The citizens of Poland have the world's highest count of individuals who have been recognized by Yad Vashem of Jerusalem as the Polish Righteous Among the Nations, for saving Jews from extermination during the Holocaust in World War II. As of 1 January 2018, there are 6,863 Polish men and women recognized as Righteous Among the Nations, over a quarter the of 26,973 recognized by Yad Vashem in total.
It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Poles concealed and aided hundreds of thousands of their Polish-Jewish neighbors. Many of these initiatives were carried out by individuals, but there also existed organized networks of Polish resistance which were dedicated to aiding Jews - most notably, the ?egota organization.
In German-occupied Poland the task of rescuing Jews was especially difficult and dangerous compared to other European countries under German occupation. All household members were punished by death if a Jew was found concealed in their home or on their property. It is estimated that the number of Poles who were killed by the Nazis for aiding Jews was as high as tens of thousands, 704 of whom were posthumously honored with medals.
Video Polish Righteous Among the Nations
Activities
Before World War II, Poland's Jewish community had numbered between 3,300,000 and 3,500,000 people - about 10 percent of the country's total population. Following the invasion of Poland, Germany's Nazi regime sent millions of deportees from every European country to the concentration and forced-labor camps set up in the General Government territory of occupied Poland and across the Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany. Most Jews were imprisoned in the Nazi ghettos, which they were forbidden to leave. Soon after the German-Soviet war had broken out in 1941, the Germans began their extermination of Polish Jews on either side of the Curzon Line, parallel to the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population including Romani and other minorities of Poland.
As it became apparent that, not only were conditions in the ghettos terrible (hunger, diseases, executions), but that the Jews were being singled out for extermination at the Nazi death camps, they increasingly tried to escape from the ghettos and hide in order to survive the war. Many Polish Gentiles concealed hundreds of thousands of their Jewish neighbors. Many of these efforts arose spontaneously from individual initiatives, but there were also organized networks dedicated to aiding the Jews.
Most notably, in September 1942 a Provisional Committee to Aid Jews (Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy ?ydom) was founded on the initiative of Polish novelist Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, of the famous artistic and literary Kossak family. This body soon became the Council for Aid to Jews (Rada Pomocy ?ydom), known by the codename ?egota, with Julian Grobelny as its president and Irena Sendler as head of its children's section.
It is not exactly known how many Jews were helped by ?egota, but at one point in 1943 it had 2,500 Jewish children under its care in Warsaw alone. At the end of the war, Sendler attempted to locate their parents but nearly all of them had died at Treblinka. It is estimated that about half of the Jews who survived the war (thus over 50,000) were aided in some shape or form by ?egota.
In numerous instances, Jews were saved by the entire communities, with everyone engaged, such as in the villages of Markowa and G?uchów near ?a?cut, G?ówne, Ozorków, Borkowo near Sierpc, D?browica near Ulanów, in G?upianka near Otwock, Teresin near Che?m, Rudka, Jedlanka, Makoszka, Ty?mienica, and Bójki in Parczew-Ostrów Lubelski area, and M?tów, near G?usk. Numerous families who concealed their Jewish neighbours paid the ultimate price for doing so. Several hundred Poles were massacred in S?onim for sheltering Jews who escaped from the S?onim Ghetto. In Huta Stara near Buczacz, all Polish Christians and the Jewish countrymen they protected were burned alive in a church.
Maps Polish Righteous Among the Nations
Risk
During the occupation of Poland (1939-1945), the Nazi German administration created hundreds of ghettos surrounded by walls and barbed-wire fences in most metropolitan cities and towns, with gentile Poles on the 'Aryan side' and the Polish Jews crammed into a fraction of the city space. Anyone from the Aryan side caught assisting those on the Jewish side in obtaining food was subject to the death penalty. The usual punishment for aiding Jews was death, applied to entire families. On 10 November 1941, the death penalty was expanded by Hans Frank to apply to Poles who helped Jews "in any way: by taking them in for the night, giving them a lift in a vehicle of any kind" or "feed[ing] runaway Jews or sell[ing] them foodstuffs". The law was made public by posters distributed in all major cities. Polish rescuers were fully conscious of the dangers facing them and their families, not only from the invading Germans, but also from betrayers (see: szmalcowniks) within the local, multi-ethnic population and the Volksdeutsche. The Nazis implemented a law forbidding all non-Jews from buying from Jewish shops under the maximum penalty of death.
Gunnar S. Paulsson, in his work on history of the Jews of Warsaw, has demonstrated that, despite the much harsher conditions, Warsaw's Polish residents managed to support and conceal the same percentage of Jews as did the residents of cities in safer countries of Western Europe, where no death penalty for saving them ever existed.
Over 700 Polish Righteous Among the Nations received their medals of honor posthumously, having been murdered by the Germans for aiding or sheltering their Jewish neighbors. Current estimates of the number of Poles who were killed by the Nazis for aiding Jews range in the tens of thousands.
Numbers
There are 6,863 officially recognized Polish Righteous - the highest count among nations of the world. At a 1979 international historical conference dedicated to Holocaust rescuers, J. Friedman said in reference to Poland: "If we knew the names of all the noble people who risked their lives to save the Jews, the area around Yad Vashem would be full of trees and would turn into a forest."
Hans G. Furth holds that the number of Poles who helped Jews is greatly underestimated and there might have been as many as 1,200,000 Polish rescuers. W?adys?aw Bartoszewski, a wartime member of ?egota, estimates that "at least several hundred thousand Poles... participated in various ways and forms in the rescue action." Recent research supports estimates that about a million Poles were involved in such rescue efforts, "but some estimates go as high as 3 million."
Gunnar S. Paulsson wrote: "How many people in Poland rescued Jews? Of those that meet Yad Vashem's criteria - perhaps 100,000. Of those that offered minor forms of help - perhaps two or three times as many. Of those who were passively protective - undoubtedly the majority of the population".
Father John T. Pawlikowski (a Servite priest from Chicago) remarked that the hundreds of thousands of rescuers strike him as inflated.
Notable rescuers
See also
- Stanis?awa Leszczy?ska: a Polish midwife at the Auschwitz concentration camp
- History of the Jews in 20th-century Poland
- Holocaust in Poland
- "Polish death camp" controversy
Notes
References
- Polish Righteous at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews
- Anna Poray, "Saving Jews: Polish Righteous. Those Who Risked Their Lives," at the Wayback Machine (archived 6 February 2008) with photographs and bibliography, 2004. List of Poles recognized as "Righteous among the Nations" by Israel's Yad Vashem (31 December 1999), with 5,400 awards including 704 of those who paid with their lives for saving Jews.
- Piotr Zychowicz, Do Izraela z bohaterami: Wystawa pod Tel Awiwem poka?e, jak Polacy ratowali ?ydów, Rp.pl, 18 November 2009 (in Polish)
Source of article : Wikipedia
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