Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

And generally, I would consider Poles much worse than the Germans.¹⁰⁰⁷
Peter Gersh, who was captured by the Gestapo in Kraków and imprisoned in several German concentration camps:
“…if I hated anyone, I would hate the Polish people. The priests and the Catholic Church, they instilled hate in the Polish people … in the war they [Poles] had a field day. … When I heard that the Russians occupied Poland, I thought, God should see to it that they’re there for a thousand years!”¹⁰⁰⁸
Menachem Begin, former Israeli Prime Minister:

“What concerns the Jews, the Poles have been collaborating with the Germans. … only at most one hundred people have been helping Jews. … Polish priests did not save even one Jewish life.”¹⁰⁰⁹

Elie Wiesel, author and Nobel Prize winner:
“We had so many enemies! … the Poles betrayed them. True, here and there a ‘good’ citizen was found whose cooperation could be bought [sic] with Jewish money. But how many good-hearted, upright Poles were to be found at the time in Poland? Very few.” ¹⁰¹⁰
Yitzhak Arad (Rudnicki), former partisan and Israeli historian:
“It was a period in which the morality of the Church was tested. The clergy should have voiced their objections to the murders and extended help to the victims, despite risks to themselves. An outcry on their part would not have changed the Germans’ annihilation policies …”¹⁰¹¹
Omer Bartov, Israeli-American historian:
“the very term ‘bystander’ is largely meaningless. The majority of the non-Jewish population profited from the genocide and either directly or indirectly collaborated with the perpetrators of the Holocaust. Even if at times the non-Jews also resisted the occupation for their own reasons, only a minority was involved in rescue and feared the vengeance of the majority. In this sense no one was passive or indifferent.”¹⁰¹²
Jan Grabowski, Jewish-Canadian historian:
“But no one, in these circumstances, could remain a neutral, emotionally detached witness, often described by historians as a ‘bystander to the Holocaust.’ … each rural inhabitant—each man, woman, and child [sic]—had a role to play in this horrible theatre of death.”¹⁰¹³
“The motivations of rescuers varied from case to case. If the helpers, however, acted out of compassion, they broke a certain consensus in their own community. Within this consensus there was no place for helping Jews.”¹⁰¹⁴
Yoram Lubling, Israeli professor of philosphy:
“Personally, it was only after I met the Polish people that I could finally understand how the Holocaust happened. It is not the case, as some argued, that it was the largest concentration of Jews that motivated the Nazis to build their extermination camp in Poland. Rather, the Germans constructed all their major extermination camps in Poland because they understood the deep and religiously motivated hatred that the Polish masses held against their Jewish neighbors; neither were the death-camps built in Poland for the purpose of exterminating the Polish nation, as Polish historians want us to believe.”¹⁰¹⁵
Meir Lau, Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi of Israel, who survived the war in hiding:
“The Gentiles … are interested in one thing only: to see the Jews devastated. … Take such a big country as Poland before World War II. The Jews made it fruitful and turned it into a blooming country, with a flourishing economy, industry and agriculture. And look at it now, after WWII, after 3.5 million Jews abandoned her. It is an island of destruction, a country failing in all areas, in its economy, its industry, and socially as well. Nevertheless, a great many Poles cooperated with the Nazis in the annihilation, G-d forbid, of the Jewish people. The six largest extermination camps were located on Polish territory. They knew that with the loss of the Jews they would suffer dearly. But it did not deter them, for this is the nature of anti-Semitism—to destroy the Jewish nation, instead of benefiting from them.” ¹⁰¹⁶
Rabbi Joseph Polak, director of the Florence and Chafetz Hillel House at Boston University:
“While Poland boasts the largest number of righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, it has still not fully embraced the moral challenge of why it did so little to save so many others.”¹⁰¹⁷
Rabbi Charles Grysman of Vaughan, Ontario, child of a Holocaust survivor:
“True, there were indeed thousands of Righteous Gentiles … But there were also many Poles who … watched passively while Jews were disenfranchised, humiliated, abused and confined to ghettos or simply were able to turn their heads away as entire Jewish populations were deported from towns and villages to labour and death camps.”¹⁰¹⁸
Rabbi Abraham D. Feffer of Toronto, a Holocaust survivor from Drobin:
“Yet many fortunate survivors from my own shtetl, remember well and with great fondness and admiration the help of the brave Christian farmers who lived in nearby villages where we worked on cold winter days. (In Poland, hiding a Jew, or feeding him was punishable by death, usually hanging). We remember how these men and women, at great peril, opened their poor “chatkis” [cottages] to share with us warm soup, bread and potatoes.”¹⁰¹⁹
Rabbi Icchok Wolgelernter of Działoszyce stated:

“The simple peasant did not feel hatred toward us—on the contrary, he always willingly contacted a Jew and trusted him in every matter. … The peasants sympathized with us in our suffering and misfortune. They demonstrated this by giving us bread and water. To be sure they were afraid to take us into their homes, because in every village notices were put up warning that anyone who takes in a Jew or gives him a piece of bread will pay for it with his life. Despite this, when things quietened down a little, they allowed us to sleep in their barns, and even took women and children into their homes.”¹⁰²⁰

Cantor Matus Radzivilover, a survivor from Warsaw:
“I never had the tendency to be a nationalist. I am positively devoted to my Jewish brethren and I am proud of my heritage, but I also loved the country of my birth, Poland. I loved my neighbors, the Poles I grew up with and lived with in love and peace. I never accused them of failing to help us because they were in great danger themselves. Hundreds of thousands of them were killed or deported to concentration camps. They paid their price under Nazism, too. Hitler’s intentions were to exterminate the Poles after he was done with the Jews.”¹⁰²¹
David Klin, a member of the Jewish underground in Warsaw and a liaison officer between the Polish Home Army and Żegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, addressed a meeting of former Israeli servicemen:
“As a whole, the Polish Nation acted heroically in their attitude to the Jews.” Immediately he was shouted down that this was not true.

“I know it is true because I was there,” he replied. “If the situation was reversed, how many of you would hide a Pole and so risk your life?” asked David Klin. Sudden silence was the answer. “Well! You see for yourselves!” he said and ended his address.¹⁰²²

Hanna Szper Cohen, a native of Lublin, who was rescued by unknown Poles on several occasions:
“To this day I say—since Jews have bad feelings about Poles—I assert that we who survived, a small percentage though it be, none of us would have survived if in some moment he did not get help, usually without ulterior motives, from some Pole. It was impossible to survive otherwise.”¹⁰²³
Nika Kohn Fleissig, a native of Wieliczka, who was saved by a number of Polish Christians:
“I learned that one cannot generalize: I was once endangered by a nasty Jewish woman, who sent a policeman to arrest me to free herself. I met a number of Christians who saved my life when they could have turned away. So there were good people and bad ones. In tough times, one discovers the truth about people, and it has nothing to do with religion.”¹⁰²⁴
Only someone who has risked his or her life for another person has the moral right to chastise others for their failure to do likewise. This proposition is, of course, entirely hypothetical because such persons would never compromise their moral values and ethical convictions by imposing such unreasonable demands on others. Heroism is a purely personal choice. No one else can make that decision for another person. No one has the right to do so. No one. But, unfortunately, it is done all too frequently. At best, this is a display of self-righteous indignation. At worst, it reveals a darker side about that person—a deep-seated contempt for others and for the value of their lives.
Mark S. Smith, an American journalist based in Scotland:
“It was difficult to fight the rising hatred I suddenly felt for these peasants. My sense of justice wanted to reject such feelings, because it dishonoured those Poles who found ways to resist the Nazi tyranny and assist the persecuted—but the courageous were too few, and Poland’s guilt is that of a nation that could have saved the lives of hundreds of thousands [sic] of people, in spite of the Germans, but did not.”¹⁰²⁵
Szymon Datner, former director of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and Holocaust survivor:
“The Second World War is a period that I have been dealing with for several decades, and I obstinately maintain that one must be very careful in passing judgment. …

… the Holocaust was such a specific, though unimaginable, crime. But it cannot be charged against the Poles. It was German work and it was carried out by German hands. The Polish police were employed in a very marginal way, in what I would call keeping order. I must state with all decisiveness that more than 90% of that terrifying, murderous work was carried out by the Germans, with no Polish participation whatsoever. …

… Every form of aid was forbidden under pain of death for oneself and one’s whole family.

To us today the choice seems altogether clear. And yet I was shocked not long ago by a girl I know, a Jew. She is a person my age, someone I value highly for her honesty and courage. And she told me, “I am not at all sure I would give a bowl of food to a Pole if it could mean death for me and my daughter.”