Historical
Background
Before
World War II, the largest and most distinctive Jewish community in the
world lived in Poland. The presence of Jews in Poland is noted in the
earliest written historical records of Poland a thousand years ago. In
1264, their rights were guaranteed by law in the Statute of Kalisz, which
protected life, property, religion, and equality before the law, including
the right to take the oath on the Torah. This legislation, an exemplary
protection of minorities even by the standards of today, also included
some provisions to regulate the behavior of the Christian majority towards
the Jews. Under these favorable conditions, and because of the widespread
persecution of Jews in the rest of Europe, Poland's Jewish community grew
into the largest in Europe, with a distinctive culture not only with its
own religion but also its own language, customs, dress, and manners.
The Jewish community
enjoyed a large degree of autonomy. That is, they were free to
regulate their own affairs, including the right to their own courts in
matters that affected members of their community, if they wished. Individuals,
however, could opt to have their case tried in a Polish court.
In 1551, the Polish
king, himself elected and responsible to his electors, granted the Jews
an even greater measure of self-government through an elected parliament
called the Council of Four Lands. By the 1600s, Poland was the largest
state in Europe, it was multicultural and religiously tolerant,
and it had a wider measure of democracy than elsewhere at that time.
At the end of the
1700s, however, the absolute monarchies around Poland—Russia, Austria,
and Prussia (now known as Germany)—together attacked and conquered
Poland, dividing the country among themselves and canceling all Polish
laws, including the new constitution, the first such constitution in Europe
and the second only after the United States. Some of the generals who
fought to retain Poland's independence also fought in America for the
independence of the United States. These included Kazimierz Pulaski and
Tadeusz Kosciuszko, the latter a friend of Thomas Jefferson's and a democrat
who wrote against the evils of slavery. Kosciuszko's contribution to the
struggle for American independence is commemorated by a monument in Lafayette
Park, across from the White House in Washington, D.C., and at West Point.
Pulaski is honored at the Fort Pulaski Memorial Monument in Savannah,
Georgia, as well as in Lafayette Park.
For 125 years after
the conquest and partition of their country, the people of Poland had
no state of their own. Their schools were closed, the use of their language
was restricted, and they were frequently arrested, deported, or killed
by the occupation forces. In the 19th century, thousands of destitute
people, Christian and Jewish alike, left Poland in search of a better
life in America. It was not until the end of World War I, in 1918, that
Poland regained its independence, in large part at the insistence of President
Woodrow Wilson, who believed in the self-determination of all peoples.
During the brief
span between the First and Second World Wars, the newly independent Poland
struggled to rebuild social and economic structures at a time when the
world was in the grip of the Great Depression. As a multi-ethnic state,
it also had to deal with tensions among various ethnic communities as
nationalist and pluralist ideologies competed for political dominance.
In any event, their
independence was short-lived. Twenty years later, in 1939, Europe was
at war again and, for the next five years, the people of Poland would
endure an occupation marked by the worst crimes against humanity ever
known in history.
On September 1,
1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland. Two days later, England and France
declared war on Germany in defense of Poland, but neither country was
prepared for war and, at this point, theirs was only a verbal support.
They did not, in fact, come to the aid of Poland or engage Germany anywhere
until France was attacked in May 1940. Meanwhile, Soviet Russia, which
only recently had signed a nonaggression pact with Poland, broke its promise
and, in agreement with Germany, attacked Poland from the east on September
17, 1939. Once again, these two large countries partitioned Poland and
began a reign of terror by arresting, deporting, and killing civilians—men,
women, and children.
Hitler, the leader
of the National Socialist Party in Germany, usually known as the Nazis,
ordered his armies to "kill Poles without mercy, all men, women and
children of Polish descent or language....all Poles will disappear from
the world....it is essential that the great German people should consider
it as its major task to destroy all Poles." This, he declared, was
the way that the German people would get the extra "living space"
he wanted.
Tens of thousands
of Polish civilians—Christians and Jews—were shot in the first
months of the occupation—1,700 between December 1939 and July 1940
in Warsaw alone. Sometimes children were specifically singled out, as
in the massacres of boy scouts in the city of Bydgoszcz. Hundreds of thousands
of people were evicted from their homes and forcibly resettled in other
sections of the country, while others were sent to concentration camps
and to work as slave laborers in Germany.
Approximately 200,000
Polish children, who in appearance were considered ideally "German,"
were kidnapped and given to German families for adoption. Of these, only
15 to 20 percent were returned to their parents after the war. And only
in occupied Poland did the Germans establish special children's camps;
in one of them, 12,000 of the 13,000 child prisoners were killed.
The western part
of Poland was incorporated into Germany, the first conquered "living
space" to be settled by German colonists. It was here that the largest
death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, was built. Thousands of Poles were arrested
and sent to the concentration camps already set up in Germany and Austria,
such as Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Mauthausen. Others were
evicted and deported to central Poland or kept for slave labor.
Social welfare
was Zegota's primary concern, but since the organization had established
contact with Jewish activists, Poles were also in a position to transmit
messages from Jewish leaders to the outside world. The Polish underground
used secret radio transmitters to beam the news about the atrocities committed
against the Jewish people and, in 1942, their couriers carried news about
the genocide to leaders in England and the United States. The most famous
of these couriers was Jan Karski, now an American citizen, who personally
met with political leaders and journalists in England and the United States,
including President Franklin Roosevelt, and pleaded for their intercession.
However, no help came. Many Jews were killed by starvation and mass shooting;
millions of others—men, women, and children—were transported
to Nazi death camps, where they were gassed and cremated. The enormity
of this crime is unparalleled in history.
By the time the
war ended, 6 million Polish citizens had been killed—half of them
Jews and the other half Christians. Although Poland had fought together
with the Allies (Britain and the United States), it was liberated from
Germany by the Soviet Union, the same country that had initially invaded
it as Germany's ally in 1939. The Soviets then imposed a Communist regime
on Poland and many of the men and women who had been in the Polish resistance
against the Nazis were once again arrested, deported, or killed. Among
these were members of Zegota, including founding member Wladyslaw Bartoszewski,
who had been a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the
German occupation and then spent seven years in prison under the Communist
regime.
It was a long time
before the Polish people could openly speak or write about their wartime
experiences. Although Zegota was recognized and honored for its rescue
work by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Institute in Jerusalem, Israel,
in 1972, it was not a story generally known in the West. In 1995, a monument
was erected in Warsaw by the American Friends of Zegota to honor these
extraordinary people who went beyond personal resistance and were prepared
to lay down their own lives so that others may live.
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