Poles and The Jews
The relations between Poles and Jews during World War II present one of the sharpest paradoxes of the Holocaust. 10% of the Jews survived, less than in any other country; yet, Poland accounts for the majority of rescuers with the title of 'Righteous Gentiles', people who risked their lives to save Jews. The Poles honored by Yad Vashem represent only one–to–ten per cent of the deserving cases. The nature of this paradox was debated by historians on both sides for more than fifty years often with preconceived notions and selective evidence.
Many Jews, persecuted by the Nazis, received help from the Poles; help, ranging from major acts of heroism, to minor acts of kindness involving hundreds of thousands of helpers acting often anonymously. The occurrence of such rescue effort is "one of the most remarkable features of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust," because ethnic Poles themselves were the subject to capital punishment at the hands of the German Nazi occupier if found offering any kind of help to a person of Jewish faith or origin.
Further information: Polish Righteous Among the Nations, Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust, Collaboration during World War II#Poland, and Polish death camp controversyOn November 10, 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 runaway Jews or sell them foodstuffs." The law was made public by posters distributed in all major cities. Capital punishment of entire families, for aiding Jews, was the most draconian such Nazi practice against any nation in occupied Europe. Thousands of Poles were executed by the Nazis for aiding Jews. Over 700 Polish Righteous among the Nations received their award posthumously, having been murdered by the Germans for aiding or sheltering their Jewish neighbors. Many of the Polish Righteous awarded by Yad Vashem came from the capital. In his work on the Jews of Warsaw, Gunnar S. Paulsson has demonstrated that despite the much harsher conditions, Polish citizens of Warsaw managed to support and hide the same percentage of Jews as did the citizens of cities in reportedly less anti-semitic and safer countries in Western Europe.
Polish Jews were a 'visible minority' by modern standards, distinguishable by language, behavior and appearance. As the Yiddish author and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in 1944, for hundreds of thousands of them Polish language was as unfamiliar as Turkish" (his article "Jews and Poles Lived Together for 800 Years But Were Not Integrated" in Forverts, New York). The presence of such large non-Christian, mostly non acculturated minority, was a source of competitive tension in prewar Poland, and periodically of violence between Poles and Jews. Here is where the temptation to jump to conclusions with regard to Holocaust rescue comes into play according to Gunnar Paulsson. As elsewhere in Europe during the interwar period, there was both official and popular anti-Semitism in Poland, at times encouraged by the Catholic Church and by some political parties (particularly the right-wing endecja faction), but not directly by the government. There were also political forces in Poland which opposed anti-Semitism, particularly centered around the tolerant Polish dictator, Józef Piłsudski. In late 1930s after Piłsudski's death, reactionary and anti-Semitic elements gained ground. Nonetheless, "leaving aside acts of war and Nazi perfidy, a Jew's chances of survival in hiding were no worse in Warsaw, at any rate, than in the Netherlands," once the Holocaust began.
At the end of the ghetto liquidation period, the largest number of Jews managed to escape to the 'Aryan' side, and to survive with the assistance of their Polish neighbors. In general – during the German occupation – most Poles were engaged in a desperate struggle for survival. They were in no position to oppose or impede the German extermination of the Jews even if they had wanted to. There were however many Poles risking death to hide Jewish families and in various ways assist the Jews on compassionate grounds. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands, or even a million Poles, aided their Jewish neighbors. The number of Polish Jews kept in hiding by non-Jewish Poles was around 450,000.
Further information: Rescue of Jews by Polish communities during the Holocaust| Part of a series of articles on the | |
| History of Judaism in Poland |
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| History of the Jews in Poland | |
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