Rescue of Jews By Poles During The Holocaust - Jews and The Polish Government

Jews and The Polish Government

Lack of international effort to aid Jews resulted in political uproar on the part of the Polish government in exile residing in Great Britain. The government often publicly expressed outrage at German mass murders of Jews. In 1942, Directorate of Civil Resistance, part of the Polish Underground State, issued a following declaration based on reports by Polish underground.

Polish government was the first to inform the Western Allies about the Holocaust, although early reports were often met with disbelief even by Jewish leaders themselves; then, for much longer, by Western powers. Witold Pilecki was member of Polish Armia Krajowa resistance, and the only person who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz. As agent of underground intelligence he begun sending numerous reports about camp and genocide to Polish resistance headquarters in Warsaw through the resistance network he organized in Auschwitz. In March 1941, Pilecki's reports were being forwarded via the Polish resistance to the British government in London but the British authorities refused AK reports on atrocities as be a gross exaggerations and propaganda of Polish government.

Similarly, Jan Karski, who had been serving as a courier between the Polish underground and the Polish government in exile, was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and reported to the Polish, British and American governments on the situation of Jews in Poland. In 1942 Karski reported to the Polish, British and U.S. governments on the situation in Poland, especially the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust of the Jews. He met with Polish politicians in exile including the prime minister, as well as members of political parties such as the Polish Socialist Party, National Party, Labor Party, People's Party, Jewish Bund and Poalei Zion. He also spoke to Anthony Eden, the British foreign secretary, and included a detailed statement on what he had seen in Warsaw and Bełżec. In 1943 in London he met the then much known journalist Arthur Koestler. He then traveled to the United States and reported to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In July 1943, Jan Karski again personally reported to Roosevelt about the plight of Polish Jews, but the president "interrupted and asked the Polish emissary about the situation of... horses" in Poland. He also met with many other government and civic leaders in the United States, including Felix Frankfurter, Cordell Hull, William Joseph Donovan, and Stephen Wise. Karski also presented his report to media, bishops of various denominations (including Cardinal Samuel Stritch), members of the Hollywood film industry and artists, but without success. Many of those he spoke to did not believe him and again supposed that his testimony was much exaggerated or was propaganda from the Polish government in exile.

The supreme political body of the underground government within Poland was the Delegatura. There were no Jewish representatives in it. Delegatura financed and sponsored Żegota, the organization for help to the Polish Jews – run jointly by Jews and non-Jews. Żegota was granted nearly 29 million zlotys (over $ 5 million dollars; or, 13.56 times as much in today's funds) by Delegatura since 1942 for the relief payments to thousands of extended Jewish families in Poland. The government in exile also provided special assistance – funds, arms and other supplies – to Jewish resistance organizations (like ŻOB and ŻZW), particularly from 1942 onwards. The interim government transmitted messages from Jewish underground to the West and gave support to their requests for retaliation on German targets if the atrocities are not stopped – a request that was dismissed by the Allied governments. The Polish government also tried, without much success, to increase the chances of Polish refugees finding a safe haven in neutral countries and to prevent deportations of escaping Jews back to Nazi-occupied Poland.

Polish Delegate of the Government in Exile residing in Hungary, Henryk Slawik, helped rescue over 5,000 Hungarian and Polish Jews in Budapest, by giving them false Polish passports as non-Jews.

With two members on the National Council, Polish Jews were sufficiently represented in the government in exile. Also, in 1943 a Jewish affairs section of the Underground State was set up by the Government Delegation for Poland; it was headed by Witold Bieńkowski and Władysław Bartoszewski. Its purpose was to organize efforts concerning the Polish Jewish population, to coordinate with Zegota, and to prepare documentation about the fate of the Jews for the government in London. Regrettably, the great number of Polish Jews had been killed already even before the Government-in-exile fully realized the totality of the Final Solution. According to David Engel and Daniel Stola, the government-in-exile primarily concerned itself with the fate of Polish people in general, reestablishing independent Polish state and establishing itself as an equal partner amongst the Allied forces. On top of its relative weakness, the government in exile was subject to the scrutiny of the West, in particular, American and British Jews reluctant to criticize their own governments for inaction in regard to saving their fellow Jews.

The Polish government and its underground representatives at home issued declarations that people acting against the Jews (blackmailers and others) would be punished by death. General Władysław Sikorski, the Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces, signed a following decree and called upon the Polish population to extend aid to the persecuted Jews:

However, according to Michael C. Steinlauf, only on rare occasions did appeals to Poles to help Jews accompany these statements before the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. Steinlauf points out that in one speech made in London Sikorski was promising equal rights for Jews after the war, but the promise was omitted from the printed Polish version of the speech. According to David Engel, the loyalty of Polish Jews to Poland and Polish interests was held in doubt by some members of the exiled government, leading to political tensions. Overall, as Stola notes, Polish government was just as unprepared to deal with the Holocaust as were the other Allied governments, and that the government's hesitancy in appeals to the general population to aid the Jews diminished only after reports of the Holocaust became more wide spread.

Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the National Council of the Polish government in exile, committed suicide in May 1943, in London, in protest against the indifference of the Allied governments toward the destruction of the Jewish people, and the failure of the Polish government to rouse public opinion commensurate with the scale of the tragedy befalling Polish Jews.

Poland, with its unique underground state, was the only country in occupied Europe to have an extensive, underground justice system. These clandestine courts operated with attention to due process (obviously limited by circumstances) and as a result it could take months to get a death sentence passed, much as in regular judicial systems. However, Prekerowa notes that the death sentences only began to be issued in September 1943, which meant that blackmailers were able to operate undeterred for 3 years from the time of the sealing of the Jewish ghettos in Autumn 1940. Overall, it took the Polish underground until late 1942 to legislate and organize non-military courts which were authorized to pass death sentences for civilian crimes, such as non-treasonous collaboration, extortion and blackmail. According to Joseph Kermish, among the thousands of collaborators sentenced to death by the Special Courts and executed by the Polish resistance fighters who risked death carrying out these verdicts, very few were explicitly blackmailers or informers who had persecuted Jews. This, according to Kermish, led to increasing boldness of some of the blackmailers in their criminal activities. Marek Jan Chodakiewicz writes that a number of Polish Jews were executed for denouncing other Jews. He notes that since Nazi informers often denounced members of the underground as well as Jews in hiding, the charge of collaboration was a general one and sentences passed were for cumulative crimes.

The Home Army units under the command of officers from left-wing Sanacja, the PPS as well as the centrist Democratic Party welcomed Jewish fighters to serve with Poles without problems stemming from their ethnic identity. As noted by Joshua D. Zimmerman, many negative stereotypes about the Home Army among the Jews came from reading postwar literature on the subject, and not from personal experience. In spite of Polish Jewish representation in the London-based government in exile, some rightist units of the Armia Krajowa – as noted by Joanna B. Michlic – exhibited ethno-nationalism that excluded Jews. Similarly, some members of the Delegate's Bureau saw Jews and ethnic Poles as separate entities. Historian Israel Gutman has noted that AK leader Stefan Rowecki advocated the abandonment of the long-range considerations of the underground and the launch of an all-out uprising should the Germans undertake a campaign of extermination against ethnic Poles, but that no such plan existed while the extermination of Jewish Polish citizens was under way. On the other hand, not only the pre-war Polish government armed and trained Jewish paramilitary groups such as Lehi but also – while in exile – accepted thousands of Polish Jewish fighters into Anders Army including leaders such as Menachem Begin. The policy of support continued throughout the war with the Jewish Combat Organization and the Jewish Military Union forming an integral part of the Polish resistance.