Available via license: CC BY 4.0
Content may be subject to copyright.
*Correspondence: j.michlic@ucl.ac.uk
1 UCL, UK
Jewish Historical Studies
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England
Article:
The politics of the memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland:
reflections on the current misuses of the history of rescue.
Joanna Beata Michlic1,*
How to cite: Michlic, J.B. ‘The politics of the memorialization of the Holocaust in
Poland: reflections on the current misuses of the history of rescue.’ Jewish Historical
Studies, 2021, 53(1), pp.132-168.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.jhs.2022v53.011.
Published: 14 March 2022
Peer Review:
This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double blind peer-review, where
both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review.
Copyright:
© 2021, The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits
unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source
are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.jhs.2022v53.011
Open Access:
Jewish Historical Studies is a peer-reviewed open access journal.
152 Jewish Historical Studies, volume 53, 2021
://./10.14324/111.444..202253.011
The politics of the memorialization of the
Holocaust in Poland: reections on the
current misuses of the history of rescue
Aer the fall of communism, commencing in the region in 1989, the
reconstruction and dissemination of histories of dicult pasts, in Poland
and other post-communist countries, have proved to be a challenging
process lled with silenced accounts, half-truths, denial, and pure lies
in narrations.1 In the case of the history of the Holocaust, the process of
uncovering the dark and dicult aspects of the attitudes and behaviour of
non-Jewish neighbours has been particularly unwelcome from the point
of view of local right-wing ethno-nationalist political and cultural elites.
They have consistently viewed it as primarily a foreign, Western-made
assault on the good name and honour of their respective nations.2
In the introduction to Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The Reception of the
Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (2013), my colleague and co-editor
John-Paul Himka and I emphasize that the multitude of approaches
towards Jews and the Holocaust in post-communist countries suggests
that troubling cultural heritage and historical traditions exert enduring
power over national identity, memory, and professional history, and that
therefore the past cannot be easily reshaped and rewritten to encompass
1 There is a huge and still growing literature on memory practices and memory politics
in the post-communist region: see e.g. a comparative study of patterns of memory politics
in 17 such countries in Jan Kubik and Michael Bernhard, eds., Twenty Years aer Communism:
The Politics of Memory and Commemoration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Ninna
Mörner, ed., Constructions and Instrumentalization of the Past: A Comparative Study on Memory
Management in the Region, CBEES State of the Region Report 2020 (Stockholm: Centre for
Baltic and East European Studies/Elanders, 2021).
2 On the problem of whitewashing the Holocaust in post-communist Europe aer 2015,
see Jelena Subotić, Yellow Star, Red Star: Holocaust Remembrance aer Communism (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Robert Rozett, “Distorting the Holocaust and
whitewashing History: Toward a Typology”, Israel Journal of Foreign Aairs 13, no. 1 (2019):
23–36; Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Return of the Image of the Jew as Poland’s Threatening
Other: Polish National Identity and Antisemitism in the Third Decade aer the End of
Communism in 1989”, in Research Handbook on Nationalism, ed. Liah Greenfeld and Zeying
Wu (Oxford: Elgar Edward of Oxford, 2020), 406–27.
The memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland 153
the shameful and troubling memories.3 But our book also focuses on new
developments in the memorialization of the Holocaust between 1989 and
2010, rooted in the then seemingly swi and steady arrival in the region of
Western liberal democracy, with its concepts of addressing the unpleasant
side of a nation’s history and issuing public apologies for one’s nation’s
historical wrongdoings.
From our vantage point today, that historical moment between
1989 and 2010 was innovative, vibrant, and encouraging in terms of the
discovery of the history of the Holocaust, especially the histories of one’s
nation’s dark aspects around local Jewish communities before, during,
and aer the Nazi German occupation. This was also a pivotal historical
moment for the vital exploration of new directions in the writing of social
histories of the Second World War. The crystallization and development
of the critical eld of Holocaust studies within the region was triggered
by a broader intellectual conversation with, and endorsement of, Western
scholarship about the history of the Holocaust and European Jews. Of
great importance in this process was the discovery of Jewish survivors’
testimonies and the acceptance of survivors’ so-called ego documents in
the reconstruction of crucial everyday human interactions and relations
under genocidal conditions, which otherwise would be unknown to
historians and lost to humanity.4
Weaponization of history aer 2010
Today, in the post-2010 reality, with the advent of illiberal authoritarian
democracies and the resurgence of exclusivist ethno-nationalistic
traditions to varying degrees in the region, history, especially the history
of the Second World War, has become “precious gold” over which intense
and sinister political and ideological battles are being constantly fought
in national and international arenas. Today, we see how hegemonic
traditions about national martyrdom and heroism have been repack-
aged, reshaped, and re-applied by right-wing, conservative, and ethno-
nationalistic political and cultural elites to defend the good name of their
respective nations. This is particularly visible in contemporary Hungary
3 John-Paul Himka and Joanna Beata Michlic, eds., Bringing the Dark Past to Light: The
Reception of the Holocaust in Postcommunist Europe (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2013),
“Introduction”, 1–24.
4 On the latter point see Omer Bartov, “Wartime Lies and Other Testimonies: Jewish-
Christian Relations in Buczacz, 1939–1944”, East European Politics and Societies: and Cultures
25, no. 3 (2011): 486–511.
154
and Poland, wherein respective illiberal, conservative, and ethno-
nationalist elites have established rm governmental rules that aim to
create a solid long-standing future – a populist authoritarian democracy
that would not permit any political or cultural changes, debate, or
diversity of remembrance practices.5 Of course, a rejection of debate is in
the nature of all ethnic collectivist nationalisms, not only in countries of
the post-communist region: a case in point is the contemporary Turkish
state behaving the same way towards its most dicult past, namely the
history and memorialization of the Armenian genocide.
As a result, in Hungary and Poland, skewed historical narratives, oen
tinted with various antisemitic tropes and antisemitic interpretations,
have become an ocial source of historical “knowledge” about the Holo-
caust and society during the Second World War. The ocial instrumen-
taliz ation of the Holocaust also involves feeding on and manipulating
Western-born Holocaust memorialization practices that arrived in
the post-communist region in the late 1990s. They are being skilfully
adapted to memorialize well-known and less-known wartime national
and local heroes who committed atrocities against local Jews and other
minorities during the war and immediately aerwards. New songs and
new commemorations are created, and new monuments are erected for
such “heroes”. In addition, troubling global developments such as the
culture of post-truth and “alternative knowledge”, and the rise of global
extremism on both the le and right, has inuenced memory politics and
the memorialization culture of the war and the Holocaust in the post-
communist region.
At present, in Poland, one of the chief goals of the hardcore historical
policy of the Law and Justice Party government is to eradicate both the
school of critical history of Polish–Jewish relations during the Holocaust
and the entire dark history in Polish–Jewish relations that that school
has been interrogating and disseminating in various publications since
5 On ethnic collectivist nationalism and its nature, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: A
Short History (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2019), 85–90. Some scholars
also refer to the current rise of collective ethno-nationalism in Poland and Hungary as a
populist, illiberal, authoritarian democracy, e.g. Weronika Grzebalska and Andrea Pető,
“The Gendered Modus Operandi of the Illiberal Transformation in Hungary and Poland”,
Women’s Studies International Forum, 68 (2018): 164–72; also as “national populism”, e.g.
Rogers Brubacker, “Between Nationalism and Civilizationism: The European Populist
Moment in Comparative Perspective”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40, no. 8 (2017): 1191–226;
Holly Case, “Now who’s living in truth?” Eurozine (13 June 2017), https://www.eurozine.
com/now-whos-living-in-truth/ (accessed 15 September 2019).
The memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland 155
the early 2000s.6 The repressive erasure of the critical history eld of
Holocaust studies is conducted in manifold ways: rstly by applying
legal measures; secondly by denying funding to academic institutions
and individual scholars carrying out research into the dark national past;
thirdly by orchestrating a wide “against-campaign” targeting academics
interrogating a dicult past in the mass and social media in the country
and abroad; and fourthly by creating a parallel world of experts, educators,
and academic institutions of higher education both in the country and
abroad. The last three measures seem to be the most successful strategies
of historical policy.
Yet, I believe that all those intellectually and morally troubling develop-
ments that seem to triumph in Law and Justice-ruled Poland today might
not prove to be as potent in the future because of the nature and weight
of primary sources hosted in various historical archives in Poland and
abroad. Archives of the Second World War and the Holocaust would have
to be assaulted and their content arrested, heavily censored, falsied, and/
or destroyed for the imposed ethno-national history vision to triumph
permanently. Aer all, individual, local, national, and transnational
historical accounts hosted by those archives are much more complex and
nuanced than the authoritarian, ethno-nationalist biased, and narrow
version of monumental national history that has been imposed in the
ocial public sphere since 2015. Critical readers can easily identify many
glaring inconsistencies and incongruent narratives tinted with covert and
overt anti-Jewish and other anti-minority tropes in that version of history.
However, the impact of the monumental ethno-national version of
history, understood as the only “just” version of the national past, cannot
be underestimated as it is dangerous for present and future historical
education and public awareness, as well as for democracy and civil society.
Both uneducated and educated members of society of all ages can be
susceptible to the narratives of glory and martyrdom, and to antisemitic
narratives portraying Jews as the chief culprit “aiming to harm Poland and
Poles” once again, by allegedly being behind all the recent forces dened
as anti-Polish, including the LGBT community.
I contend, however, that under the weight of individual, complex
accounts of both Polish non-Jewish eyewitnesses and Polish Jewish
survivors, the power of monumental, ethno-national history could
6 On the critical school of history writing on the Holocaust in Poland, see e.g. Joanna B.
Michlic, “‘At the Cross-Roads’: Jedwabne and the Polish Historiography of the Holocaust”,
Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust, 31, no. 3 (2017): 296–301; special Hebrew ed. of Dapim, 2018.
156
in time weaken, as it contains too many biases and obviously naive
and false narratives that can easily be questioned and exposed. In my
various publications on Jewish child survivors, I argued that by critically
examining children’s early and late postwar testimonies, we historians
can gain much new insight into the complex topics of rescue, survival,
self-help, and everyday relations with adults, both Jewish and non-Jewish
Poles, under the Nazi German occupation of the country.7
In this paper, I shall concentrate on one aspect, namely the ways in
which children’s voices complicate and oppose the ocial narratives of
a highly emotional and timely subject – the rescue of Jews in German-
occupied Poland. This historical eld is subjected to extensive and
sinister manipulations within Law and Justice’s historical policy, and in
fact stands at the centre of historical policy concerning the Holocaust of
Polish Jews and the reactions of non-Jewish Poles to the extermination
of Polish Jewish co-citizens. Before I engage with the children’s voices,
I want to discuss briey new approaches towards the history of rescue of
Jews in the historiography of the Holocaust.
New approaches to the history of rescue in Holocaust historiography
Scholars recognize the recent “rescue turn” or “the resistance turn” and
its importance for revisiting, reinterpreting, and questioning the older
established approaches towards and denitions of rescuers of Jews as
Righteous Gentiles and moral heroes without blemishes.8 Scholars such
as Mark Roseman, one of the chief historians representing the “rescue
turn”, show that the old schemas of thinking about rescuers provide
a somewhat narrow historical picture of rescue, unable to apprehend
dierent proles of rescuers.9 In painting the history of rescue of Jews in
Germany, Roseman convincingly demonstrates that some of the rescuers
do not t into traditional categories of Righteous Gentiles that Yad
Vashem introduced in the 1960s, and that the realities and challenges of
daily life for those who opposed the Nazi regime were full of compromises
7 See e.g. Joanna Beata Michlic, “Jewish Children in Nazi-Occupied Poland: Survival and
Polish–Jewish Relations during the Holocaust as reected in Early Postwar Recol lections”,
Search and Research: Lectures and Papers 14 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), 1–92.
8 Jacques Semelin, Claire Andrieu, and Sarah Gensburger, eds., Resisting Genocide: The
Multiple Forms of Rescue, trans. Emma Bentley and Cynthia Schoch (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011).
9 Mark Roseman, Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019).
The memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland 157
and oen not easy decisions. In his important, controversial study (of
2019) on the rescue of Jews and resistance in France, the French political
scientist Jacques Semelin stresses the importance of analysing the nature
and dynamics of rescue in everyday settings – “the little gestures of
help”, the political parameters, and everyday social interactions between
rescuers and their Jewish charges.10 In a microhistory of Buczacz (of 2018),
Omer Bartov deconstructs the old schemas of thinking about rescuers by
introducing the concept of “ambivalence of goodness”.11 In my own work
on rescuers of Jews in Poland, I have discussed (in 2017) the “grey zone
of rescue” and emphasize the importance of outlining the full spectrum
of rescue, ranging from “altruistic/seless rescuers”, “decent rescuers
for prot”, “rescuers for prot only”, to the categories of rescuer-abusers
who mentally, physically, or sexually tormented their Jewish charges, as
well as rescuer-perpetrators who in time transformed into denunciators
and killers of their Jewish charges.12
Another important historical development investigated in the current
scholarship on rescue by all these scholars is the history of self-help among
Jews and Jewish resistance, and the agency of Jewish fugitives during the
Holocaust.13 This, in turn, leads to the re-evaluation of the concept of
solely non-Jewish rescue of Jews by showing that, in cooperation with
non-Jews, Jewish fugitives oen played a key role in their own survival and
that of other Jews.
Overall, the new historical scholarship on rescue complicates the old
schemas of thinking about rescuers by shiing focus onto how dierent
social, cultural, and geographical environments inuenced rescue, and
onto the pivotal role of the agency of Jewish fugitives. As a result, more
complex narratives of rescue and rescuers have been interwoven into
Holocaust history writing, and new important questions have been asked
about how one remained a decent human being, without losing one’s
10 Jacques Semelin, The Survival of the Jews in France, trans. Cynthia Schoch and Natasha
Lehrer (New York: Oxford University Press, and London: Hurst, 2018).
11 Omer Bartov, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town called Buczacz (New York:
Simon and Shuster, 2018), 374.
12 Joanna Beata Michlic, “What Does a Child Remember? Recollections of the War and
the Early Postwar Period among Child Survivors from Poland”, in Jewish Families in Europe,
1939–Present: History, Representation, and Memory, ed. Joanna Beata Michlic (Waltham, MA:
Brandeis University Press/University Press of New England, 2017), 153–72.
13 For the rst major collection of essays on a variety of Jewish self-help during the
Holocaust, see Patrick Henry, ed., Jewish Resistance to the Nazis (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 2014).
158
humanity in Nazi-occupied Europe, when others in society succumbed
to antisemitism, and happily accepted the outcomes of the extermination
of Jews. Another more general question that springs from the history of
rescue of Jews during the Holocaust is how individuals mobilize at the
grassroots level to aid persecuted people.
Finally, another set of major topical questions that has sprung from
recent rescue scholarship ponders the place of the subject within the
general history of the Holocaust, since the rescue of Jews was historically
a crucial and yet a marginal phenomenon. Various historical studies
since 2010 conrm that only between ve and ten per cent of Jews who
survived in Germany, its occupied territories, and collaborationist states
received active assistance from non-Jews and non-Jewish organizations
during the Holocaust.14 This data prompted Alvin Rosenfeld, a doyen of
Holocaust and antisemitism studies, to ask questions about how central
or peripheral the “moral heroes” of the Holocaust were to the larger
history of the Holocaust.15 Thus another immediate question that comes
to mind is about how much space the rescue of Jews should be allocated in
global and respective national historical education about the Holocaust:
should it be central to Holocaust education, since protecting Jews from
persecution and physical annihilation by the Germans and their local
collaborators constituted the exception to the rule?
The history of rescue of Jews in contemporary Poland
In Poland, over the last two decades, the subject of the rescue of Polish
Jews by Polish society in the Second World War seems to have been almost
entirely highjacked by the right-wing conservative political and cultural
elites, who constantly use biased and outdated schemas of thinking
about the rescue of Jews, chiey as a strategy to build soothing and “all
feel good” narratives about the national past. Thus, they constantly insist
on maintaining the ahistorical narrative that “most Poles assisted Polish
Jews during the Holocaust” and that Polish society that no doubt suered
greatly under the two totalitarian regimes during the Second World War
has in its wartime past “nothing to be ashamed of”. However, one can
also notice since the early 2000s the emergence of some more complex
14 Peter Hayes, ed., How Was It Possible?” A Holocaust Reader (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2015), “Introduction”, 25.
15 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, The End of the Holocaust (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
2011), 81.
The memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland 159
histories and memories of rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, and
new sophisticated educational programmes on rescue taught in the
Brama Grodzka in Lublin, the Polin Museum in Warsaw, and Galicia
Jewish Museum in Kraków. The Polish branch of the Association of Child
Holocaust Survivors has also been instrumental in raising more nuanced
public awareness about Polish rescuers of Jews and in assisting rescuers
living in Poland.
Since 2015, the architects and faithful executors and disseminators of
Law and Justice’s historical policy have weaponized the history of rescuers
of Polish Jews in their war for the supposedly “only right and just” historical
version of Polish society during the Second World War. The opening by
President Andrzej Duda on 17 March 2016 of a new museum, devoted
to the memory of the no doubt remarkable Ulm family in Markowa,
in southern Poland,16 and the creation of an annual institutionalized
National Day of Remembrance of Polish Rescuers of Jews, established
on 24 March 2018, on the initiative of President Duda, are two pivotal
examples of the ways in which the history of Polish rescuers is currently
being weaponized in memory politics and presented in a skewed form,
devoid of nuance and without regard to wartime and postwar complexities
and contexts.17 This is achieved by a skilful exploitation and manipulation
of the accounts of individual rescuers and network rescue activities, as
well as of Jewish survivors’ accounts. The continuous highlighting of the
fact that more Poles than any other nationality have been awarded the
Medal of Righteous among the Nations by Yad Vashem also serves as one
of the chief arguments used by those seeking to “defend the good name
and honour of Poland” and to erase any public discussion about the dark
past.
The historical studies and exhibitions produced by the current Institute
of National Memory – which has, since 2015, become the guardian of solely
monumental ethno-national history writing of heroism and bravery,
and its oshoot younger organization, the Witold Pilecki Institute,
opened in 2017, ignore histories of the ways in which home-made prewar
16 Andrzej Duda, “Wystąpienie na uroczystości otwarcia Muzeum Polaków Ratujących
Żydów im. Rodziny Ulmów w Markowej”, 17 March 2016, http://www.prezydent.pl/
aktualnosci/wypowiedzi-prezydenta-rp/wystapienia/art,33,wystapienie-na-uroczystosci-
otwarcia-muzeum-polakow-ratujacych-zydow-im-rodziny-ulmow-w-markowej-.html
(accessed 7 June 2017).
17 See https://www.prezydent.pl/aktualnosci/wydarzenia/art,931,narodowy-dzien-
pamieci-polakow-ratujacych-zydow-pod-okupacja-niemiecka-pleng.html (accessed 13
October 2020).
160
antisemitism, and fear of one’s neighbours, colleagues, and even family
members in Polish society inuenced the scale and nature of the rescue of
Polish Jews.
This current weaponization of the history of rescuers of Polish Jews
constitutes an ideological abuse of that history, and could be harmful to
both future commemorations and to the study of the history of rescue in
particular, and the history of the Holocaust and the Second World War
in general. It oen also constitutes an insult to the deceased and living
genuine Polish non-Jewish rescuers because the executors of the historical
policy do not hesitate to manipulate individual ageing rescuers to full
current political goals in both Poland and abroad. For example, in the
ocial annual delegations to Israel in 2018 and 2019, the representatives
of Polish Righteous among the Gentiles were accompanied by Professor
the Reverend Waldemar Chrostowski, known for antisemitic utterances
for which he had earlier been expelled from the Christian Jewish Council
in Poland. On 27 October 2016, in his keynote lecture at the International
Congress dedicated to the Polish Righteous among the Nations and the
grand pages of Polish history, Chrostowski had also claimed that “the
Holocaust was organized in Poland in order to destroy the good name of
Poland”.18
As a result of the weaponization of the history of rescue, an immense
variety of hagiographic representations of Polish rescuers proliferate
today in the government-controlled and -supported mass media, ocial
commemorations, and memorialization sites that have been mush-
room ing since 2015. Among the last, I will discuss only one here – the
rst major hagiographic memorialization site to the Polish rescuers of
Jews, the Chapel of Memory of Rescuers at the Sanctuary NMP Gwiazdy
Nowej Ewangelii i św. Jana Pawła II (Temple of Our Lady the Star of New
Evangelization and St. John Paul II), set up in the bastion of the “Old
Church” of Father Tadeusz Rydzyk in Toruń. Father Rydzyk is known as
a chief advocate and forceful disseminator of the most extreme ethno-
nationalist version of Polish Catholicism lled with anti-Jewish traditions
of both the modern and premodern kind.
From its inception in October 2016, the Chapel aims to create an archive
documenting the great deeds of Polish rescuers who had not necessarily
been acknowledged by Yad Vashem. During the opening of the Chapel on
18 Waldemar Chrostowski, keynote speech, Kongres w WSKSiM-pomoc Polaków w ratowaniu
Żydów, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76_w96hEW9g (accessed 3 March 2017).
The memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland 161
27 October, 1,059 names of Righteous Gentiles were collected and listed
on the Chapel’s walls. In August 2020, Father Rydzyk and the foundation
Lux Veritatis created an interconnected hagiographical memorialization
site to Polish rescuers, the National Park of Memory, with the leading
slogan “They did the right thing”. The Park of Memory, which can be
seen as a follow-up to the Chapel, has even more ambitious and more
spectacular goals than the former because it views Poles at the centre of
commemoration both as heroes helping others and as victims of others’
persecution, including the infamous Volhyn massacre of 1943.
At the opening of the Park, on 8 August, a special commemorative site
was unveiled to 2,345 Polish nuns and priests who were “helping Jewish
brothers”. But the central aspect of the Park constitutes a display of 300
striking-looking columns commemorating Poles helping Jews during the
German-occupation of Poland. A hundred of the columns were ready for
public viewing with the names of 18,457 Poles inscribed on them at the
time of the opening, but the aim of the creators of the Park of Memory is to
commemorate 40,000 Poles who rescued Jews. Not only do the creators of
this site not verify their gure of 40,000 Polish rescuers of Jews against the
data of approximately 7,000 non-Jewish Polish rescuers commemorated
by Yad Vashem, the chief Israeli memorialization site of non-Jewish
European rescuers, but they also ignore the more uncomfortable studies
about rescue of Jews conducted within the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej
(IPN; Institute of National Remembrance). The IPN research project,
which began in 2006, about the Poles persecuted for helping Jews, Represje
za pomoc Żydom na okupowanych ziemiach polskich w czasie II wojny światowej
(Index of Poles Persecuted for helping Jews), was partially completed in
2019. Based on extensive and detailed research of 654 cases out of 6,000
in the database of this project, the historians Martyna Grądzka-Rejak and
Aleksandra Namysło contended that 341 Poles lost their lives because of
their actions rescuing Jews.19
The lack of verication of the number of rescues is only one major
problem, however, within the hagiographical literature about Polish
rescuers. What is also missing in this genre is crucial discussion of what
might be called the “grey zone of rescue”. The hagiography neglects and
omits a historical analysis of rescuer-abusers and rescuer-perpetrators
19 Martyna Grądzka-Rejak and Aleksandra Namysło, eds., Represje za pomoc Żydom na
okupowanych ziemiach polskich w czasie II wojny światowej (Warsaw: IPN, 2019), https://ipn.gov.
pl/pl/publikacje/ksiazki/84294,Represje-za-pomoc-Zydom-na-okupowanych-ziemiach-
polskich-w-czasie-II-wojny-swiat.html (accessed 20 October 2021).
162
on the one hand and, on the other, the investigation of the stigmatization
and denunciation of seless rescuers by their Polish compatriots and the
postwar hostility to seless Polish rescuers and their families by members
of Polish society. What is also missing is the important theme of the long-
term postwar silence in rescuers’ families about the wartime deeds of their
relatives, and the suppression of that knowledge in local communities or
within the rescuers’ families. This topic needs to be properly investigated
in the broader context of prewar prejudices, individual jealousy, anti-
semitism, and the stigmatization of rescuers as “traitors to the Polish
nation”.20
Child survivors’ testimonies: challenging false histories of rescue
At present, we do not yet have a detailed chart of rescue or a comprehensive
typology of rescuers in Nazi German-occupied Poland.21 Nevertheless,
an analysis of Jewish child survivors’ early postwar testimonies throws
new light onto the two opposing categories of rescuers – the rescuer-
perpetrators and seless rescuers. They illuminate the every day dynamics
of rescue, shis between help and rescue, and the emotion al landscape
of rescue encompassing moments of frustration, hesi tation, and dicult
decisions. They provide clues about dierent grades of complicity on the
part of local communities who disrupted and opposed the rescue acts
of seless rescuers. Not only do the testimonies enrich rescue history
writing, but they also add depth to and complicate and challenge popular
and skewed narratives of rescue. I would like to illustrate the power of
child survivors’ voices in opposing the skewed history of rescue by using
four examples.
20 See e.g. Joanna Beata Michlic, “The Stigmatization of Dedicated Polish Women
Rescuers during the Second World War and its Aermath”, East European Memory Studies,
13 (2013): 1–6; Michlic, “Gender Perspectives on the Rescue of Jews in Poland: Preliminary
Observations” Polin, 30 (2018): 407–27.
21 See e.g. Jan Grabowski, Judenjagd: Polowanie na Żydów 1942–1945. Studium dziejów
pewnego powiatu (Warsaw: Polish Center for Holocaust Research, 2011), trans. Hunt for the
Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-Occupied Poland (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2013); Barbara Engelking, Jest Taki Piękny Słoneczny Dzien . . . Losy Żydów
szukających ratunku na wsi polskiej 1942–1945 (Warsaw: Polish Center for Holocaust Research,
2011). Specically on the mistreatment of children, see Olga Orzeł, ed., Dzieci żydowskie w
czasach Zagłady. Wczesne świadectwa 1944–1948: Relacje dziecięce ze zbiorów Centralnej Żydowskiej
Komisji Historycznej (Warsaw: ŻIH, 2014), “Introduction”, 7–46; many of the 55 early
postwar Jewish children’s testimonies in this important publication speak directly about
mistreatment and abuse.
The memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland 163
Accounts of rescuer-abusers and rescuer-perpetrators
A history of the brutal mistreatment of Jewish child fugitives by those
who were supposed to rescue and care for them has not yet been written.
The picture that emerges from the children’s early postwar testimonies
reveals a disturbing, strange intimacy and cruelty in the realm of the home
of what I call a rescuer-abuser. What should have been a safe shelter was
oen, for the hidden children, a space of daily suering, isolation, and
loneliness. The reasons behind abuse could be multiple, ranging from
pure individual cruelty mixed with anti-Jewish prejudice, the knowledge
of Nazi persecution of Jews and the calculating understanding that Jews
were simply disposable in the eyes of the German occupier, and that
one could benet from the helpless young fugitives by inheriting the
properties of the children’s dead parents.
In their early postwar testimonies, children were capable of expressing
what they felt and what they thought in the face of everyday doses of
emotional and physical cruelty. Recollections of threats of denunciation
by cruel and simple-minded rescuer-abusers, children’s crying and
begging them to spare their lives for one more day provide a brutal and
disturbing picture of rescue that looks much more like a grey zone in which
human greed, lack of compassion and respect for a young life, and pure
exploitation of the young are central to the dynamic of the relationships
between Jewish children and their rescuer-abusers.
On 3 September 1947, in a Jewish children’s home in Bytom located at
23 B. Prusa Street, Gizela Szulberg recollects matter of factly the ways her
rescuers mistreated her on a daily basis. She was born on 23 September
1934 into a well-to-do middle-class Jewish family, and her father was an
engineer and co-owner of a glass factory in Dubeczno, near Włodawa, in
Lublin voivodeship:
My host had two sons-in-law, terrible anti-Semites, and they constantly
said, “We have to kill this Jew or give her back to the ghetto.” This is how
they talked about me. The wife of the rescuer ordered me to pray to my
Jewish God for help. I sat in the room next door and heard everything. The
farmer used to say: “I will not kill her; I do not want to have blood on my
hands.” His wife used to say in response: “You wish to kill me, you do not
have mercy over your own children.” Our gardener [the brother of Mr.
Wajdzik, the host] took lots of money from my parents but did not share
the sum with his brother. He would advise him to kill me, and that would
be the end of the story . . . Later, I learnt what happened with my parents.
164
They were in hiding, but at some point, they did not have any funds
because a woman [not clear who] did not want to return their belongings
to them. They wanted to visit me but were caught by the Germans and
were killed and buried in a ditch. Aer we received this news, the farmer
decided to keep me aer all, but demanded that I bequeath my parents’
estate to him. Every day they would talk only about the estate, nothing
else. I wanted to be treated well, so I had promised them that I would
bequeath them the estate. In spite of my promise, once they threw me out
of the house. I sat near the barn because I had nowhere to go. They found
me there later and allowed me to return inside the house.
I was so drained that I did not care any longer what they would do with
me. When the spring came, I was looking aer the cows in the elds
and was happier, because I did not need to be in the wardrobe in a bent
position. Until today, my posture is still a little bit bent [as a result of
living in the wardrobe]. . . . They caused me so much pain. They hated
me because I was a Jewess. They treated me as if I was a Cinderella, and
nothing else. I would wake up with the sunrise and would go to elds with
the cattle. I had eighteen cattle including the sheep under my care. My
legs were so full of cuts and blisters, they looked horrible.22
A similar case of survival in the house of a rescuer-abuser is poignantly
articulated by Chana Grynberg (or Grinberg). Chana was born in
Głowaczew, a small village in the Radom district. She was born on 15
January 1932. In 1942, the entire Jewish population of Głowaczew was
transferred to the nearby town of Kozienice (Kozhnitz in Yiddish), which
was a thriving centre of Hasidism in central Poland during the nineteenth
century.23 Chana’s parents and her youngest sibling soon died of hunger
in the ghetto and Chana had to fend for herself.24 Aer the liquidation of
the Kozienice ghetto on 27 September 1942 Chana roamed from village
to village and begged for food and a place to stay. One Polish woman,
22 Testimony of Gizela Szulberg, 1947, signed by the interviewer, Ida Gliksztejn, CKŻP
(Central Committee of Polish Jews), le no. 301/2731, pp. 1–2, Archives of ŻIH (Jewish
Historical Institute), Warsaw.
23 See Baruch Kaplinski, ed., Sefer Zikharon le-Kehilat Kozhnitz (Hebrew; Tel Aviv and New
York: Kozienice Organization, 1969; English ed. 1983); on the Kozienice ghetto, see also
Anna Skibińska, “Życie codzienne Żydów w Kozienicach”, Zagłaga: Studia i materiały, 3
(2007): 64–86. For the number of deportees and dates of deportation from Kozienice and
other locations in that vicinity, see Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation
Reinhard Death Camps (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 392–5; Hebrew ed.
Mivtsa Reinhard: Belzets, Sobibor, Treblinkah (Tel Aviv: Am’Oved, 1988).
24 In the close and cramped Kozienice ghetto, people began to die en masse from hunger
in the summer of 1942; Skibińska, “Życie codzienne Żydów w Kozienicach”, 76–82.
The memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland 165
with whom she could stay only a few days, was a crucial helper, advising
her in which direction to go and how to present herself convincingly as a
Polish girl whose parents had been killed by the Germans. In the village of
Trzebień, Chana came across Mrs. Józia B., a farmer and head of the family,
who accepted her without requiring a birth certicate. Chana stayed with
her family for a few months and was well looked aer and well treated as a
help on the farm, so she considered it a safe refuge. However, at one point
in the winter, from fear of being thrown out of the house and having to
roam once again without stable shelter, Chana was forced to disclose to
her new employer-benefactor that she was Jewish. The neighbours of the
farmer had suspected the girl was Jewish and had insisted that Mrs. Józia
check her identity. Aer the disclosure, the woman did not throw Chana
out – she needed her on the farm – but became a rough mental abuser
driven by anti-Jewish prejudices:
I felt so good at this place. However, one day she called me and told me
that people were saying that I was Jewish. In order to check if I was Jewish
she ordered me to bring my birth certicate. This was a very hard decision
to make, but I decided to admit to her that I was Jewish because I could not
face wandering around again. The woman did not throw me out, because
no one else could cope with her, but aer the disclosure of my Jewishness,
she was awful to me. She did not give me much to eat. In the winter she
would not give me much bread to eat, arguing that I had not earned it.
She oen shouted at me and beat me up. I had enough of this treatment
and wanted to leave, but she did not let me, threatening that she would
denounce me to the Germans. I was so bullied that I almost gave up on
living: when terrible bombing began, I did not go to the air-raid shelters,
but stayed with the cows in the elds.25
Seless rescuers and their predicaments in their communities
Of course, Jewish child survivors’ testimonies also illuminate everyday
acts of kindness and goodness bestowed on them by daring, seless
non-Jewish rescuers under life-threatening conditions in Nazi-occupied
Poland.
“Szlamo” (Szlama, Szlomo) Kutnowski, born in 1929 in Warsaw,
worked for a farmer who underwent a transformation from being a caring
25 Chana Grynberg (Grinberg), “Wspomnienia Chany Grynberg” (Memoirs of Chana
Grynberg), in Franciszka Oliwa, ed., “Księga Wspomnień”, le no. 302/289, pp. 87–8,
Archives of ŻIH.
166
employer to knowingly being the caring, long-term rescuer of a Jewish
boy. In his undated early postwar memoirs written in the Jewish Children’s
Home in Lublin, Szlama recounts his rescuer-farmer’s transformation.
Aer his escape from the Warsaw ghetto in 1942, Szlama found work at the
farm of Aleksander Ciemierych in the small village of Zambski Kościelne
(Zambski Stare), in the Pułtusk district:
I had to work hard at his place, but I had enough to eat. He was very good
to me when he did not yet know that I was Jewish, and was still sending
me to take Holy Communion in church. Yet, when he realized that I was
Jewish he was still good to me. . . . People tried to persuade Ciemierych to
get rid of me, but he told them that his conscience did not permit him to
get rid of me in such a cold winter and to leave me without a roof above my
head.26
Szlamo Kutnowski’s plain and bold testimony not only throws light on
his relations with Ciemerych but also provides important clues about the
relations between Ciemerych and other villagers – the social pressure and
instances of blackmail and threats he had to oppose and withstand to save
the Jewish boy. Kutnowski was well aware of the daily battles Ciemierych
had to ght with his neighbours. Therefore, he worried about the safety
and wellbeing of his rescuer aer the end of the war, when he had already
made his way to a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. In February 1948,
from Maine in Germany, Kutnowski wrote in desperation to the Central
Committee of Polish Jews (CKŻP) in Warsaw for news of Ciemierych.
No doubt, he was by then greatly concerned about Ciemierych’s well-
being since he had not received any response from him to his earlier
correspondence:
This man did so much good for me. Now aer the war I wrote to him, but
I did not get a reply. Germans arrested him and I do not know if he has
already returned home or not. They know me as Jan Hodkowski there. I
ask the Committee to nd out what is now happening with Ciemierych,
if he still lives at his [old address] and if not so perhaps his wife Helena
Ciemierych [might know something]. As soon as you get any news please
do write to me promptly.27
26 The memoir of Szlama Kutnowski, le no. M-49/273-279, p. 7, Yad Vashem Archives,
Jerusalem.
27 Ibid., 38.
The memorialization of the Holocaust in Poland 167
The strength and longevity of the bond between the child survivors
and seless rescuers are expressed frequently in postwar children’s
testimonies. In the six-page testimony written on the eve of her departure
to Israel in the summer of 1955, Irena Grundland, née Morgensztern, born
on 30 September 1933 in Warsaw, calls her compassionate and trustworthy
rescuer “aunt”: this was Mrs. Wisia from the small village of Boryczówka,
in the Tremblowa district near Tarnopol. The letter also reveals that
Irena and Aunt Wisia performed like two “actresses” before their Polish
audience: Irena played a Christian Polish girl and Aunt Wisia supported
her in a variety of ways in her special performance to escape death:
The cousin of Mr. Pietruszka I want to call Aunt Wisia. She is a wonderful
human being and I lived with her until 1946. I grazed cows and geese
during my stay at her place. She knew that I was Jewish, but never touched
upon that topic with me. She was as good to me as if she had been my
mother. Aunt Wisia was a teacher. She lived on her own. Her parents
were deported to Siberia [by the Soviets] and her brother was captured
and imprisoned by the Germans. We were a good team, and we still write
letters to each other.28
Child survivors’ testimonies are oen corroborated by the early postwar
testimonies of genuinely seless Polish rescuers. Attempts to persuade
the rescuers to get rid of and thus abandon the young Jewish fugitives
are recounted by many of these rescuers. In her undated early postwar
testimony, Klementyna Darczuk, born on 17 February 1883, recalls that her
neighbour in Otwock complained many times about her sheltering two
Jewish children, Michał and Basia Cytryn. The neighbour also threatened
Mrs. Darczuk with denunciation to the police. Darczuk’s assertive, sharp,
and cunning response pre-empted the neighbour’s desire to betray her
and the two young fugitives:
The girl did not look like a Jewess, only the boy, when he took o his hat
in the church, began to look like a Jew, but he eagerly prayed. A few times
he experienced some problems. My neighbour Włodarczykowa also
constantly complained to me that I was sheltering Jews (but of course,
I do not wish to cause her any harm now. God should be her judge. She
had a rotten character in the past and today she is mean too). Once,
when she saw the children, she abused me and threatened me for two
hours that she would denounce me to the Germans. But I replied, yes, go
28 The testimony of Irena Grundland (Morgersztern), 1955, CKŻP, le No. 301/5543, p.
5, Archives of ZIH.
168
ahead, you rogue! If you denounce me, I then too will denounce you to
the Germans. I will tell them that you sell butter on the black market and
make commercial deals with Jews.29
Conclusions
The accounts of rescue in the postwar testimonies of Polish Jewish child
survivors, Polish seless rescuers, and other non-Jewish eyewitnesses
enable historians to paint a complex and nuanced history of rescue that
challenges the old, false schemas of historical thinking about rescuers,
and to question the ahistorical representation of a “good saviour nation”
of Polish Jews. Those testimonies are a potent weapon against the post-
2015 ideologization and politicization of the history of rescue. The
testimonies expose the false narratives and both naive and sinister lies
in hagiographical writings, representations, and commemorations
about the wartime rescue of Polish Jews. They are the evidence that the
weaponization of the history of the Holocaust and rescue has its limits,
despite its current triumphs.
29 Two-page testimony of Mrs. Klementyna Darczuk to Henryk Wasser, interviewer,
n.d., Record Group 104/File 204, Seria I, 1, YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research), New
York; under the testimony Wasser wrote a poignant note: “My observation: a good face,
trustworthy eyes, she knows how to read and write. She is 64-years-old. In spite of her
eye problems, she has to continue work as a dressmaker. She does not portray her rescue
activities as heroic. She speaks with no touch of false pathos.” Henryk (Hersh) Wasser was
the secretary and one of the few remaining key members of the underground archive in the
Warsaw ghetto, Oneg Shabbat. On the wartime activities of Wasser in the Warsaw ghetto,
see Samuel Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2007), 292–9.
© 2021 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
