Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

996 Testimony of Marek Oren (Orenstein), in Piotr Głuchowski and Marcin Kowalski, “Żyd miły z bliska,” Wyborcza–Duży Format, September 11, 2007.

997 Testimony of Dr. Avraham Horowitz, Świda Family, The Righteous Database, Yad Vashem, Internet: .

998 Oral history interview with Leon Lepold, July 25, 1989, conducted on July 25, 1989 for William B. Helmreich’s book Against All Odds: Holocaust Survivors and the Successful Lives They Made in America (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Transaction Publishers, 1996). Helmreich notes, however, that most of his interlocutors “were even more hostile, on the whole, toward Poles, often comparing them unfavorably to Germans.” Ibid., 252.

999 Henryk Bryskier, Żydzi pod swastyką czyli getto w Warszawie w XX wieku (Warsaw: Aspra-Jr, 2006), 231.

1000 Szewach Weiss, “Polacy pozostali niezłomni,” Rzeczpospolita, January 26, 2011.

1001 Cited in Bill Tammeus and Jacques Cukierkorn, They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust (Columbia, Missouri and London: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 69. Roman Frayman states: “But the thing I feel guilty about today is that we never maintained a relationship [with his rescuer, Maria Bałagowa], while she was living.” Ibid., 70.

1002 Cited in Eva Hoffman, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 245.

1003 Shimon Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians, 1918–1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002), 22.

1004 Michael Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism (New York: Karz-Cohl, 1982), 143.

1005 Sobiborinterviews.nl—Survivors of an Extermination Camp, Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie, Internet: . Polish Jews were required to wear distinctive armbands and most were readily identifiable by their appearance. Almost eighty percent of Dutch Jews, it must be remembered, were murdered by the Germans with considerable Dutch collaboration. Most of those who attempted to hide were betrayed. Many Dutch Jews were able to survive because they were exempted from Nazi genocidal measures.

1006 Ephraim F. Sten, 1111 Days In My Life Plus Four (Takoma Park, Maryland: Dryad Press, in association with the University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 31–32. Yet the author records, at p.75, a raid on the village of Jelechowice where several Polish families were sheltering more than 40 Jews (including him): “Today was some panic because last night Hryc informed us about the police arriving … looking for Jews. … there were area combings, the Wehrmacht arrived, as well as the foresters and police, and they went from house to house, from forest to forest, because Jews were hiding in the environs.”

1007 Interview with Raoul Harmelin, April 26, 1992, Gratz College Holocaust Oral History Archive, 47. The disturbing phenomenon of anti-Polonism was explored by Steve Paiken, in his article “Poland Striving to Shake Off an Anti-Semitic Past”, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), May 29, 1992: “And many Jews around the world blame the Poles nearly as much as the Germans for the Holocaust. They say it wasn’t coincidental that the majority of the death camps were on Polish soil—that anti-Semitism in Poland made Hitler’s Final Solution in Poland achievable. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once summed up that view by saying that Poles drink anti-Semitism with their mother’s milk. … The signs of change are even prompting some to challenge the long-held view that Poles were just about as guilty as the Germans for the Holocaust. That view is ‘ingrained,’ says Nathan Leipciger, chairman of the Canadian Jewish Congress Holocaust Remembrance Committee, and a survivor of Auschwitz. ‘How can you say that? I was in camps where 90 per cent of the inmates were Poles. … Most of this [anti-Polish] feeling is just based on myth.’”

1008 Cited in Rhoda G. Lewin, ed., Witnesses to the Holocaust: An Oral History (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 35.

1009 Said on Dutch television in 1979. Cited in Stewart Stevens, The Poles (St. James’s Place, London: Collins/Harvill, 1982), 317. Stevens, a Jew, described this outburst as “a disgraceful statement in which Begin disgraced himself and dishonored his own people.”

1010 Introduction to Vladka Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall: Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), 3–4.

1011 Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), 449–50.

1012 Omer Bartov, “Much Forgotten, Little Learned,” Yad Vashem Studies, volume 35, no. 2 (2007): 276.

1013 Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 83. Jan Grabowski’s father, Zbigniew Ryszard Grabowski (then Ryszard Abrahamer), whose family passed as Christians in Warsaw, states that his (Zbigniew’s) father was fingered in a streetcar by a Jewish Gestapo agent. “Jews in the service of the Gestapo,” he writes, “were best at recognizing other Jews.” See Katarzyna Meloch and Halina Szostkiewicz, eds., Dzieci Holocaustu mówią…, volume 4 (Warsaw: Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie “Dzieci Holocaustu” w Polsce, 2012), 195.

1014 Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews, 166.

1015 Yoram Lubling, Twice-Dead: Moshe Y. Lubling, the Ethics of Memory, and the Treblinka Revolt (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 107.

1016 An adaptation of a Dvar Torah on Arutz 7. Cited in The Jewish Press, Brooklyn, August 13, 1993.

1017 Joseph Polak, “The Silence lifts on Poland’s Jews,” The Boston Globe, July 28, 2007.

1018 Rabbi Charles Grysman, “Not All Poles Were Innocent,” The National Post, May 16, 2008.

1019 Rabbi Abraham D. Feffer, My Shtetl Drobin: A Saga of a Survivor (Toronto: n.p., 1990), 22.

1020 Barbara Engelking, Jest taki piękny słoneczny dzień…: Losy Zydów szukujących ratunku na wsi polskiej 1942–1945 (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum nad Zagładą Żydów, 2011), 52–53.

1021 Matus Radzivilover, Now or Never: A Time For Survival (New York: Frederick Fell, 1979), 82.

1022 Cited in Chciuk, Saving Jews in War-Torn Poland, 1939–1945, 18.

1023 Julian Cohen, Escape from Belzec: Saved By a Pair of Heels, Internet: .

1024 Alicia Fleissig Magal, From Miracle to Miracle: A Story of Survival (Parker, Colorado: Outskirts Press, 2011), 93.

1025 Mark Smith, “Escape from Treblinka,” The Herald (Scotland), May 31, 2010.

1026 Interview with Szymon Datner in Małgorzata Niezabitowska, Remnants: The Last Jews of Poland (New York: Friendly Press, 1986), 247–50.

1027 Interview with Professor Raul Hilberg, June 20, 2005, available on line at . A scene similar to the one described by Bronia Klebanski was observed by Szmul Zygielbojm, a respected Jewish member of the Polish National Council in London. Zygielbojm recalled than when he was on his way to Kraków, he heard a Pole sermonizing on the Jews in the presence of other Poles. Finally, one of the Polish peasants who had heard enough of the anti-Semitic diatribe asked the man, “And where did you learn to preach so well in German?” The anti-Semite tried to respond but was drowned out by the laughter of the pro-Jewish Poles. See Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939–1944 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 142–43.

1028 Polin: A Journal of Polish-Jewish Studies (Oxford: Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies), volume 2 (1987), 341.

1029 “Poles Can Be Very Proud of Sendlerowa,” Israel Gutman interviewed by Piotr Zychowicz, Rzeczpospolita (Warsaw), May 13, 2008.

1030 Contribution to the discussion “Ethical Problems of the Holocaust in Poland: Discussion Held at the International Conference on the History and Culture of Polish Jewry in Jerusalem on Monday 1 February 1988,” reproduced in Antony Polonsky, ed., My Brother’s Keeper? Recent Polish Debates on the Holocaust (London and New York: Routledge, in association with the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies, 1990), 203–4.

1031 “The Poles Are Not Without Blame,” Letter to the Editor, National Post, Toronto, December 30, 2011.

1032 Jewish historiography, for the most part, and indeed virtually all Jews who write about contemporary Polish-Jewish relations, are tellingly silent on the first contacts between Jews (depicted as paragons of virtue and righteousness, consistently oppressed by evil Christians) and Poles (depicted as innately and endemically “despicable,” “lowly,” “wild,” “bloodthirsty,” and “ignorant”). Jews first came to Poland in the 10^th century as traders in—among other commodities, but primartily—Christian slaves, which certainly did not augur well for mutual relations between Poles and Jews. In the early medieval ages, the international slave trade was monopolized by Iberian Jews known as Radanites, who transferred slaves (Slavs) from Central Europe through Western Europe centres such as Mainz, Verdun and Lyons, where they were often castrated, to Islamic buyers in Muslim Spain and North Africa. According to historian Zofia Kowalska:

In the early Middle Ages the Jews kept a high profile in various branches of long-distance and overseas trade, in which slaves were, for at least three hundred years, the chief commodity. … The accounts of travellers (Ibn Kordabheh, Ibrahim ibn Yacub), passages in the works of other Arab and Jewish authors (Ibn Haukal, Ibrahim al Quarawi, Yehuda ben Meir ha-Kohen), documents issued by ecclesiastical and secular authorities, charters of municipal privileges and customs tariffs build up a massive body of evidence corroborating the involvement of the Jews in the slave trade. Their “goods” came mostly from the Slav nations; their trade routes led to and crossed in Eastern and Central Europe. Slaves of Slav origin would be taken westwards across the Frankish lands to Arab Spain and from there to other countries in the Mediterranean. The main centres of the slave trade were Prague (from the 10th century onwards); Magdeburg, Merseburg, Mainz and Koblenz in Germany; Verdun in northern France and a number of towns in southern France. In spite of the vociferous debates that the slave trade provoked in both secular and church circles, the Jews were undismayed and went on with their business.

See Zofia Kowalska, “Handel niewolnikami prowadzony przez Żydów w IX-XI wieku w Europie,” in Danuta Quirini-Popławskiej, ed., Niewolnictwo i niewolnicy w Europie od starożytności po czasy nowożytne (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 1998), 81–92. The slave trade was strongly opposed by the Catholic Church, which prohibited the export of Christian slaves to non-Christian lands. So many Slavs were enslaved for so many centuries that the very name “slave” derived from their name, not only in English and other European languages. The corroborating English language literature on this topic includes: See Iwo Cyprian Pogonowski, Jews in Poland: A Documentary History: The Rise of Jews as a Nation from Congressus Judaicus in Poland to the Knesset in Israel (New York: Hippocrene, 1993; Revised edition–1998), 257–66; M.M. Postan and Edward Miller, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 2: Trade and Industry in the Middle Ages, Second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 416–18, 485–87; Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 6: Early Slavic Paths and Crossroads, Part 2: Medieval Slavic Studies (Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam: Mouton, 1985), 864; Timothy Reuter, ed., The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 3: c.900–c.1024 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 69–70; H.H. Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1976), 394–98, Plate 31; Joseph Adler, “The Origins of Polish Jewry,” Midstream, October 1994, 26–28; Livia Rothkirchen, The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, and Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 8; “Radhanite”, Internet: ; “Slavery in Medieval Europe,” Internet: . Additional literature on this topic published in Polish and Poland includes: Tadeusz Lewicki, “Osadnictwo słowiańskie i niewolnicy słowiańscy w krajach muzułmańskich według średniowiecznych pisarzy arabskich, Przegląd Historyczny, vol. 43, nos. 3–4 (1952): 473–91; Tadeusz Lewicki, “Handel niewolnikami słowiańskich w krajach arabskich,” in Słownik Starożytności Słowiańskich: Encyklopedyczny zarys kultury Słowian od czasów
najdawniejszych, vol. 2 (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1964), 190–92; Iza Bieżuńska-Malowist and Marian Małowist, Niewolnictwo (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1987), 267–77; Zofia Borzymińska, Studia z dziejów Żydów w Polsce (Warsaw: DiG, 1995), 14–26; Ahmed Nazmi, Commercial Relations between Arabs and Slaves (9th-11th Centuries) (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Akademickie Dialog, 1998), 114–83; Hanna Zaremska, “Aspekty porównawcze w badaniach nad historią Żydów w średniowiecznej Polsce,” Rocznik Mazowiecki, vol. 13 (2001): 177–91, here at 178.

1033 “Relations Between the Poles and the Jews,” in Pinchas Cytron, ed., Sefer Kielce: The History of the Community of Kielce. From Its Foundation To Its Destruction (Tel Aviv: Organization of Immigrants from Kielce in Israel, 1957), 47ff.; translation of Sefer Kielce: Toldot Kehilat Kielce: Miyom Hivsuduh V’ad Churbanah.

1034 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 182.