They Were Just People: Stories of Rescue in Poland During the Holocaust

Notes

Introduction 1. Most of the rescuers mentioned in this book also have been honored as “Righteous.” Their names can be found in the short chapter on Yad Vashem at the end of this book. 2. Historian Saul Friedlander reports that “of the 3.3 million Jews who had lived in Poland in 1939, some 300,000 survived the war; among these some 40,000 at most survived in hiding on Polish territory.”The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939– 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 632. 3. Friedlander goes so far as to say that “no Jew in occupied Europe imagined what the German measures would be.” Ibid., 488. 4. Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in NaziOccupied Poland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 6. 5. Bernard D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History of the Jewish Community in Poland from 1100 to 1800 (Philadelphia, Pa.: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 17, 311. 6. This is the way Leni Yahil reports some of the statistics: “Of the 3.5 million Jews to be found in Poland before the German conquest, 2,350,000 were living in the area that came under German control and 1,150,000 were in the Soviet-controlled sector. When the war began, some 60,000 Jews fled from the western districts of Poland into the area that was to become the Generalgouvernement (General Government); about 300,000 managed to cross the border from the Generalgouvernement into the Soviet zone. During the first weeks of the fighting, some 30,000 managed to escape the area of German occupation and leave Poland altogether, going primarily to the Baltic states and via Slovakia to Hungary and Rumania.” Leni Yahil, The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 136–37. 7. The prewar borders of Poland were different from the borders today. See the two maps in the front of this book, showing Poland as it existed in 1939 and Poland’s borders today. In these six death camps as many as 2.7 million Jews were murdered, along with tens of thousands of others, including non-Jewish Poles, gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, and others. For more details about the camps, see the Web site of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, at http://www.ushmm.org/outreach/ncamp.htm, accessed March 7, 2009, and the Web site of Aktion Reinhard Camps (hereafter ARC), at http://www.deathcamps.info, accessed March 7, 2009. See also Friedlander, Years of Extermination, esp. 356–65. 8. Michael Phayer reports that only 1 to 3 percent of the Polish population participated in rescue work. The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 113. He attributes this figure to Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski,“PolishJewish Relations: A Current Debate among Polish Catholics,” Research Report 7 (October 1987). 205 Notes 206 Notes 9. For readers who want to delve into more scholarly works about rescue and, more broadly, the nature of altruism, we suggest at a minimum the following works (as well as other books listed in the bibliography): Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (New York: Anchor Books, 1995); Samuel P. Oliner and Pearl M. Oliner, The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe (New York: Free Press, 1988); Mordecai Paldiel, The Path of the Righteous: Gentile Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust (Hoboken, N.J.: KTAV Publishing House, 1993); works by Nechama Tec, including When Light Pierced the Darkness; and works by Yehuda Bauer, particularly A History of the Holocaust (London: Franklin Watts, 1982) and Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002). 10. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, xv. 11. Ellen Land-Weber, To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 187. 12. Christopher Browning, speech given at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, on February 18, 2008, audiotape in the possession of Tammeus. Browning is best-known as the author of Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). 13. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust, xi. The Stories 1. The local honor was announced in 1999 at the Holocaust Memorial Center’s annual dinner.YadVashem honored Maciej and Zofia Dudzik as“Righteous”in 2007,at a ceremony in Poland attended by several Dudziks as well as by Zygie and his daughter Esther Ingber. 2. ORT was founded in the eighteenth...