still not Judenfrei since a few work camps remained in operation until the Germans began their withdrawal from Poland. For example, the camp at Płaszów where Oscar Schindler ran a factory. As the Soviet armies approached, Schindler drew up a list of Jewish workers and arranged for their evacuation westwards. Furthermore, there were an unknown number of Jews maintaining a tenuous existence in hiding. Recent research has suggested that 28,000 Jews remained hidden in Warsaw after the liquidation of the ghetto. Of these about 40 per cent survived the war, compared to the 99 per cent death rate among those deported to the death camps, meaning that in effect about 5 per cent of the pre-war Jewish population of Warsaw survived.43 It is thought that between 50,000 to 100,000 Polish Jews survived the war across Poland, hidden by their fellow Poles.44 In addition about 250,000 escaped Poland during the war, principally into the Soviet Union.
The deportation of the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto is perhaps the best documented by the victims themselves, and serves as an illustration of how the Germans went about their work in clearing the ghettos. On 21 July 1942, the Germans demanded that the Judenrat deliver 7,000 Jews for deportation on the following day and 10,000 on the day after that. This request was too much for the chairman of the Judenrat, Adam Czerniaków, who committed suicide rather than accede. Chaim Kaplan noted that he ‘may not have lived his life with honour but he did die with honour. Some merit paradise by the deeds of an hour but President Adam Czerniaków earned his right to paradise in a single moment.’45 He was succeeded by Marc Lichtenbaum. The victims would be rounded up by the Jewish police and failure to comply would lead to the death of the families of members of the Judenrat and Jewish police. Those chosen were informed that they would be resettled in the east to work and were urged to take items such clothes and money with them. Exemptions were given to members of the Judenrat, the police force, those employed by German business, administrators and shopkeepers selling rationed goods.46 This led to the belief, common in all ghettos and ultimately to prove erroneous, that holding a work permit led to exemption from deportation. Suddenly workshops were flooded by job applicants, and many were accepted even when there was insufficient work for them all. On 29 July the Germans adopted a policy of offering bribes of food to those reporting for deportation, and about 20,000 starving Jews accepted. Despite the lack of news from those taken first, there was still a widespread disbelief that they were destined to be killed: no one could believe that ‘a cultured race like the Germans would have a policy of gassing people and burning them’. Even when an escapee from the transport to Treblinka, Dawid Nowodworski, returned to the ghetto with the news of the ultimate destination, few believed him. The first wave of deportations continued until 12 September, by which time around 265,000 Jews had been sent to Treblinka, leaving only 55,000 Jews remaining in the Warsaw ghetto.47
Those listed for deportation were taken to the Umschlagplatz (collection point) by Ukrainian and German guards to wait for the trains that would take them to their deaths at Treblinka. The lingering image in many witnesses’ minds was the deportation of an orphanage run by Janusz Korczak:
On the day that they left the ghetto they made a strange procession as they walked along Sliska Street led by an elderly, dignified man, and accompanied by only a few policemen. The orphans, dressed in their finery, marched in twos, the younger ones followed by the older. With them were the teachers and all the orphanage staff. Were it not for the expression of stony peace and overbearing sadness on the face of the elderly gentleman, it could have been taken for a children’s excursion or a peaceful stroll. But he knew where he was leading his children, this man whose supreme love was for his little homeless wards.48
At the Umschlagplatz Korczak was offered the opportunity to remain in the ghetto but told the SS: ‘Where my children are going, I must go as well.’49 He died alongside his charges.
The Germans relied on the Jewish police, most of whom had been lawyers before the war, to coerce their brethren into the cattle trucks. There were 2,000 Jewish policemen in the Warsaw ghetto, and their conduct has been uniformly condemned by witnesses to their work. One inmate wrote:
These policemen became merciless; they had horse-drawn carts, they’d close a house, everyone had to come down, and they’d go from door to door pulling people out … They worked because they thought they could save themselves and their families and get some allocation of food. Eventually, when it became more difficult to make up the numbers, they broke doors and dragged people out, pushed them down the stairs and onto the waiting carts.50
Abraham Lewin noted in his diary in August 1942: ‘The Jewish police have received an order that each one of them must bring five people to be transported. Since there are 2000 police, they will have to find 10,000 victims. If they do not fulfil their quotas they are liable to the death penalty.’51 The Jewish police were so desperate that they tore up the work papers of their selected victims, but they also accepted bribes to save lives. Emanuel Ringelblum wrote: ‘Jewish policemen distinguished themselves with their fearful corruption and immorality. But they reached the height of viciousness during the resettlement. They said not a single word of protest against this revolting assignment to lead their own brothers to the slaughter.’52 Their conduct was so reprehensible that on 29 October 1942 the commandant of the Jewish police, Jakub Lejkin, was assassinated. Some Jewish police refused to collaborate with the Germans, and 20 to 30 paid for their moral courage with their lives.53
The subject of Jewish collaboration with the Germans is naturally an extremely sensitive topic and one which has been little researched. After the war the great Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal noted:
We have done very little to condemn Jewish collaboration with the Nazis. When, after the war, I demanded that those who had abused their office in ghettos or concentration camps be removed from Jewish committees, I was told that ‘this would diminish the guilt of the Nazis’.54
A survivor of Treblinka, Jankiel Wiernik wrote: ‘Another amazing character trait of the Germans is their ability to discover, among the populace of other nations, hundreds of depraved types like themselves, and to use them for their own ends.’55 It has been estimated that at the end of 1941 the Gestapo controlled 15,000 Jewish agents in the General Government. The Jewish Militia (Żydowska Gwardia Wolności), led by Abraham Gancwajch, assisted the Germans in finding Jews who were living in hiding: more will be said on its activities later in this chapter. There was also the Society of Free Jews (Towarzystwo Wolnych Żydów), under Captain Lontski, which spied on the Jewish underground, the Jewish Fighting Organisation (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB). In January 1943, the Jews resisted the renewal of the deportations but the locations of their secret bunkers were revealed to the Germans. The ŻOB then issued a warning to the betrayers: ‘that if they do not stop their degenerate deeds immediately they will be executed’, and this proclamation resulted in the assassination of the Jewish Gestapo informant Professor Alfred Nossig. The Jews ran their own secret court in the Warsaw ghetto and sentenced 59 collaborators to death.56 Polish archives have an incomplete list of 1,378 Jewish collaborators and betrayers.57
Faced with deportation to their deaths the Jews of Poland had two options: resistance or going into hiding. But the first barrier to be overcome was that of disbelief: shared alike by the Jewish victims, by the Polish population as witnesses and by the world at large as unaffected observers. A Pole who was very active in saving Jews, Władysława Chomsowa, noted: ‘The greatest difficulty was the passivity of the Jews themselves.’58 This opinion has been echoed by a major historian, Raul Hilberg: ‘In fact, the behaviour of the population during the killing operations was characterised by a tendency towards passivity.’59 An inmate of the Łódź ghetto, Jakub Poznański, wrote in his diary on 27 September 1943: ‘Persistent rumours circulate about the liquidation of the ghettos in various Polish cities. In my opinion, people are exaggerating, as usual. Even if certain excesses have taken place in some cities, that still does not incline one to believe that Jews are being mass-murdered. At least I consider it out of the question.’60
The Holocaust was such an unprecedented action that it is perhaps unsurprising that no clear response was possible to the events even as they unfolded. Above all there was the persistent belief that only those incapable of work would be killed, as Emanuel Ringelblum noted:
So strong is the instinct of life of the workers, of the fortunate owners of work permits, that it overcomes the will to fight, the urge to defend the whole community, with no thought of consequences. This is partly due to the complete spiritual breakdown and disintegration, caused by unheard-of terror which has been inflicted upon the Jews for three years and which comes to its climax in times of such evacuations.
The effect of all this taken together is that when a moment for some resistance arrives, we are completely powerless and the enemy does to us whatever he pleases.61
The Germans encouraged such beliefs: in the middle of August 1942, they issued 30,000 employment cards to workers in the Warsaw ghetto and made them feel that this excluded them from deportation. The highly controversial leader of the Judenrat in the Łódź ghetto, Chaim Rumkowski, was convinced that working for the German war effort exempted the Jews from deportation, and he was therefore willing to sacrifice the aged and sick, and even all the children under 10 years old. On 4 September 1942, Rumkowski told the gathered Jews: ‘Give into my hands the victims so that we can avoid having further victims, and a population of a hundred thousand Jews can be preserved. So they promised me: if we deliver our victims ourselves, there will be peace.’62 A survivor of the Łódź ghetto, Roman Halter, was appalled and believed that Rumkowski should have refused to give up the children. Interviewed after the war, he criticised Rumkowski but later in the same interview excused him on the grounds that ‘these times were abnormal, so horrendous, that one cannot rationalise in the circumstances in which we live today, how people behaved and what they did’.63 Like Rumkowski, the head of the Judenrat in the Białystok ghetto, Ephraim Barasz, was also convinced that working for the German war effort would keep the Jews alive. Ultimately both men were proved wrong: the inhabitants of the Białystok ghetto were deported to Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau before the end of 1943. The Łódź ghetto lasted longer, only in June 1944 did the deportations, including Rumkowski, to Chełmno and Auschwitz-Birkenau begin.
The inability to believe that all Jews were destined for extermination, not on the grounds of age, sex or occupation, but simply because they were considered Jewish by the Germans also led the Jews to be taken in by schemes designed by the Germans to ferret out those in hiding. One put into practice in the summer of 1943 was when the Germans let it be known that Jews holding passports from South American countries or for Palestine should report to the Hotel Polski in Warsaw, and then they would be allowed to leave the General Government. The news spread among the hidden Jews and 3,500, one in seven of those in hiding, went to the hotel. For many years it was thought that they were deliberately lured out of hiding on the promise of being sent abroad but instead were either killed soon after or sent to concentration camps. Later research has shown that in the middle of 1943 the Germans did actually genuinely plan to exchange Jews with South American passports, albeit often forged ones, in return for Germans interned in those countries. The Jews were sent to holding centres at Vittel in France and at Bergen-Belsen, but at this point the South American governments withdrew the passports and the scheme collapsed; the 420 Jews still at Hotel Polski were taken to the Pawiak prison and shot. All the others, except for the few hundred with papers for Palestine who were exchanged for Germans interned there, were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.64
By no means all the Jews were passive. Some of their resistance was spontaneous, as a German train superintendent, Jäcklein, discovered when he encountered problems during the transport of 8,200 Jews to Bełżec:
We had only been travelling a short time when the Jews attempted to break out of the wagons on both sides and even through the roof. Some of them succeeded in doing so …
Jäcklein contacted the stationmaster at the next large town, Stanisławów, to have materials ready to repair the train. The train set off again:
However, all of this was of very little help, for only a few stations later when the train was stationary I established that a number of very large holes had been made and all the barbed wire on the ventilation windows had been ripped out. As the train was departing I even established that in one of the cars someone was using a hammer and pliers. When these Jews were questioned as to why they had these tools in their possession they informed me that they had been told that they might well be of use at their next place of work. I immediately took away the tools. I then had to have the train boarded up at each station at which it stopped, otherwise it would not have been possible to continue the journey at all.65
Jews risked their lives by jumping off trains despite the presence of armed guards on the roofs. There was resistance too within the extermination camps. At Treblinka a revolt was carefully prepared for 2 August 1943, by placing all the fittest men on the afternoon shift. When the signal, a gunshot, was given to start the revolt, offers of gold were made to the Ukrainian guards to bribe them down from their watchtowers. Then the Jews ran: ‘Our objective was to reach the woods, but the closest patch was five miles away. We ran across swamps, meadows and ditches, with bullets pursuing us fast and furious.’66 Elsewhere, notably at Sobibor, the Sonderkommando revolted and escaped for the forests, where they joined existing partisan groups or formed their own. The German method of dealing with this problem will be covered in Chapter 12.
Revolts also took place in numerous ghettos. During the height of the extermination of the Jews in the summer of 1942, there were mass escapes of several hundred or several thousand at a time from 27 ghettos in Wołyń, with a total of around 47,500 Jews escaping, a quarter of the pre-war Jewish population of Wołyń. Many would later perish in the forests. There was also opposition to German selections in the ghettos elsewhere in eastern Poland, notably at Neświecż and Słonim.67 In January 1942, the United Partisans Organisation (Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye) was established in the Wilno ghetto under the leadership of a communist, Yitzhak Witenberg. His proposal to engage in open battle with the Germans should they attempt to dissolve the ghetto was opposed by the head of the Judenrat, Jacob Gens, who also opposed plans for the partisans within the ghetto to leave to join those outside. In July 1943, the Germans discovered Witenberg’s identity as a communist leader within the ghetto and Gens demanded that Witenberg surrender himself to the Germans, which he did. A month later the Germans began to deport the Jews from the Wilno ghetto to Stutthof and Majdanek without any opposition. A survivor later wrote: ‘We should have mobilised and fought.’68
In late July 1942, the ŻOB was established by Mordechai Anielewicz in the Warsaw ghetto. There was a clear left-wing and pro-Soviet bias to ŻOB: Anielewicz belonged to the Zionist-Marxist group Hashomer-Hatzair, and communists were represented on the ŻOB committee. This pro-Soviet bias alienated the Jewish resistance from many within the ghetto and from many of those outside the ghetto who were prepared to help the Jewish resistance.69 Appeals were made to the AK, using pre-war connections made during service in the Polish Army, for a supply of arms. Rowecki telegraphed London on 4 January 1943 informing the government: ‘Jews from a variety of groups, among them communists, have appealed to us at a late date asking for arms, as if our own arsenals were full. As a trial I offered them a few pistols. I have no confidence that they will make use of any of these arms at all.’ Rowecki was also desperately worried that a rising within the ghetto might inspire a more widespread uprising in Warsaw, which would result in a pointless slaughter and almost certainly irrevocably weaken the AK.70 The same month the Germans renewed the deportations from the Warsaw ghetto and, as a result, opinion on the utility of resistance began to change both inside and outside the ghetto: ‘Here and there one could hear it voiced that any further German action aimed at the deportation of Jews would now be met with resistance.’71
The AK was short of arms: the entire Warsaw region possessed only 135 heavy machine guns, 190 light machine guns, 6,045 rifles, 1,070 pistols, 7,561 hand grenades and 7 anti-tank guns.72 Out of these meagre stocks the AK supplied ŻOB with 90 pistols, 600 hand grenades, 35 pounds of explosives, a light machine gun and a sub-machine gun.73 In addition the Jews obtained supplies from other sources, including stealing them from German railway transports.74 It has been alleged that the AK could have done more to arm the Jewish resistance but recent research has suggested that in the spring of 1943 each ŻOB fighter was in fact far better armed than an average AK soldier would be during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising.75 The AK also undertook the training of the ŻOB, whose fighters began visiting the AK base on Ulica Marszałkowska for training:
The men from the ghetto were handed various printed instructions on how to use the arms and explosives, studied the techniques of fighting in town, were acquainted on the spot with various anti-tank weapons effective at close range, and were initiated into the manufacture of typical incendiary materials, mines and grenades. The ŻOB fighters showed tremendous ardour, lively interest, and a great deal of military ability.76
The AK also advised on the construction of mines and creation of Molotov cocktails.
On 19 April 1943, the Germans began the final liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. One of the ŻOB fighters, Marek Edelman, watched the Germans approach:
On April 19th around 4 a.m. we saw the German troops coming from Nalewki Street. Tanks, armoured vehicles, small-calibre guns and columns of SS soldiers on motorcycles. ‘They are going as if to war,’ I remarked to a girl standing next to me. I realised how weak we were, how meagre our resources. Just pistols and grenades. But the fighting spirit did not abandon me. It’s time we settled accounts with them.77
The first Germans to enter were met by rifle fire and a hail of hand grenades. There were at the most 1,200 ŻOB fighters ranged against 2,100 Germans. The SS attempted to enter the ghetto but were driven off by machine-gun fire. Four armoured cars came and started shelling the houses. Danny Falkner, an inmate in the ghetto, later recalled:
I felt elated that the Jews had fired the first shots; we could see that the Germans were not immune to violence, that violence could be exerted against them as well. Of course we knew it was an impossibility to conquer or resist them completely. We knew that our fate was sealed. But we wanted to bring down as many Germans as possible.78
Zivia Lubetkin later wrote: ‘we threw those hand grenades and bombs, and saw German blood pouring over the streets of Warsaw, after we saw so much Jewish blood running in the streets of Warsaw before that, there was rejoicing’. On the first day ŻOB killed 6 SS men and 6 Ukrainian auxiliaries.79
The AK assisted the ghetto uprising from the outside and managed to smuggle some rifles into the ghetto. On the first day, 19 April, Captain Józef Pszenny led a company of sappers who tried to blow a hole in the ghetto wall to help civilians caught up in the fighting to escape but was forced to withdraw after 2 AK members were killed and 4 were wounded.80 On 22 April, an AK detachment attacked a unit of Lithuanian auxiliaries near the ghetto walls, and on the 23rd, an AK unit under Lieutenant Jerzy Skupienski attacked the gate at Ulica Pawia but failed to blow it up and retreated after killing 4 SS and police officers.81 In his post-action report, the SS commander Major-General Jürgen Stroop complained that his soldiers ‘have been repeatedly shot at from outside the Ghetto’.82 Ringelblum noted that the Germans had taken precautions to reduce outside help: the trams were diverted and the Poles ‘were forbidden to move freely in the streets bordering the ghetto’.83
Only an estimated 5 per cent of Jews took part in the fighting. For the remaining 95 per cent, the uprising was a time of pure terror, hiding in bunkers, hoping not to be discovered or burned out. Indeed, the German tactics appear to have been directed more against the non-participants than the fighters. The ŻOB leadership had predicted that the Germans would fight house to house, a method that would allow the resistance to inflict casualties on the Germans with the limited weaponry at their disposal. Instead, on 25 April, incendiary bombs were dropped to set the entire ghetto on fire, suffocating those hiding in the cellars and bunkers. The Germans also deployed armoured vehicles. On 29 April, the AK helped about 40 ŻOB fighters to escape through the sewers to the forests near Otwock where they could then join the partisan units.84 By the end of the first week of May, the remnants of the Jewish resistance were concentrated in a bunker at Ulica Miła 18, which the Germans then attacked:
The fighting lasted two hours, and when the Germans convinced themselves that they would be unable to take the bunker by storm, they tossed in a gas-grenade. Whoever survived the German bullets, whoever was not gassed, committed suicide … Jurek Wilner called upon all partisans to commit suicide together. Lutek Rotblat shot his mother, his sister, and then himself. Ruth fired at herself seven times. Thus 80% of the remaining partisans perished, among them ŻOB Commander, Mordechai Anielewicz.85
The final act of the ghetto uprising was on 16 May when Stroop pressed the button to blow up the Great Synagogue: he then informed his superiors that the uprising was over and that ‘the Jewish quarter is no more’. Around 7,000 Jews lay dead, killed in the fighting, and the remaining 30,000 were transported to their deaths at Treblinka.86
The ghetto uprising inspired very differing reactions among the Poles and the Jews living in hiding among the Poles. One Jew living outside the ghetto, Ruth Altbeker, provided perhaps the most eloquent description of the response:
The scum of society stood by the ghetto walls. Some were tempted by the possibility of looting Jewish property, others lurked for easy prey – a Jew who might try to creep over to the Aryan side through a crevice or chink in the wall. Among the uniformed policemen, manhunters, conmen and all kinds of rascals around the walls, other Poles waited too, looking out for a convenient moment to supply the fighters with arms and ammunition. A girl hungry for thrills would be waiting to convey the needs of the besieged to the Underground Organisation. All of these were called human beings whom God had created in his image – the Jew-insurgent in his desperate fight against domination and the Polish comrade endangering his life in order to supply him with weapons; the blackguard, the scoundrel and the Polish policeman obligingly serving the Germans, and that soldier in a steel helmet.87
Another Jew hiding in Warsaw paid tribute to the fighters, seeing their resistance as somehow atoning for ‘previous submissiveness’: ‘They died in glory for those who yet survive, who are being hunted down like animals, who are hiding and waiting for the war to end or plodding along from day to day pretending to be Aryans.’88 The Delegatura sent a report back to London giving details of the uprising and concluding: ‘This war between the Jews and the Germans has awakened feelings of sympathy and admiration on the Aryan side of Warsaw, and shame among the Germans, who feel rightly that the situation that has come about in Warsaw is an uncommon blow to German prestige.’89 Sikorski broadcast to Poland from London on 4 May 1943, thanking the population of Warsaw for the assistance it had given to the ghetto fighters and asking them ‘to offer all succour and protection to the threatened victims’.90
Before turning to the issue of Jews who went into hiding, it is necessary to examine the attitude of the Poles towards the Jews during the period of the Holocaust. This has provoked intense and highly emotional debates which show no sign of ending. There is little doubt that anti-semitism was widespread in Poland before the war, which led to economic boycotts of Jewish shops and a cross-party general agreement on the desirability of encouraging Jewish emigration. The German attacks on the Jews in the early period of the occupation – identification, expropriation, hard labour and concentration into ghettos – aroused no strong demonstration of opposition from the Poles. Indeed, despite the Polish Government ordering Poles not to profit from the German expropriation of Jewish property and shops, there is evidence to suggest that they did; an underground newspaper noted in 1942: ‘Cases of mass robbery of former Jewish property bear eloquent witness to the ongoing moral decay.’91 Nor did the attitude change when the Germans began the mass shootings of Jews after the invasion of eastern Poland and of the Soviet Union. It should also be remembered that many of the intellectual elites that might have been able to provide leadership had been killed by the Germans during Aktion AB in 1940 or, in the case of eastern Poland, had been deported to the Soviet Union in 1940–41. Rowecki communicated the feelings in the country to the Polish Government, noting that the pro-Jewish sentiments issued by the government were alienating many Poles from the government because: ‘Please accept it as a fact that the overwhelming majority of the country is anti-Semitic. Even socialists are not an exception in this respect. The only differences concern how to deal with the Jews. Almost nobody advocates the adoption of German methods … Anti-Semitism is widespread now.’92 Yet there must have been substantial resistance among the Poles to the German mass murders for Frank to feel it necessary to issue a decree on 15 October 1941 stipulating: ‘those who knowingly give shelter to such Jews or help them in any way’ were punishable by death: a decree that was not issued in any other country.93 Furthermore, as the deportations began, rumours spread throughout Warsaw ‘about collective responsibility – that whole blocks if not the neighbouring blocks would be burnt down if Jews were found in hiding’.94
The obstacles against the rescue of the Jews were formidable. One major difficulty was the nature of the majority of Polish Jews themselves: around 80 per cent were unassimilated and therefore did not speak Polish, looked different and dressed differently, and had different dietary requirements. Therefore, they would have had to remain for years totally concealed from sight, unable to leave their hiding places: and as a consequence few were saved. A Polish woman, Maria Ossowska, who was later arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Auschwitz spoke of the problem:
The tragedy of the children who came out of the ghetto to beg for food was that they could not speak Polish – they were from places deep in eastern Poland and only spoke Yiddish – so it was really difficult to help such people because if you don’t explain a few things to them, how can you really give them proper help?95
Michael Zylberberg, an assimilated Jew in hiding in Warsaw, echoed this: ‘The religious ones inhabited a world of their own, and few had friends among the Poles, who might have saved them.’ He noted the cry of the orthodox: Zu Torah Ve’zu Secharah?, ‘We lived by the Torah; is this the reward?’, as they were rounded up for deportation.96 Even after the war a survivor, Roman Halter, recalled that in London he was asked by some orthodox Jews: ‘Tell me, if it came to renouncing Jewishness and becoming a Gentile, or losing your life, you would rather lose your life, wouldn’t you?’ To which he replied that he would choose life.97
The significant number of Jews who were assimilated, spoke Polish fluently and understood Polish customs had a far higher chance of survival and, perhaps most importantly, had the necessary pre-war contacts with Poles to whom they could turn for help. Wanda Grosman-Jedlicka was not only assimilated but her family had converted to Christianity, yet under the Nuremberg Laws they were all considered to be Jews. After the war she paid tribute to those who helped her family:
And now it must be stated that survival would have been absolutely impossible were it not for the generous disinterested help which often defied all limits of self-sacrifice and bravery on the part of many people, friends and strangers alike. Most often it was given by those who had no moral duty, on a personal level, toward me and my family.98
Adam Neuman-Nowicki, an assimilated Jew, had the good fortune to have blond hair, as did his brother, so both fled the ghetto and lived openly in the small town of Staszów using false papers but their parents remained in the ghetto. When news arrived of the impending clearance of the ghetto:
My brother and I, more than once thought about how we could save our parents from certain death. We reached the conclusion that their Semitic appearance excluded any possibility of arranging Aryan papers for them, and the shortage of money made it impossible to find a Polish family with whom to hide them … My conscience is clear.99
Ruth Altbeker, who did leave the Warsaw ghetto, wrote of the fears of her sister-in-law: ‘She feared her Polish was not good enough, that her looks were perhaps not sufficiently Aryan, and argued that she might betray herself by her behaviour.’100
It has been estimated that out of the Jews who either did not enter the ghettos or escaped from them, 46 per cent hid, another 10 per cent hid some of the time and lived openly at other times, while the remaining 44 per cent lived openly.101 Ringelblum described their situation eloquently and accurately because he himself spent time in hiding in Warsaw before being betrayed:
Life ‘on the surface’ is not at all easy. A Jew on the surface lives in constant fear, under constant tension. Danger lurks at every step. In the block of flats – the landlord, smelling a Jew in every new subtenant, even if he produces a guarantee of Aryanism from a trustworthy source; the gas and electricity account collectors; next, the manager and the porter of the block, a neighbour, etc., – all these constitute a danger for the Jew ‘on the surface’, because each of them can recognise him for a Jew. Yet there are far fewer dangers than the Jew imagines. It is these imaginary perils, this supposed observation by the neighbour, porter, manager or passer-by in the street that constitute the main danger; because the Jew, unaccustomed to life ‘on the surface’, gives himself away by looking round in every direction to see if anyone is watching him, by the nervous expression on his face, by the frightened look of a hunted animal, smelling danger of some kind everywhere.102
The Germans had deliberately flooded Poland with virulent anti-semitic materials which played on existing Polish anti-semitism and encouraged the existing belief in the danger of the żydo-komuna – the link between being Jewish and communism.103
Then there was the attitude of the Catholic Church, which is important, given its centrality to the Poles. Many of the Catholic clergy and religious orders did provide great assistance to the Jews, but equally many priests continued to preach anti-semitic sermons. Irene Gut had witnessed the liquidation of the Radom ghetto and later while working as a housekeeper for a German officer, Major Rügemar, in Tarnopol hid 11 Jews in the cellar of the house. He found out but promised to keep the secret if she would start sleeping with him. Gut went to confession:
‘Father, there is something else,’ I said, and when he nodded I drew a deep breath. ‘Father I have become the mistress of a German officer in order to preserve the lives of my Jewish friends.’
‘My child, this is a mortal sin,’ he said without hesitation.
I frowned, and leaned closer to the screen. ‘But Father, if I don’t do this, eleven people will lose their lives.’
‘If you do this, it is your immortal soul that you will lose. They are Jews.’104
She was refused absolution. In contrast, Michael Zylberberg remembered that when his saviour, Mrs Klima, confessed to hiding Jews, her priest reassured her that ‘she was performing a noble service in helping those in danger’.105
Almost all Jewish survivors remember the ever-present threat of the szmalcowniki, the Polish and Jewish blackmailers, who demanded constant payment for not betraying the Jews in hiding and their Polish protectors. In the case of the Poles, the szmalcowniki were usually youths or young men who, deprived of an opportunity for education and under threat of being deported to the Reich for forced labour, resorted to blackmail in order to make a living. The Germans also gave money to those who betrayed Jews, leading to one SS man remarking: ‘You Poles are a strange people. Nowhere in the world is there another nation which has so many heroes and so many denouncers.’106 In the case of the Jewish szmalcowniki, these were usually members of the Jewish Militia (Żydowska Gwardia Wolności), who would trawl Warsaw looking for Jews in hiding, often driving up behind a person they suspected of being Jewish and calling out in Yiddish or Polish some verses from the Torah in order to gauge the reaction: ‘Their eyes were penetrating and the Jews pointed out by them were lost without hope.’107
Adolf Berman, a Jew who liaised between the Polish and Jewish undergrounds, wrote that too much had been written about the threats to the Jews in hiding and too little about the Poles who risked their lives to save them: ‘The flotsam and jetsam on the surface of a turbulent river is more visible than the pure stream running deep underneath, but that stream existed.’108 It is extremely difficult to establish with any degree of certainty how many Poles helped Jews. The fact that Yad Vashem in Jerusalem honours over 5,000 Poles as ‘righteous’ because of their work in saving Jews during the Holocaust is used as evidence to suggest that only 5,000 Poles actively worked to save Jews, but this is not a legitimate inference, because Yad Vashem requires the testimony of Jews who were saved. Since any capture of hidden Jews by the Germans resulted in the immediate execution of the Jews and their Polish protectors, there was no chance for a later Jewish survivor to bear witness. Furthermore, Yad Vashem also requires that the Gentiles received no financial reward for hiding Jews, so this means that the many people who were too poor to keep a Jew unless he could contribute financially to his upkeep are automatically excluded.109 The last point is worth comment, because, as has already been noted, Polish rations were so low that most Poles were forced to rely on the black market or on the relief agencies in order to survive. The Jews in hiding could not contribute to their upkeep by working nor did they receive any rations, so that many had to be asked to pay for their board and lodging. Certainly some Poles asked extortionate sums but equally others cared for Jews without charge. Zofia Rysżewska-Brusiliewicz’s family hid 13 Jews in a small flat in Warsaw and remembered: ‘It was a big problem to buy food for so many people without attracting the attention of the neighbours.’ Her father did not earn enough to feed even his own family, so those Jews had to contribute financially. She also noted another problem: she was forbidden to join the AK ‘because of the possible danger to the thirteen people’, and therefore ‘I often had to face the disapproval of my peers because of my passive attitude.’110
Icchak Cukierman, a participant in the Warsaw ghetto uprising, claimed: ‘One swine could betray a hundred Jews to the Germans. But to save one Jew, you needed the participation of a hundred Poles.’111 Just as there can be no reliable statistics on how many Poles were involved in hiding Jews (claims range from 1,000,000 to 3,000,000), so we can never know how many Poles were killed trying to save Jews. For example, in 1968 the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw confirmed the cases of 343 Poles killed for assisting Jews and were still investigating many others; the Association of Former Political Prisoners raised the estimate to 2,500; the Maximilian Kolbe Foundation identified by name 2,300 executed Poles; some have even claimed as many as 50,000 Poles were killed.112 A member of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101, Bruno Probst, provided evidence of the German attitude towards Poles helping Jews:
Even at that time denunciations or comments from envious neighbours sufficed for Poles to be shot along with their entire families on the mere suspicion of possessing weapons or hiding Jews or bandits. As far as I know, Poles were never arrested and turned over to the competent police authorities on these grounds. From my own observations and from the stories of my comrades, I recall that when the above-mentioned grounds for suspicion were at hand, we always shot Poles on the spot.113
Even as late as October 1943, when most of the Polish Jews had been exterminated, the SS and Police Leader in the General Government, Krüger, complained to his superiors: ‘According to reports reaching us from the Galicia District, the number of cases immediately pending before the special court in Lwów, regarding people providing refuge for Jews, has in the last period increased greatly in number and in scope.’114
The attitude of the Underground Government and the AK has led to the strongest criticism of Polish-Jewish relations during the war, which can be summarised:
The leadership of Polish clandestine organisations was in the position to mould the attitudes of Polish society towards the fugitives and towards those who sought an opportunity to escape from a ghetto or from a camp … [but] This inaction and utter callousness concerning Jewish suffering on the part of those who had been entrusted with responsibility for the welfare of Polish citizens under the occupation is beyond comprehension … In Poland both the civil and military branches of the underground regarded Jews to be an alien presence on Polish soil for which they felt no responsibility.115
The evidence provided comes from examination of underground publications which were widely read. While the Biuletyn Informacyjny did reveal the extent of the German crimes against the Jews and did encourage people to assist the Jews, detractors argue that this was not enough. Furthermore, critics point out that the virulent anti-semitism of right-wing groups like the National Radical Camp (Obóz Narodowno-Radykalny), or the NSZ, and the small Sword and Plough (Miecz i Pług), was perpetuated in their publications, which also had a wide readership.116
The Underground Government did, however, establish Żegota, the Council to Aid the Jews, in September 1942, after the main deportations from the Warsaw ghetto. This was the initiative of two Polish women, Zofia Kossak and Wanda Filipowicz. Kossak had previously led the Catholic Front for the Reborn Poland, which advocated a Poland without the Jews, but nonetheless she was appalled by the German extermination policy and was determined to save as many as possible.117 Her appeal to the Polish population reveals a curious mixture of anti-semitism and humanitarianism:
Our feeling towards the Jews has not changed. We continue to deem them political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland. Moreover, we realise that they hate us more than they hate the Germans, and that they make us responsible for their misfortune … We do not want to be Pilates. We have no means actively to counteract the German murders; we cannot help, nor can we rescue anybody. But we protest from the bottom of our hearts, filled with pity, indignation, and horror … Who does not support the protest with us, is not a Catholic.118
Despite Kossak believing that it was impossible to save the Jews, Żegota set out to do precisely that. Those who condemn the Poles for making insufficient efforts to save the Jews should remember:
In no other country of Europe under the Nazi occupation was a similar council created to attempt to rescue the Jewish population, within which such a wide spectrum of socio-political convictions would be represented, which would be attached to the central underground authorities, whose activities would be financed by the state budget and which would manage to continue for so long.119
Żegota began in Warsaw but soon extended its operations to cover most of the General Government. The aim was to provide financial assistance to Jews in hiding: at the beginning Żegota gave each Jew 1,500 złoty per month from its relief funds, but as the number of applicants increased, this dropped to 1,000 złoty and finally to 500 złoty: ‘The money was paid in special well-hidden places, sometimes brought directly to the Jew in hiding.’120 Funds were frequently short and dependent on the unpredictable arrival of couriers carrying money into Poland from Britain.
Żegota was particularly concerned with the rescue of children from the ghettos. Irena Sendler was very active in this respect and organised the placement of more than 2,500 children in orphanages and private homes and with religious orders. The children frequently had to be moved from one place to another because the small children often could not understand what danger they were in and why they had to stay undercover. Sendler recalled being asked by one small boy: ‘Madam, how many mothers is it possible to have because I’m going to [my] 32nd?’ She kept a card index listing the children’s real names and their new names, which she buried in bottles, and after the war passed it to Dr Adolf Berman, the first president of the Jewish Committee, so that he could try to reunite the children with any surviving relatives. The children were taught Polish and Catholic prayers in the hope that they could survive questioning by the Germans.121 Sometimes this did not work as Elżbieta Szandorowska recalled: ‘A six-year-old girl, Basia Cukier, automatically brought the death sentence upon herself by refusing to say her prayers in the presence of the Gestapo.’122
The Catholic Church played an important role working alongside Żegota to save Jews. Władysława Chomsowa, who ran Żegota’s operations in Lwów reported:
The Catholic clergy were of invaluable assistance in enabling us to obtain certificates of baptism, for which they provided blank forms, instructions on what to do, and ready-made certificates. How much effort and nerves went into the making of one document! With time we became more experienced. Żegota from Warsaw began to supply us with blanks of documents and the Home Army legalising cell with beautifully made official stamps. The fury of the Gestapo at our graphic skills was correspondingly great for they realised what was going on.123
Although the Jewish children, even those hidden by the religious orders, were taught Catholic prayers to survive questioning, there appears to have been very little attempt made to convert them. Indeed, when Karol Wojtyła, the future Pope John Paul II, was approached by a woman who wanted the Jewish child she was hiding to be baptised, he refused on the grounds that it was against the wishes of the child’s parents.124 The Salesian Brothers in Warsaw hid a number of Jewish boys, and the Germans discovered them:
They hanged the arrested Salesian Brothers and their young foster-children on the balcony of one of the highest burnt-out buildings, opposite the Courts of Justice. Their tragic bodies were left hanging for several days. In the business area, in a bustling, thriving street, with its trams, cars, cabs and people hurrying in all directions, living their otherwise normal daily lives – there on the balcony, in full view of everybody, still hung the blackened corpses of the heroic priests and boys.125
If the Polish, or indeed the European, Jews were to be saved in any large numbers, the international community had to take action. There is no doubt that the allied governments knew of the Holocaust at the time. Probably the first report to reach the west (via a Swedish businessman) was written in May 1942 by the Jewish Bund and gave the details of the mass shootings in the east. Jan Karski’s mission to the west in late 1942 was more important since he had visited the Warsaw ghetto to see the conditions there for himself and had met with a leader of the Jewish Bund and a leading Zionist. The message he carried from them was uncompromising:
We are only too well aware that in the free and civilized world outside, it is not possible to believe all that is happening to us. Let the Jewish people, then, do something that will force the other world to believe us. We are all dying here; let them die too. Let them crowd the offices of Churchill, of all the important English and American leaders and agencies. Let them proclaim a fast before the doors of the mightiest, not retreating until they will believe us, until they will undertake some action to rescue those of our people who are still alive. Let them die a slow death while the world is looking on. This may shake the conscience of the world.126
The Jewish leadership also wanted the Allies to threaten the Germans with reprisals against German POWs and civilians and with collective action against the German people if the exterminations did not cease. Neutral countries could help by supplying Jews with blank passports. Furthermore, the Vatican should threaten the perpetrators with excommunication.127
On 10 December 1942, the Polish Foreign Ministry issued a statement The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland, in which it announced that the Germans ‘aim with systematic deliberation at the total extermination of the Jewish population of Poland’. The Poles also provided fully authenticated documentation of the scale of the Holocaust now overwhelming the Jews in Poland. A week later eleven allied governments condemned the policy and promised retribution against the perpetrators,128 but little action was actually undertaken. On 31 December 1942, Churchill told the chiefs of staff that he hoped that the RAF would mount several heavy raids on Berlin during January and ‘during the course of the raids leaflets should be dropped warning the Germans that our attacks were reprisals for the persecutions of the Poles and Jews’.129 These raids were carried out and dropped over 1,000,000 leaflets. More evidence continued to reach the west from Poland: in March 1943, information was given that the new crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau was burning 3,000 people per day; in April 1943, Korboński reported on the discrepancy between the numbers arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the size of the camp population along with the conclusion that these 22,000 had been killed shortly after arrival; in April 1943, a Polish courier, probably Jerzy Salski, provided more information on Auschwitz-Birkenau; towards the end of 1943, Jan Nowak reached London and gave details of the Warsaw ghetto uprising.130
By then the world was tired of the news of the sufferings of the Poles and the Jews, and often found the news impossible to believe. Karski’s report appalled Szmul Zygelbojm, the representative of the Bund in London and a member of the Polish National Council. In May 1943, after hearing of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, he committed suicide, and left a note addressed to Raczkiewicz and Sikorski: ‘I cannot continue to live and to be silent while the remnants of Polish Jewry, whose representative I am, are being murdered. My comrades in the Warsaw ghetto fell with arms in their hands in the last heroic battle. I was not permitted to fall like them, together with them, but I belong with them, to their mass grave.’131 When Karski met Roosevelt in 1943, he found that the president was more interested in the opinions on the Soviet Union held by the Underground Government and the AK and rather dismissive of the plight of the Jews. Karski met with an even more dramatic reaction from the Jewish Supreme Court judge Felix Frankfurter, who told him clearly: ‘I am unable to believe you.’132 When Jan Nowak arrived in Britain from Poland in 1943, he was warned by Ignacy Szwarcbart, a Zionist activist on the Polish National Council in London, not to mention the figure of 3,000,000 Polish Jews because no one, not even the Jews, would believe it.133 The gross inflation of German atrocities during the First World War, which had been revealed during the interwar years to be largely fabrications, had made governments disbelieving. Nor was the west in any event prepared to do anything to save the Jews. In 1943 the United States Government proposed the evacuation of 60,000–70,000 Bulgarian Jews, who could reach the sanctuary of the Middle East with relative ease, but Eden’s response was: ‘If we do that, then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany. Hitler might well take us up on such an offer and there are simply not enough ships and means of transportation in the world to handle them.’134
Given the helplessness or indifference of the Christian world to the extermination of the Jews, one is forced to agree with the conclusion drawn by Władysław Bartoszewski, a ‘Righteous Among Nations’: ‘From the moral point of view it must be stated clearly that not enough was done either in Poland or anywhere else in occupied Europe. “Enough” was done only by those who died while giving aid.’135 But at the same time one must remember that in the case of Poland, the Poles too were in terror of what might happen to them and their families and scarred ‘by the crime committed on their soil before their eyes’.136 The Polish Underground Government and resistance reacted too slowly to the tragedy unfolding in Poland, and resources were put in place to rescue Jews only after the major deportations had taken place, but the underground authorities also did not resist the massive deportations of Poles for forced labour in the Reich. The Holocaust was the defining moment in Polish-Jewish relations but one that was largely confused for many years in Poland by the debates concerning the clashes between different partisan forces in the forests, and especially by the controversy surrounding the high number of Jewish participants in the communist government forcibly foisted on to the country immediately after the war. Because the Holocaust itself and the response to it is not just a matter of numbers but of difficult moral decisions which faced both Polish Christians and Polish Jews alike, the arguments will and probably should continue.