Activities
"The Mass Extermination of Jews in German Occupied Poland", note of the Republic of Poland addressed to United Nations, 1942| Righteous Among the Nations |
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Before World War II, Poland's Jewish community had numbered between 3,300,000 and 3,500,000 persons or about 10 percent of the country's total population. During World War II, Germany's Nazi regime sent millions of deportees from every European country to the concentration camps it set in the General Government in occupied Poland. Soon after war had broken out, the Germans began their extermination of Polish Jews, Jews and ethnic Polish mostly then Roms, Russians, Czech and others minorities of Poland,. Most of them were quickly rounded up and imprisoned in ghettos, which they were forbidden to leave.
As it became apparent that not only were conditions in the ghettos terrible (hunger, diseases, etc.) but that the Jews were being singled out for extermination at Nazi concentration camps, they increasingly tried to escape and hide in order to survive the war. Many Polish Gentiles concealed hundreds of thousands of their Jewish neighbors. Many of these efforts arose spontaneously from individual initiatives, but there were also organized networks dedicated to aiding the Jews.
Most notably, in September 1942 a Provisional Committee to Aid Jews (Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy Żydom) was founded on the initiative of Polish novelist Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, of the famous artistic and literary Kossak family. This body soon became the Council for Aid to Jews (Rada Pomocy Żydom), known by the codename Żegota, with Julian Grobelny as its president and Irena Sendler as head of its children's section.
It is not exactly known how many Jews were helped by Żegota, but at one point in 1943 it had 2,500 Jewish children under its care in Warsaw alone. At the end of the war, Sendler attempted to return them to their parents but nearly all of them had died at Treblinka. It is estimated that about half of the Jews who survived the war (thus over 50,000) were aided in some shape or form by Żegota.
Jews were saved by the entire communities (see their partial list) with everyone engaged, such as in the villages of Markowa and Głuchów near Łańcut, Główne, Ozorków, Borkowo near Sierpc, Dąbrowica near Ulanów, in Głupianka near Otwock, Teresin near Chełm Rudka, Jedlanka, Makoszka, Tyśmienica, and Bójki in Parczew-Ostrów Lubelski area, Mętów near Głusk – where "almost the entire population" rescued Jews – and in many other places. Numerous families who concealed their Jewish neighbors paid the ultimate price for doing so. Most notably, several hundred Poles were massacred in Słonim. In Huta Stara near Buczacz, all Polish Christians and the Jewish countrymen they protected, were burned alive in a church.
Read more about this topic: Polish Righteous Among The Nations
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