Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust

Introduction

INTRODUCTION Fifty years after the outbreak of World War II, it is ironic that, among works published in the English language, there is no major collection of personal accounts by Poles of the savage occupation by the Germans under Hitler. This book fills that void in the literature. The Poles here who wrote their recollections of those years, or who spoke with me in interviews, live today in countries ranging from Poland and Great Britain to Canada and the United States. Of diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, they lived during the war in various parts of occupied Poland. Some of the men and women who recounted their experiences did so with great difficulty, as for them it was not merely a matter of remembering but of reliving the torments of the war years. One Polish woman was so pained by her memories that she recounted her family's aid to Jews in almost cryptic form. Though hers is an extremely brief account, it has a place in this anthology ; it tells us far more than would seem could be conveyed by a few paragraphs on the printed page. These vignettes of what life was like for the Pole in occupied Poland touch on a subject about which the world knows very littleand that little badly flawed by a kind of selective history, practiced by many historians and popular accounts of the Holocaust. One of the subjects about which there is much misunder~tanding, confused even more by the film Shoah, is Polish-Jewish 'Yartime relations. The following accounts will give the reader the chance to get acquainted with a number of Poles who risked their lives to shelter and save Jews. With the exception of two accounts, these reminiscences are derived from interviews and written depositions that have never before been published. They are told simply and straightforwardly, sometimes eloquently. It is a privilege to have worked with these remarkable men and women, who, through the windows of their personal experiences, allow us to see what it was like to suffer the horrors of German-occupied Poland. Most of these Poles are elderly, many are ill as this manuscript goes to press, and some are no longer living. 2 Out of the Inferno But their memories prove to be sharp. I sensed in them a genuine respect for historical truth; when a specific detail escaped them, they admitted it and did not try to dissimulate. Most of them revealed a keen urgency to tell the world what it was like for the Poles to be among Hitler's major victims. As the late Reverend Jan Januszewski, told me in an interview: "The world rightly knows about what happened to our Jewish brothers and sisters, but it knows so little about us. We should not be forgotten."l This saintly man constantly relived the nightmare of the Nazi years. On walks from the rectory to the church where he served as pastor in Florida before his death, Januszewski would glance from side to side almost as if anticipating the next blow from a concentration camp guard. A victim of Dachau, he never left a crumb of bread or a morsel of food on his plate. As one would expect from a varied group of memoirs, these accounts vary in historical and literary merit, but together they create a vivid picture-a kind of microview-of a people under German occupation. The diverse memoirs all give a sense of immediacy to the conditions the Poles faced during that terrible time. Presenting the accounts in alphabetic rather than thematic order dramatically reveals the diversity of experiences that characterized the life of Poles during the war. These recollections make it clear that there is no room for glib generalizations about how Poles felt, thought, and acted during the German occupation of their country. Since these are historical documents that have obvious value to the study of World War II, I have limited my editing to the requirements of space and to punctuation and the like. In many instances, the testimonies were submitted to me in the Polish language, and the translations are mine. Hitler hated Poles only slightly less than Jews. When the Germans invaded Poland, the initial focus of Hitler's wrath was the Poles, not the Jews. After the Polish military defeat, Hitler ordered that Poland's Jews be confined to ghettos while his henchmen inaugurated a program of systematic terror, enslavement, and extermination of Polish Christians. The Nazi annihilation of the Poles in...