Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto. An Epitaph for the Unremembered (review)

In the writings about the Warsaw Ghetto, little is made of the some five thousand Christians of Jewish origin, mostly Catholics, who shared this plight. Jewish contemporary observers ignored this small group, or made disparaging comments about them. Afterwards, political factors dominated the writing of histories of these events. Archival sources were unavailable, and survivors were often too intimidated to speak out. So it has been left to Peter Dembowski, as an eye-witness, to describe the complexity and perils of their lives and deaths in the Warsaw Ghetto.

These Jewish Christians were a minority within a minority. Most of them had no sense of belonging to the Jewish community, and were only forced to accept this designation when expelled to the ghetto in February, 1941. There they shared the fate of 300,000 full Jews in being murdered in the series of enforced deportations to Treblinka in the summer of 1942. In Dembowski's view the Jewish Christian community ceased to exist in the early stages of the Nazi Aktion.

Within the largely Jewish part of northern Warsaw, there already existed three Catholic parishes: St. Augustine, where the priests lived outside the ghetto, but were later forbidden to enter, and services ceased; All Saints, which was the largest church building in Warsaw, built in an imposing classical style; and the Church of the Nativity, whose courageous priest resided there throughout the ghetto period, refusing to leave and helping Jews where he could. Like many others, these priests did not consider "their" Catholics to be Jews at all, and were shocked by the Nazi decision to include them in the ruthless isolation and persecution.

Since most of the Jewish Christians were educated and assimilated to Polish society, they were often resented as "enemies of Israel" by the Yiddish-speaking majority of full Jews. But Dembowski, who knew many of them personally, takes a more favorable stance. For their part, the Jewish Christians, usually of a higher social class, sought to maintain their former contacts in Polish Catholic society, attended the church services with diligence, and avoided contact with the majority of Yiddish-speakers around them. For those who had lost any contact with their Jewish roots, or had not been aware that they had any, the shock of being thrust into the ghetto was traumatic.

Another feature of the distance between the two groups can be seen over the plans made by the Catholic clergy to rescue Jewish children by finding places for them to hide in monasteries or convents. These efforts were misinterpreted as "soul snatching," or in order to gain extra income for these institutions. Jewish observers had a long memory of such Catholic attempts to gain converts. They were rarely convinced by the priests' assurances that these children would not be subject to proselytism. In fact, even though giving assistance to Jews of any age was punishable by death according to Nazi rules, the evidence is that many children were rescued, especially in 1942. Far more was at stake for these "righteous Gentiles" than monetary gain or conversionary fervor.

One moving testimony is the memoir, as yet untranslated in English, of the prominent Jewish Christian doctor, Ludwig Hirszfeld. His career was suddenly cut short by the Germans in 1939, but he was allowed for a few more months to practice in his hospital for typhus patients until forced to relocate to the ghetto. There he became one of the leading personalities in All Saints parish, and a great admirer of the selfless work of the priest Father Godlewski. Luckily he was able to escape just before the deportation Aktion of July-August 1942, when the remaining members of this parish were transported to their deaths in Treblinka. In her post war novel Hana Krall recalled, "When the Germans cleared the church of all the Christian Jews, there was only one Jew left in the church: the crucified Jesus above...