By Peter D. Stachura

The acrimonious debate concerning the role of Poles in the Holocaust relates not only to the question of anti-Semitism in the Second Republic before the outbreak of the Second World War, but also to relations between two persecuted groups under German and Soviet occupation. In addition to accusations that pre-war Polish anti-Semitism helped pave the way for the Holocaust, and that there was a degree of active Polish complicity in the extermination of Jews, the masses of ordinary Poles have been vilified for allegedly standing aside in apathy while Jews were being rounded up and transported to the death camps.1 Examples of individual or instititutional Polish help for Jews are dismissed as largely insignificant and ineffective.2

The debate, and especially the endeavour to substantiate the charges levelled at the Poles from Jewish spokesmen, has led to a searching analysis of a broad range of multifarious factors which shaped Poland’s historical development since the regaining of independent statehood in 1918. At its most superficial and, it must be said, most unconvincing, critics have pointed to the fact that the Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibór, Majdanek and others were all located on Polish soil, as if this provides conclusive proof of Polish culpability. Fortunately, even some of Poland’s fiercest accusers, such as Yisrael Gutman, have rejected this notion as untenable.3 Of more relevance here was that over three million Jews were conveniently concentrated in a distant part of Eastern Europe under total Nazi control, and to which it made logistical sense to send Jews from across the rest of Europe to their death.

Until the late 1980s this historical controversy was conducted mainly by scholars living outside Poland, for during the period of Communist ‘People’s Poland’ the topic, along with a number of others, notably the Nazi–Soviet Pact of 1939, the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland from 1939 to 1941, the Katyn Massacre and the Yalta Agreement, was officially ignored, naturally, at the ultimate behest of the Soviet Union.4 Contributions from, among others, Gutman, Krakowski, Mendelsohn and Ringelbaum went unchallenged as a result of political and ideological imperatives.5 Rather crude, intermittent propaganda of an anti-Semitic flavour was about the sum total of the Communist regime’s response. None the less, the rather sordid disagreement throughout the late 1970s and 1980s between the Warsaw regime and Jewish groups over the siting of a Carmelite convent at Auschwitz was but one public manifestation of ongoing tensions between Poles and Jews. Only following the intervention in more recent years of the Polish Pope, John Paul II, who has insisted on a series of friendly gestures and concessions towards the Jews, has this particular squabble subsided, though it continues to rumble on.6

Anti-Semitism had broken into the public domain for the first time in post-war Poland in 1967–8, when competing factions within the Communist Party employed it as part of a power struggle, and although popular interest in the Jewish past blossomed in the next decade, especially among younger Poles, it was the furore occasioned by the publication in early 1987 in the Krakówbased Catholic weekly ‘Tygodnik Powszechny’ of Professor Jan Blonski’s article, ‘Biedni Polacy patrzf na getto’, that a response from scholars in Poland was forthcoming.7 Blonski, who held the Chair of the History of Polish Literature at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, was the first Polish academic to abandon an apologetic stance on this painful subject by sharply criticizing Polish attitudes towards the Jews in wartime Poland. His bold intercession had been encouraged by the well-known philosemitic editor of the journal, Jerzy Turwicz, and since that moment discussion has broadened and intensified.

After denouncing the Catholic Church for sustaining antipathy towards Jews, ‘thereby driving them into isolation and humiliation’, Blonski continues with the accusation that Poles were guilty of an ‘inadequate effort to resist’ the Nazi treatment of the Jews, being at best indifferent to their fate. He argues further that pre-war Polish anti-Semitism facilitated the Holocaust. On these counts, therefore, he concurs with the principal arguments of the anti-Polish lobby. More sensationally, Blonski asserts, without adducing any evidence, that Poles would have actively assisted the Nazis in their grisly work, had not ‘the hand of God’ somehow restrained them. Once again, this is at one with a major point made by some historians, that there were numbers of Poles who did, after all, actively participate in the Holocaust by, for example, blackmailing and betraying Jews to the Gestapo, or even by shooting them outright. In the latter regard the extreme right-wing resistance organization, the National Armed Forces (NSZ), and sections of the main resistance movement, the Home Army (AK), are identified as having been particularly hostile towards the Jews (and Communists) in the closing stages of the war. It is an argument which really dresses some Poles in Nazi uniform. Blonski concludes his piece with the astonishing falsehood that ‘it was nowhere else but in Poland, and especially in the twentieth century, that anti-Semitism became particularly virulent’.

The credibility of these statements and allegations against the wartime conduct of Poles towards the Jews is perhaps difficult to disentangle from the plethora of information and disinformation that has accumulated over the years. But having previously argued that the extent and importance of anti-Semitism in prewar Poland have been grossly exaggerated, and matched in any case by Jewish polonophobia,8 I consider that a review of the most pertinent developments in occupied Poland during the Second World War is demanded.

The tragic outcome of the September Campaign of 1939, despite the unaided heroism of the Polish Armed Forces, ushered in the darkest era in modern Polish history. The German invaders adopted from the beginning an occupation policy that was based on the most brutal racial ideology, at the core of which were anti-Semitism and slavophobia. From his earliest days as a political agitator, Adolf Hitler had made clear his almost pathological hatred of the Jews, whom he described in Mein Kampf as Untermenschen, or sub-humans, a cancer in German and European society which he was unshakeably resolved to remove.9 Although racial anti-Semitism was a fundamental component of Nazi ideology and of the appeal he and his National Socialist Party (NSDAP) made during their rise to power before 1933, they had not publicly advocated the wholesale extermination of the Jews as their preferred method of addressing the ‘Jewish problem’.10 Once in power, the Nazi regime’s policy towards the Jews in Germany steadily but inexorably intensified, from the aggressive boycotting of Jewish businesses in Spring 1933, the Nuremberg Race Laws in September 1935, the encouragement to emigrate, the destruction of Jewish property and synagogues in the so-called Reichskristallnacht (‘Night of Broken Glass’) in November 1938, to Hitler’s declaration in the Reichstag the following year that a European war would result in the extinction of the Jewish race in Europe.11 Confronted in 1939 by a substantial Jewish community in conquered Poland, the Nazis lost no time in introducing an organized programme of repression against both Jews and Poles which was the prelude to the mass slaughter of both.

The Nazi ‘New Order’ in Poland brought unparalleled terror, brutality and genocide to bear on all sections of the population.12 By the end of it, and of the war itself, no fewer than 6 million Poles had been killed, half of them Jewish citizens of the Second Republic. Effective resistance to a totalitarian system such as that in the Third Reich was invariably impossible, and always highly dangerous, as exemplified by the marginal impact of the German anti-Nazi resistance movement from 1933 onwards.13 The combination of the power of the German military, police and SS authorities, draconian laws and the ruthless implementation of an uncompromising racial ideology ensured that when the extermination of Jews was set in train in 1942 there was very little that the Poles could do to help them, except through small, individual acts of daring and compassion. According to a decree issued on 25 October 1941 by the German Governor, Hans Frank, helping Jews was punishable with the death penalty, and the Poles were further emasculated by the deportation of several million of the most able-bodied as slave labour to the Reich and the imposition of serf-like living conditions on the rest. Despite this, perhaps as many as 200,000 Jews were saved from extermination by the merciful intervention of Poles, 2,500 of whom were caught and executed for their trouble.14

What is perhaps remarkable, therefore, is that Poles actually found the time and resources to specifically consider the plight of the Jews in their midst. The clandestine Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota), which was set up in December 1942 by the Delegatura in Warsaw of the Polish government in London with branches in major cities, may have been limited by circumstances and resources in what could be achieved, but its very existence is a tribute to the many who gave it and the Polish Underground State that directed it on the ground their passive or active support.15 This effort, unfortunately, was not reciprocated by the Jews, most of whom met their fate passively, as testified, for example, by the small and ineffectual underground resistance movement represented by ZOB (Jewish Combat Organizations) and the Jewish Military Union (ZZW). Indeed, some Jews, employed in the Jewish Councils (Judenräte) and Jewish Police (Ordnerdienst), actually made the control of their fellows easier in some ways for the Nazis. The Jewish Ghetto Rising in Warsaw in Spring 1943, however, was an honourable exception.16 Furthermore, in view of the vicious anti-Polish behaviour of many Jews in Soviet occupied Eastern Poland from 1939 until summer 1941, the courageous efforts made by Poles to help Jews thereafter is surely testimony to their unbroken sense of decency and humanity in the face of the most deadening barbarism.

The relatively few instances of Polish collaboration with the Nazis in hunting down Jews, as well as the murder of some Jews by the NSZ in 1944–5, are entirely unrepresentative of the wartime comportment of the Polish nation. It may well have been the case that the incessant anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazis eventually left a mark on these aberrant elements of the Polish population, and some Polish underground newspapers and other publications did reflect this influence.17 In other words, Poles of a radical right-wing or criminal disposition were possibly not entirely immune to hate-filled Nazi propaganda over a sustained period. Even so, the extent of Polish collaboration in denouncing and killing Jews was insignificant compared with the assistance given to the Germans in occupied France, Romania, the Baltic States and the Ukraine.18 It is consequently a palpable untruth to claim that by 1943 ‘Polish Fascism and its ally, anti-Semitism, have won over the majority of the Polish people’.19 Nor was it the case, as several Jewish historians have alleged,20 that the Home Army waged a war against the small numbers of Jewish partisans under cover of opposing banditry in 1943–4. The Home Army, recognizing the growing scale of that problem in many parts of occupied Poland, took action against bandits regardless of nationality, so that of the 920 executions it carried out in 1943 and the first six months of 1944, most were of ethnic Poles, including some of its own members.21

More important to an understanding of the development of Polish–Jewish relations during the war, however, is the Jewish reaction to the Soviet invasion of Eastern Poland, beginning on 17 September 1939. It was welcomed in that area with ‘ecstatic enthusiasm’ by many of the large Jewish population, regardless of class or previous political affiliation,22 and there were examples of military action by locally organized Jewish units in support of the Red Army, as had also been the case in 1920 during the Polish–Soviet War. An orgy of reprisal against ethnic Poles, especially estate owners, the professional classes and the military colonists who had arrived in the 1920s, was undertaken by Jews with the active collaboration of the Soviet Security Police (NKVD).23 Murder, looting, confiscation and denunciation were soon to be followed by mass roundups of Poles in preparation for their expulsion into the remotest corners of the Soviet Union: over 1.5 million had been deported by summer 1941.24 For these Eastern Jews the atrocities were sweet revenge for what they regarded, without justification, as their discriminatory treatment at the hands of Poles before the war, most recently in the course of the polonization drive in 1938–9 and the ‘pacification’ exercise of 1938. They openly rejoiced at the collapse of the Polish Republic, believing, erroneously as it soon transpired, that the day of national and class liberation had arrived. With their Soviet masters, they aimed at the effective depolonization of Eastern Poland.25

Only a small percentage of the Jewish community had been members of the Communist Party of Poland (KPP) during the inter-war era, though they had occupied an influential and conspicuous place in the party’s leadership and in the rank and file in major centres, such as Warsaw, Lódz and Lwów. But a far greater number of younger Jews, often through the pro-Marxist Bund (General Jewish Workers’ Union) or some Zionist groups, had possessed an underlying sympathy for Communism and an affinity with Soviet Russia, both of which had been, of course, prime enemies of the Polish Second Republic. For these Jews Communism had an almost messianic appeal, while the Soviet Union was regarded as their natural homeland. As a result of these ideological, political and anti-Polish factors they found it easy after 1939 to join the Soviet bandwagon in Eastern Poland, and soon occupied prominent positions in industry, schools, local government, police and other Soviet-installed institutions. They went about their business with revolutionary zeal and an consuming hatred for all things Polish. As Soviet-Bolshevik commissars, they were the most fanatical.26 Hence, the argument that their frenzied participation in the new Soviet administration was motivated by gratitude for being saved from the Nazis is patently unconvincing. 27 For their part, the Poles could not help but be bitterly aware of the Jews’ attitudes and conduct, as Jan Karski vividly reported to the exiled Polish government in London,28 and as General Stefan Grot-Rowecki, Commander of the Home Army, acknowledged in 1941.29 It is certain that this adversely affected Polish attitudes towards the Jews until the end of the war and beyond. The radical-proletarian and pro-Communist pronouncements issued by the tiny Jewish underground resistance groups from time to time 30 hardly inspired confidence in a Polish population for whom extreme left-wing ideologies held little attraction before, during or after the war.

The type of behaviour and attitude displayed by many Jews in Eastern Poland between 1939 and 1941, when the Germans expelled the Soviets in the course of ‘Operation Barbarossa’, was linked by many Poles to other disasters that befell the Polish cause, notably the Katyn Massacre by the NKVD and Stalin’s refusal in August 1944 to assist the Poles in the Warsaw Uprising. These actions were widely blamed on the nefarious machinations of ‘Jewish Bolshevism’. This is not to overlook the considerable efforts of General Wladyslaw Sikorski’s Polish government in London to immediately reassure the Jews, as part of a strategy that stressed its clean break with the pre-war Sanacja regime, that it was not anti-Semitic and that in a restored, independent Poland they would be treated on a fair and equitable basis, as declarations of 3 November 1940 and 10 December 1942 made explicit. In the latter, Jan Stanczyk, Minister of Labour and Social Welfare, announced: 31

Future relations between Gentiles and Jews in Liberated Poland will be built on entirely new foundations. Poland will guarantee all her citizens, including the Jews, full legal equality. Poland will be a true democracy, and every one of her citizens will enjoy equal rights, irrespective of race, creed or origin. …Democratic Poland…will give the Polish Jews…a home.

The statement was warmly received by most Jewish leaders and organizations.32

Two Jews, Ignacy Schwarcbart and Szmul Zygielbojm, were brought into the advisory Polish National Council in London, and several occupied leading positions in the exiled government, including the former Polish Socialist Party stalwart, Herman Lieberman, who served until his death in 1941 as Minister of Justice, Henryk Strasburger as Treasury Minister, Adam Pragier as Minister of Information, and Ludwik Grosfeld as Minister of Finance (who returned to Poland after 1945 to join the Communist regime).33 In the most trying of circumstances, particularly in the face of incessant complaints from Jewish representatives34 at a time in 1941/2 when its political and diplomatic influence was beginning to seriously decline, the Polish government strove manfully to maintain good relations with the Jews. General Sikorski himself was not anti-Semitic and, for example, urged Poles to aid the Ghetto Rising in Warsaw, which some units of the Home Army undertook at great risk and cost in lives.

Sikorski’s government also provided through its Delegatura in Warsaw increasingly generous financial support to the Council for Aid to Jews, funded stranded Polish Jews in France, paid for the transit of some Jews from Portugal to Britain, and facilitated the passage of large numbers of them from Europe to Latin America. Moreover, in April 1944 the Polish government established in London, in the face of Allied apathy and Jewish resignation, the Council for Rescuing Polish Jews, a well-intentioned if limited enterprise. Regrettably, however, these endeavours have been disparaged as unimportant and the Poles accused of acting from ulterior motives and self-interest.35 At the same time the inevitable weaknesses, failures and omissions on the Polish side, including the absence of substantive contact between the Polish underground and the Jews in 1939–42,36 and some evidence of anti-Semitism in the Polish army led out of the Soviet Union for the Middle East in 1942 by General Wladyslaw Anders, have been unduly highlighted.37 No matter what was done and what was not, this was always bound to be an extremely sensitive and delicate relationship. In any case, only the Allies had the resources to save the mass of Jews from extermination, but despite repeated exhortations from the Polish side from 1942 onwards, nothing was done.38

By the end of the war, Polish–Jewish relations were far worse than they had been at the beginning. Both communities had suffered immeasurably under the Nazis. The planned, systematic extermination of the Polish élites (the intelligentsia, landowners, clergy and army officers) and the slaughter of millions more was as heinous a crime as the mass extermination of the Jews in the gas chambers: the ‘Forgotten Holocaust’ of the Poles,39 on the one hand, and the Holocaust of the Jews on the other. But other crucial events quickly increased distrust, suspicion and hatred on both sides.

In the first instance, the acquisition in 1945–6 by some Poles of former Jewish commercial and residential property, their jobs and material goods, and the use made of anti-Semitism by several right-wing political parties in their propaganda, undoubtedly soured relations further. The returning Jews were unwanted and resented for these reasons. Second, the rapacious nature of the Red Army’s ‘liberation’ of Poland in 1944–5, beginning with its calculated failure to assist the Home Army-led Warsaw Uprising from August to October 1944, and continuing with its mass looting, deportations and killings (especially of Home Army personnel and other anti-Communists), convinced Poles that one totalitarian oppressor had simply been replaced by another. There was no question, therefore, of ‘a democratic Polish Government…[being]…set up in a liberated Poland’.40 The treacherous arrest and subsequent show trial in Moscow in June 1945 of the former commander of the Home Army, General Leopold Okulicki, the representative in Poland of the Polish Government-in-Exile, and fourteen other prominent figures, was an especially instructive episode for the mass of Poles. The civil war that lasted until the late 1940s, involving Soviet-backed Communist forces, units of the nationalist resistance (principally, Zrzeszenie Wolnotdi i Niepodleglotdi, the Freedom and Independence Group) and Ukrainian partisans, further embittered the atmosphere. By the end of the fighting, the organized anti- Communist military resistance had been permanently crushed.

Third, the Poles’ acute feelings of disappointment and betrayal on learning of the outcome of the Yalta Conference in February 1945, by which, in line with decisions taken at the Tehran Conference in December 1943, the Allies agreed that over 40 per cent of the territory of the pre-war Republic, including the historic Polish cities of Lwów and Wilno, was to be annexed by the Soviet Union, underlined the heart breaking reality of their situation.41

Fourth, despite spurious talk of Soviet ‘liberation’ of Poland, a Communist government, totally alien to her traditions and subservient to the Soviet Union, was imposed. Bolshevism had finally triumphed, which for many Poles was synonymous with a ‘Jewish victory’. The Western Allies’ withdrawal of recognition in July 1945 of the Polish government in London, a faithful and brave ally during the entire war, was rightly seen as an act of the utmost cynicism, ingratitude and betrayal, complemented in January 1947 by the Communists’ staging of transparently fraudulent elections without meaningful protest from the West.42 Fifth, immediately following the end of the war a sizeable Jewish community began to reassemble in Poland, especially in Warsaw and several other cities. It lost no time in re-establishing its own press, theatre, publishing house, cooperatives, Historical Commission, social welfare network, political parties and even a Jewish section of the Communist Polish Workers Party (PPR). This activity was widely resented, particularly as many of these Jews were members of the pro-Communist intelligentsia and of the Communist party itself.43

Finally, and reinforcing the latter point, the incoming Soviet controlled Communist regime had a comparatively large number of Jewish officials, especially in the hierarchy of the Polish Communist Party and the security services. Most of them, born and educated in Poland, had arrived from the Soviet Union in the wake of the Red Army’s relentless advance along the Eastern Front. Invariably with assumed Polish names, they constituted an integral part of the new Red Establishment, emerging as the most dedicated proponents of a regime universally detested by Poles. Jakub Berman, the éminence grise of the new regime, enjoyed direct access to Stalin; others, such as Roman Zambrowski, Hilary Minc, Eugeniusz Szyr, Juliusz Katz-Suchy, Adam Schaff, Stefan Staszewski, Leon Kasman, Wiktor Grosz, Artur Starewicz, Jacek Rózanski, Anatol Fejgin, Leon Szajn and Zygmunt Modzelewski, epitomized the formidable role of Jewish Communists in the Party, parliament, Army, secret police and security organs, the press and the ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs. Polonophobia had been institutionalized with a vengeance by a Jewish Communist élite who remained in power until 1955/6.44

It is within a context shaped by these developments that anti-Semitism in Poland led, in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, to a outbreaks of violence. As a result of random violence 353 Jews were allegedly killed in 1945 alone, including pogroms in Rzeszów in July and in Kraków in August, though it may well be that most of these can be attributed to military rather than to ethnic clashes. In July 1946 the notorious pogrom in Kielce saw 42 Jewish deaths. The Holocaust, it seemed, was a Jewish affair of no wider relevance to Poles, who had their own tragedies to mourn, and they blamed the Jews for the greatest of them.45 Paradoxically, therefore, anti-Semitism was stronger in Poland in the aftermath of the Holocaust than it had been before it, but so also was polonophobia. The prejudices and tensions between both sides persisted as a feature of Polish political life and social attitudes, though with perhaps diminishing intensity, until the end of the Communist era in 1989/90, and beyond.46

NOTES
1. Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and
Jewish Victimization during the Holocaust (Free Press, New York,
1979), pp. 33, 50 ff.
02. Antony Polonsky (ed.), ‘My Brother’s Keeper?’ Recent Polish
Debates on the Holocaust (Routledge, London, 1990), Introduction.
03. Polish–Jewish Relations During the Second World War. A
Discussion’, Polin, 2 (1987), comment by Yisrael Gutman, p. 341.
04. Andrzej Chojnowski, ‘The Jewish Community of the Second Republic
in Polish Historiography of the 1980s’, Polin, 1 (1986), pp. 288–99;
Antony Polonsky, ‘Polish–Jewish Relations and the Holocaust’,
Polin, 4 (1989), pp. 226–42, especially pp. 228–31.
05. Yisrael Gutman, ‘Polish and Jewish Historiography on the Question
of Polish–Jewish Relations during World War II’, in Chimen
Abramsky, Maciej Jachimczyk and Antony Polonsky (eds), The Jews
in Poland (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986), pp. 177–89; Shmuel
Krakowski, ‘Relations Between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust:
New and Old Approaches in Polish Historiography’, Yad Vashem
Studies, 19 (1988), pp. 317–40; Ezra Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland:
The Formative Years, 1915–1926 (Yale University Press, New Haven,
1981); Emmanuel Ringelbaum, Polish–Jewish Relations during the
Second World War (Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1992).
06. The Times, 21 February 1998, reports that a large cross commemorating
a landmark Mass celebrated by the Pope in 1979 is to be removed
from its location near Auschwitz because of protests from Jewish
groups. Smaller crosses were removed in December 1997 from the
Auschwitz museum following similar protests.
07. Jan B)onski, Tygodnik Powszechny, 11 January 1987, reprinted in
English as ‘The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto’, Polin, 2 (1987),
pp. 321–36; see also comments on the article by Polonsky, ‘Polish–
Jewish Relations’, Polin, 4 (1989), esp. pp. 231–3, and Norman
Davies, ‘Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth-Century Poland’, ibid., p. 155.
08. See Chapter 3 in this book.
09. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Hutchinson, London, 1969), especially
pp. 258–99, 402–10.
10. See Martin Broszat, The Hitler State (Longman, London, 1981),
Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship (Edward Arnold, London, 1993);
idem, Hitler (Longman, London, 1991); Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s
Weltanschauung: A Blueprint for Power (Wesleyan University Press,
Middletown, Conn., 1972); Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel
Lives (Harper Collins, London, 1991); Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the
Final Solution (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984); Sarah
Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’ (Princeton
University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1984).
11. Hermann Graml, Anti-semitism in the Third Reich (Blackwell,
Oxford, 1992), provides a well-informed and succinct overview.
12. Detailed accounts in the Polish Ministry of Information, The German
New Order in Poland (Hutchinson, London, 1942) and Jan T. Gross,
Polish Society under German Occupation: The Generalgouvernement,
1939–1944 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1979).
A useful reference work is Walter Okonski, Wartime Poland,
1939–1945: A Select Bibliography (Greenwood Press, New York,
1997).
13. From a vast literature, see Peter Hoffmann, Widerstand, Staatsstreich,
Attentat. Der Kampf der Opposition gegen Hitler (Piper, Munich,
1969), idem, German Resistance to Hitler (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1988).
14. Stefan Korbonski, The Jews and the Poles in World War II
(Hippocrene Press, New York, 1989), pp. 45, 68; further details in
W)adys)aw Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewinówna, The Samaritans:
Heroes of the Holocaust (New York, 1970); idem (eds), Righteous
Among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews, 1939–1945 (Earls
Court Publications, London, 1969); Kazimierz Iranek-Osmecki,
He Who Saves One Life (Crown Publishers, New York, 1971); Nechama
Tec, Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (Oxford
University Press, London, 1985). A figure of only 60,000 Jews saved
by Poles is given in Teresa Prekerowa, ‘ “Sprawiedliwi” i “bierni” ’,
Tygodnik Powszechny, 29 March 1987.
15. Stefan Korbonski, The Polish Underground State: A Guide to the
Underground, 1939–1945 (Columbia University Press, New York,
1978); Teresa Prekerowa, ‘The Relief Council for Jews in Poland,
1942–1945’, in Abramsky et al. (eds), Jews in Poland, pp. 161–76.
16. Yisrael Gutman, The Jews of Warsaw, 1939–1943: Ghetto, Underground,
Revolt (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1982);
Shmuel Krakowski, The War of the Doomed: Jewish Armed
Resistance in Poland, 1942–1944 (Holmes & Meier, New York, 1984).
17. Lucjan Dobroszycki, Reptile Journalism: The Official Polishlanguage
Press Under the Nazis, 1939–1945 (Yale University Press,
New Haven, 1994), passim.
18. Krakowski, ‘Relations Between Jews and Poles during the Holocaust’,
p. 327.
19. Ringelbaum, Polish–Jewish Relations, p. 247.
20. Yisrael Gutman and Shmuel Krakowski, Unequal Victims: Poles and
Jews During World War II (New York, 1986), pp. 120–34, 216–20.
21. J. L. Armstrong, ‘The Polish Underground and the Jews: A Reassessment
of Home Army Commander Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski’s Order
116 Against Banditry’, Slavonic and East European Review, 72
(1994), No. 2, pp. 259–76.
22. Jaff Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish
Communists of Poland (University of California Press, Berkeley,
1991), pp. 152 ff.; Ben-Cion Pinchuk, Shtetl Jews under Soviet Rule:
Eastern Poland on the Eve of the Holocaust (Blackwell, Oxford,
1990). The 1931 national census recorded a Jewish population in
Eastern Poland of 925,000 from a total of 11 million, according to
Adam [ó)towski, Border of Europe: A Study of the Polish Eastern
Provinces (Hollis & Carter, London, 1950), pp. 286–91.
23. Ryszard Terlecki, ‘The Jewish Issue in the Polish Army in the
USSR and the Near East, 1941–1944’, in Norman Davies and
Antony Polonsky (eds), Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR,
1939–46 (Macmillan, London, 1991), pp. 161–71; W)adys)aw
Anders, Bez Ostatniego Rozdzia)u (Gryf, London, 1983), p. 99.
24. Keith Sword, Deportation and Exile: Poles in the Soviet Union,
1939–48 (Macmillan, London, 1994), pp. 1–27.
25. Davies and Polonsky (eds), Jews in Eastern Poland, pp. 6, 12 ff.;
full details in Keith Sword (ed.), The Soviet Takeover of the Polish
Eastern Provinces, 1939–41 (Macmillan, London, 1991); Jan
T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s
Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia (Princeton University Press,
Princeton, NJ, 1988). A specious apologetic for Jewish behaviour is
given in Pawe) Korzec and Jean-Charles Szurek, ‘Jews and Poles
under Soviet Occupation (1939–1941)’, Polin, 4 (1989), pp. 204–25.
26. M. K. Dziewanowski, The Communist Party of Poland (Harvard
University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 98–100, 126, 154;
Jan B. de Weydenthal, The Communists of Poland (Hoover Institution
Press, Stanford, 1978), pp. 17–19, 26 f.
27. The argument adduced by Jan T. Gross, ‘The Sovietization of
Western Ukraine and Western Byelorussia’, in Davis and Polonsky
(eds), Jews in Eastern Poland, pp. 60–76.
28. Jan Karski, The Story of a Secret State (Boston, 1944), pp. 77–106.
29. Roman Zimand, ‘Wormwood and Ashes (Do Poles and Jews Hate
Each Other?)’, Polin, 4 (1989), p. 339.
30. Examples provided in Manfred Kridl, Jerzy Wittlin and W)adys)aw
Malinowski, The Democratic Hertiage of Poland (Allen & Unwin,
London, 1944), p. 224.
31. Ibid., pp. 197–8.
32. David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-
Exile and the Jews, 1939–1942 (University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill, 1987), pp. 80 ff.
33. Korbonski, Jews and Poles, p. 83.
34. Engel, Shadow, pp. 83–113.
35. David Engel, Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile
and the Jews, 1943–1945 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel
Hill, 1993), pp. 70 ff. 84, 203 ff.
36. Gutman, ‘Polish and Jewish Historiography …’, in Abramsky et al.
(eds), Jews in Poland, pp. 184–5.
37. Engel, Facing a Holocaust, pp. 162–5, 177 ff., 281.
38. Korbonski, Jews and Poles, p. 55.
39. Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under
German Occupation, 1939–1944 (University Press of Kentucky,
Lexington, 1986).
40. Ringelbaum, Polish–Jewish Relations, p. 315.
41. Polish Government-in-Exile, The Yalta Agreements, ed. Zygmunt
C. Szkopiak (London, 1986), provides good coverage of important
documents; Sikorski Historical Institute, Documents on Polish–Soviet
Relations, 1939–1945 (Heinemann, London, 1961).
42. Antony Polonsky and Boles)aw Drukier, The Beginnings of Communist
Rule in Poland, December 1943–June 1945 (Routledge, London,
1980), pp. 90–128; see also Krystyna Kersten, The Establishment of
Communist Rule in Poland, 1943–1948 (London, 1993); Teresa
Toranska, ‘Them’: Stalin’s Polish Puppets (New York, 1987). The
wider picture is discussed in N. M. Naimark and L. Gibianskii, The
Establishment of Communist Regimes in Eastern Europe, 1944–1949
(Westview Press, Boulder, Co., 1996). On the issue of elections, see
William Larch, ‘Yalta and the American Approach to Free Elections
in Poland’, The Polish Review, 40 (1995), No. 3, pp. 267–80.
43. Michal Borwicz, ‘Polish–Jewish Relations, 1944–1947’, in Abramsky
et al. (eds), Jews in Poland, pp. 190–1.
44. Korbonski, Jews and Poles, pp. 73 ff., 79 ff., 84 ff.; Norman Davies,
Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1984), p. 149.
45. In Michael C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the
Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse,
1996), the Poles are criticised for failing even to make an effort to
come to terms with the meaning of the Holocaust.
46. Lukasz Hirszowicz, ‘The Jewish Issue in Post-War Communist
Politics’, in Abramsky et al. (eds), Jews in Poland, pp. 199–208.