The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust

by Gilbert, Martin

  Zofia Kossak’s past known anti-Jewish stance, and her fame, made her wartime advocacy of helping the Jews a powerful one. In spite of her anti-Semitism she had been repelled by the savagery of the Nazi persecutions of the Jews, and her human instincts drove her to use her organizational skills to do something about it. Her opposition to the occupation regime would lead to her being sent to Auschwitz—to the Polish section of the camp, itself a centre of torture and terror. She survived her incarceration there, and was in due course recognized in Israel as one of the Righteous Among the Nations.17

  A month before the establishment of Zegota, Zofia Kossak wrote the appeal issued by the clandestine Front for the Rebirth of Poland. Headed ‘Protest!’ it declared: ‘What is occurring in the Warsaw Ghetto has been occurring for the past half year in various smaller and larger cities of Poland. The total number of Jews killed already exceeds a million, and the number enlarges with each passing day. Everyone dies. The wealthy and the impoverished, the elderly, women, men, youth, infants, Catholics dying in the name of Jesus and Mary, as well as Orthodox Jews, all of them faulted for the fact that they were born of the Jewish race, condemned to extermination by Hitler.’

  The Polish ‘opponents of Jews’, the appeal stated, ‘demonstrate a lack of interest in a matter, which is foreign to them. The dying Jews are solely surrounded by Pilates washing their hands of any fault. This silence cannot be tolerated any longer. Whatever its motives, they are despicable. In the face of crime, one cannot remain passive. Who remains silent in the face of slaughter—becomes an enabler of the murderer. Who does not condemn—then consents.’

  Bizarrely, yet honestly, Zofia Kossak went on to note that the feelings of Catholic Poles towards Jews ‘have not changed. We have not stopped considering them the political, economic and conceptual enemies of Poland’ but the ‘consciousness of these feelings does not free us of the responsibility of condemning the crime. We do not wish to be Pilates. We do not have the ability actively to forestall the German slaughter, we cannot change anything, and save anyone—yet we protest from the depth of our hearts, which are encompassed with pity, indignation and anger. God requires this protest from us, God who does not allow murder. It is required of a Catholic conscience. Each being, calling itself human, has a right to brotherly love. The blood of the innocent calls for vengeance to the heavens. He, who does not support this protest—is not Catholic.’18

  Zofia Kossak then threw all her energy into her work with Zegota. In its first two months, its members took care of an estimated 180 Jews, mainly children. At first Zegota’s activities were almost entirely limited to Warsaw, where it opened three safe houses in which Jews could be hidden at any time. It also distributed documents, cash and clothing. But within a few months, branches of Zegota were opened in Cracow, Brest-Litovsk and Siedlce. Contacts were also made, and help given, in Kielce, Bialystok, Radom and Bochnia, as well as in Lublin and a number of localities in the Lublin region, including Zamosc. Eventually Zegota’s rescue efforts extended to the Eastern Galician city of Lvov. Liaison between these towns and Warsaw was undertaken by Ferdynand Arczynski, who was also Zegota’s treasurer.

  Active in Zegota from its earliest days was Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. As an eighteen-year-old underground activist in 1940, he had been imprisoned by the Germans in Auschwitz for seven months. On his release he was among the founders of Zegota—and later one of the first Poles to be recognized by Yad Vashem.19 Many years later he was to recall that in the pre-war years his parents had Jewish friends and business associates who would visit them at home. ‘Even though my family was Catholic, we had a very liberal outlook towards the world. What was important for me is not a person’s religious beliefs, but whether a person is a good human being.’20

  Irena Sendlerowa headed the children’s section of Zegota. Before the war she had been a senior administrator in the social welfare department of the Warsaw municipality, and before the establishment of Zegota she had used her connections in the municipality to place Jewish families on the welfare rolls, using fictitious Christian identities; to get apartment superintendents to register them as tenants; and to get social workers to report, falsely, that they were afflicted with contagious diseases so they would not be inspected. In time, more than three thousand Jews were receiving assistance through her connections. After the sealing of the ghetto she obtained special passes from physicians in the epidemic control department that allowed her and her co-conspirator, Irena Schultz, to enter the ghetto at will. The two women made daily visits with food, medicine, clothing and money. They were able to bring substantial quantities of these items into the ghetto with the help of plumbers, electricians and other Polish workers who were allowed to bring their trucks into the district.

  As the situation in the Warsaw Ghetto deteriorated, with starvation rampant, and deportations intensifying, Irena Sendlerowa and Irena Schultz began to help get children out of the ghetto. At the end of 1942 they were contacted by Zegota, and their network was incorporated into the new organization. As head of the children’s section of Zegota, Sendlerowa placed more than two and a half thousand Jewish children in orphanages, convents, schools, hospitals and private homes. She provided each child with birth and baptismal certificates and a new identity. In addition, she carefully recorded in code the original names of all the children and where they were being placed, so that after the war they could be claimed by surviving relatives. In autumn 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Pawiak prison. Though subjected to severe torture that crippled her for life, she did not reveal her networks of rescue.21

  The chairman of Zegota, Julian Grobelny, working closely with his pre-war Jewish Socialist colleagues, organized the provision of medical help, secure hiding places and transport out of the ghetto, until he was arrested in March 1944. He was imprisoned for a month, suffering a relapse of his earlier tuberculosis. The Polish underground managed to smuggle him out of prison, but ill health forced him to give up his rescue activities.22

  Henryk Wolinski was another leading activist in Zegota. Before the war he had worked in the Warsaw administration; during the German occupation he joined the underground and became head of the Jewish affairs section of the Delegatura, the Home Delegation of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London. In autumn 1942 the Jewish Fighting Organization in Warsaw contacted him, seeking to obtain arms and instructions in their use. Wolinski pleaded the Jewish cause before the Home Army command, obtained some arms for them, and played a leading role in relaying to the West the news about the fate of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. In addition to his liaison work, Wolinski headed a Zegota cell that protected 280 Jews in hiding.23

  Those who helped Zegota came from many different walks of life. One of them was Jan Dobraczynski, a writer, who before the war had been a member of a Catholic nationalist party with anti-Jewish tendencies. He undertook to help Zegota’s Children’s Section. Working as a senior administrator in the Warsaw municipality’s Department of Health and Social Welfare, he automatically signed every placement form for a Jewish child, and made arrangements with a number of convents so that, whenever they came across a child with a special recommendation from him, they would know that the child was Jewish and required special treatment. He later dismissed his own work as ‘nothing’, citing the much more difficult task of those who carried the children from the ghetto through the sewers, or retrieved them from hiding places and brought them to safety.24

  Stanislaw Dobrowolski, head of the Cracow branch of Zegota, helped many individual Jews in hiding, as well as distributing food to Jewish workers in the various factories in the area.25

  Members of Zegota took a personal part, and a personal risk, in helping Jews, even hiding them in their own homes. One of those whom, collectively, they saved was Maurycy Gelber, a Jew from Lvov, who was masquerading as an Aryan Pole. Most of the Polish staff in the bookshop where he worked were strong anti-Semites, and some of them began to suspect that Gelber—who was using the ‘Aryan’ name Alexander Ar
tymowicz—was Jewish. In fear that he would be handed over to the Gestapo (‘being afraid and shaky’, as he later expressed it), Gelber approached one of the other men who worked in the shop, Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz. ‘I had confidence because his acting towards everybody had been nice and correct, and I told him that I am Jewish and in trouble.’ Dunin-Wasowicz answered: ‘I don’t care who you are, for me you are a human being.’

  Gelber was soon fired from the bookshop. Dunin-Wasowicz’s family invited him to their home each day, fed him and, in his words, ‘encouraged me to fight to survive’. Every night, Dunin-Wasowicz hid Gelber in a different Polish home, until he was able to find him a permanent place to live, in Zofia Kossak’s home. ‘In this place,’ Gelber recalled, ‘which I occupied for about six months by myself, never leaving the house, once a week girls from the underground brought me food—and leaflets which I folded for them for distribution to the people. From time to time they left with me a Jewish child, or woman, for a short time.’

  When Zofia Kossak was arrested, Gelber had immediately to leave her home. Dunin-Wasowicz gave him the address of Adam Rysiewicz, another Polish member of Zegota, who ‘kept eleven Jewish people’ in his home. ‘I became the twelfth.’26 There, Gelber’s food and lodging was paid for by Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. ‘On top of that they gave me pocket money every month.’27

  Not only Krzysztof Dunin-Wasowicz, but also his brother and his father were active in the Polish resistance. All three were arrested, and sent to Stutthof concentration camp.28 Writing in his diary, Tuvia Borzykowski, in hiding in ‘Aryan’ Warsaw, commented: ‘Some of the finest personalities of the Polish people are members of Zegota.’29

  Zegota had to operate against a background of constant blackmail and betrayal. In March 1943, and again in January 1944, with the support of the Polish Government-in-Exile in London, it issued warnings that acts of extortion against Jews would be considered crimes, punishable in accordance with the law of the pre-war Polish Republic. ‘Several verdicts were handed down and executed in 1944,’ writes the American Jewish historian Lorraine Justman-Wisnicki, ‘yet the Council was dissatisfied, as these sentences were not announced on street posters to be read by the entire population, but only in the underground press. The failure to punish the extortionists led to an increase of their criminal activities. As more and more Jews made their way to the Aryan sector, the plague of blackmail became much worse. The hostile climate was reinforced by the political changes in the Polish underground.’ Still, even in these unpropitious circumstances, Zegota continued with its work until liberation, deserving, she writes, ‘a special gold-written chapter in the history of mankind during the tragic years of Hitler’s inferno’.30

  Even after the Polish Uprising in Warsaw had been crushed in late 1944, Zegota continued to exist, moving its headquarters to the town of Milanowek, twenty miles west of Warsaw, and doing whatever it could, in the few months before liberation.31

  In addition to Zegota, writes Yisrael Gutman, ‘a substantial number of common people took part in the rescue work as well, usually out of profound religious, ideological, or humanitarian convictions. These people, in many cases villagers and townsfolk, risked their lives to help Jews escape the jaws of the Nazi death machine.’ Yet Gutman adds that ‘almost certainly the majority’ of those rescued were concealed by Poles ‘in exchange for what amounted to a ransom. Some of these Poles behaved honorably, that is, they earned the payment by attempting to protect the Jews under their care. But a portion of them were eager to extort Jewish property as quickly as possible, and when these resources were exhausted, they did not hesitate to evict the Jews from their hiding places and even went as far as turning them directly over to the Germans.’ He also notes that while ‘the clergy and members of certain religious institutions also engaged in the rescue and concealment of Jews, particularly children…these efforts were not undertaken on a broad scale and were certainly not free of proselytical motives.’32

  Despite the need to exercise caution, even scepticism, in so many cases, individual stories of rescue can be uplifting. ‘Betrayal and greed were facts of life he had to learn to live with,’ Allan Levine writes in his review of Jankiel Klajman’s memoirs, ‘but ultimately his survival was dependent on the kindness of many strangers, among them even one soft-hearted Nazi officer.’33

  In north London, fifty-six years after the end of the Second World War, Jerzy Lando commented: ‘If it wasn’t for Polish Christians I wouldn’t be here today.’34 At the age of twenty, having managed to leave the Warsaw Ghetto with the false papers of a non-Jew, Jerzy Lando had made his way to the shop owned by the mother of one of his pre-war Christian friends, Boguslaw Howil. Lando later recalled that a sign ‘inscribed with Galanteria Skorzana—Leather Goods—Helena Howil (Bogus’ mother) hung above the imposing store at the corner of Marszalkowska and Aleje Jerozolimskie, probably the busiest junction in the heart of Warsaw. ‘Its large windows were packed with suitcases, ladies’ handbags, briefcases and other leather articles,’ he recalled. ‘German police, SS and military in their green, olive and black uniforms stood out from the dense crowd of civilians. Warsaw was the centre of communications for men and supplies destined for the Eastern front, and the main railway station was only a few hundred yards away…For a long while I stood outside the store, staring at the multitude of leather objects, a few of them known to me from my workshop days in the Ghetto.’

  Jerzy Lando continued: ‘I was still undecided. I hesitated until I saw the familiar figure of Bogus standing close to the glass partition. He was a handsome, tall, athletically built man with a round open face, some thirty years old. As I entered through the door, he took a look at me and his expression froze, as if he saw an apparition, probably not trusting his eyes. “Jesus Maria, what are you doing here?” He tried to keep his voice down. The shop was some fifteen feet wide and eighty feet deep. The left-hand wall was lined with shelves, reaching all the way up to the ceiling, all packed with merchandise. A few salesmen stood behind the long counter extending throughout the length of the premises; they were serving a dozen or so prospective customers, mainly women. Before I could reply, Bogus asked me to follow him to his office at the far end of the shop. This windowless room contained a small oak desk, several filing cabinets and a couple of revolving office chairs. As soon as we sat down Bogus asked me:

  “How is your father?”

  “He’s all right, he sends his regards.”

  “And your mother?”

  “Surviving”—this was meant to be taken literally.

  “Plomniks? Morgensterns?”

  “I saw them a couple of times at the Toebbens’ factory. They were busy, sewing.”

  He then got the point.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I planned to see Wolowski, but he’s away.” I paused to take a deep breath. “Can I ask you to help me? I need somewhere to live. I need a job. I had learnt bookkeeping. I can type fast. I know shorthand. So many words to convey a simple plea, Please save my life…”’

  For Jerzy Lando, this was the beginning of a saga of hiding, and also participation in the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, which brought him, alive, to the war’s end. As for almost every Jew in hiding, it was to be a long, dangerous and uncertain road.

  Little did Lando know that Boguslaw’s mother was already hiding a Jewish child. Only four days after he had been taken in by his friend, a blackmailer sent Howil an unsigned, typewritten threat: ‘I know that your mother is harbouring a Jewish child in her flat in Cracow. I am about to pass this information to the Gestapo in Warsaw and in Cracow, unless you hand over 100,000 zloty (about £4,000). The exact amount, wrapped in a newspaper, is to be placed inside the waste bin located twenty steps to the right of the main entrance to the Principal Post Office in Plac Napoleona at 8 p.m. today.’

  The note spelt danger for Lando, and although his presence at Boguslaw Howil’s flat in Warsaw was unknown to the blackmailers, he could not risk staying there
any longer. Howil told him: ‘My mother has already made arrangements to find another home for the Plomniks’ little girl, away from her flat.’ Lando set off in search of another haven.35 In order that he could survive—as for so many Jews who survived in hiding—five, ten, even more rescuers had to be willing to risk their lives: sometimes just for minutes, sometimes for a few hours, but often for weeks and months at a time.

  IN JANUARY 1943 the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto resisted the continuing depletion of their ranks through deportation, attacking the Germans who came into the ghetto in search of victims and driving them out. After this act of defiance, Josef Sack, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization, went into hiding with his wife and daughter in the suburb of Praga, just across the Vistula from the city. There, they were helped by Wladyslaw Liszewski, who had earlier helped Jews by smuggling food into the ghetto.36

  ‘Our arsenal grew after the January revolt,’ recalled Zivia Lubetkin, one of the leaders of the Jewish resistance in Warsaw. ‘We received a new shipment of arms from the Aryan side. The Armia Krajowa, the official Polish underground, sent fifty pistols, fifty hand grenades and a large quantity of explosives. We used the latter to construct mines, which we later planted on the main streets and in the houses which stood at the intersections through which the Germans had to pass as they entered the ghetto. Many Germans were killed by the mines during the April uprising. We received instructions on improvising other weapons from Polish experts.’37