Wartime Rescue of Jews by the Polish Catholic Clergy

It was a truly satanic moral trial that Poles were subjected to. I do not know if anyone else would have emerged victorious from it. …

On the other hand, to speak concretely of the attitude of Poles toward Jews: the majority of Poles behaved passively, but that can be explained by the terror and also by the fact that Poles, too, were being systematically murdered on a mass scale by the Germans.”¹⁰²⁶
Raul Hilberg, preeminent Holocaust historian:
“Overall, the general Polish population is not mentioned in German documents in respect of its participation as harassing Jews and helping the Germans. To the contrary; many German reports indicate that Poles felt anxiety for their own safety after the Jews disappeared. There are some German documents that mention some Poles, notably Polish police, railroad-workers and low-level employees in German offices but there was no Polish central authority collaborating with the Germans, as we find in e.g. Norway and its Quisling government or France and its Vichy regime. This was never the case in Poland.

As was the case in many European countries, there were also Polish individuals that played extortion games with Jews, but then there were also Poles that helped Jews under risk of facing death penalty from the German occupants. Both categories were relatively small in comparison to the general population, albeit one must take into consideration that most survivors made it through the war by Polish help and protection. A friend of mine, Bronia Klebanski, who is Jewish but lived on the ‘Aryan’ side of society and was an active member of the Jewish underground in the Bialystok [Białystok] area, once told me a story of how she at a time took the train during the war, and was suddenly pointed out by a little girl who yelled ‘Jew!’. All the Polish passengers sat quietly, and nobody said anything to instigate further interest. This account is a small example of the general practice of non-collaboration among the Poles during the war.

… In Ukraine, contrary to Poland, where the Germans built secluded death camps, Jews were often massacred on the spot. The Nazi death camps in occupied Poland such as Treblinka, Belzec [Bełżec], Sobibor [Sobibór] and Chelmno [Chełmno] were all hidden to the public.”¹⁰²⁷

Israel Gutman, historian at Yad Vashem, editor-in-chief of The Encylopedia of the Holocaust, and Warsaw ghetto fighter:
“This feeling of identification of Poles from all social spheres and their anti-German solidarity is a previously unheard of historical achievement and one of Europe’s greatest under Nazi occupation. I should like to make two things clear here. First, all accusations against the Poles that they were responsible for what is referred to as the ‘Final Solution’ are not even worth mentioning. Secondly, there is no validity at all in the contention that … Polish attitudes were the reason for the siting of the death camps in Poland.

Poland was a completely occupied country. There was a difference in the kind of ‘occupation’ countries underwent in Europe. Each country experienced a different occupation and almost all had a certain amount of autonomy, limited and defined in various ways. This autonomy did not exist in Poland. No one asked the Poles how one should treat the Jews.”¹⁰²⁸
“Only in Poland did the Germans impose such draconian punishments (i.e., death) for helping Jews. Yet despite that, Poles constitute the largest number of “Righteous.” To a great extent, it is the “Righteous” who have changed the Israelis’ perception of Poland. That is what influenced me. I too, at first, accepted these negative stereotypes as truth. Collaborators, blackmailers, neighbours who wouldn’t help. That’s what was said in all articles, in books. But when Yad Vashem published its Encyclopedia of the Righteous – I was the editor – I was forced to examine this again through the stories told by Jews who were saved. I don’t change my opinions readily, but these testimonies brought about a diametrical change in opinion. … Gradually, they (i.e., Israelis) are learning about this. It enables them to see Poles as real people, made of flesh and blood. The same as Jews. In the archives of Yad Vashem I found testimonies of such deeds, deeds that I myself would not be able to do. And that disturbs my peace. It was a trial, a test of one’s humanity. Would we pass this test if placed in that situation? All of us—both Jews and Poles—we are only human. We are not saints. Yes, there were blackmailers in Poland. There were also heroes. People like (Irena) Sendlerowa, of whom you may be very proud.”¹⁰²⁹
“Sometimes I hear Jews accusing the Poles of deliberately not helping them even though they could have done so. Such observations are expressions of pain, which eclipse a sensible attitude. More could certainly have been done to save Jews, but the Poles in the conditions of the occupation could not fundamentally have changed the fate of the Jews. … I shall permit myself to say more—there is no moral imperative which demands that a normal mortal should risk his life and that of his family to save his neighbour. Are we capable of imagining the agony of fear of an individual, a family who selflessly and voluntarily, only due to an inner human impulse, bring into their home someone threatened with death. … The Poles should be proud that they had so many just lights, of whom Ringelblum spoke, who are the real heroes of the deluge. And we can never do enough to thank these rare people.”¹⁰³⁰
Isaac Glick, Thornhill, Ontario, former Lieutenant-Colonel in the Israeli Defence Force:
Although it is generally believed that Germans, as a nation, were responsible for the Holocaust, it is very important to state that people in Germany were more resistant to Jewish repression than those in the neighbouring occupied countries, including Poland … The reason Germans established ghettos and concentration camps in these countries was because the local populations not only didn’t object, they were often seen as righteous. The anti-Semitism in Poland actually rivalled that in Germany.¹⁰³¹
The following is a characteristic excerpt from a Jewish memorial book expressing perverse view that, unfortunately, inform a great deal of Jewish historiography on Polish-Jewish relations, demonizing Poles and turning them into the primary target of a broad-based assault on Christianity and, in particular, the Catholic Church:
The anti-Semitic propaganda, which was being conducted in Poland before the outbreak of the Second World War, trained the hearts and prepared the ground for the deeds so horrifying in their cruelty and ruthlessness during the war. When Hitler’s minions invaded Poland they found Poles who already agreed with them, for regarding the destruction of the Jews there were Poles who were of one mind with the Nazis. The Poles were well trained by the fifth column, Hitler’s agents, who spread hatred of the Jews. The Nazis found in the Poles not opponents, but loyal assistants in the act of destruction. All circles of Poles participated in this project of mass-murder, from the laborer to the priest. …

Due to this attitude of the Poles regarding the Jews, can it be surprising that Poland was chosen by the Devil and his demons of destruction to be the arena for the destruction of European Jewry. The ground here had been worked and prepared enough for the task. The Nazi monster was certain that its satanic enterprise would have a one hundred percent success rate here. …
This is the Christian ethic, which aspired to be the most exalted ethic for all of humanity. With regard to the Jews, Christianity—of which the Poles were considered its most devoted practitioners—was revealed in all of its despicableness and lowliness. Christianity did not purify their souls: they remained wild, blood thirsty, just as they had been a thousand years before when they were still sunk in the ignorance of paganism.¹⁰³² The moral and humane imperative of our prophets: “My refugees shall live among you, hide the refugees and do not reveal the wanderer!” [Isaiah 16/3]—such an imperative was strange and foreign to our Polish neighbors.¹⁰³³
The harsh and hateful criticism of Poles which permeates much of Jewish literature necessarily invites assessing the bearers of such criticism by their own standards. Is there any evidence that any of these harsh critics have themselves performed a deed of significant self-sacrifice, let alone heroism, on behalf of a non-Jew?
French-Jewish intellectual Pierre Vidal-Naquet has decried “the sort of primitive anti-Polish sentiments that too often characterize those whom I shall call ‘professional Jews’.”¹⁰³⁴ Unfortunately, the pathology of anti-polonism runs deep and has infected “artistic” pursuits. In a spiteful parody of a “Passion play” titled “Rebbe,” Artists For Israel International have, contrary to the documented historical record, recast Polish priests as the instigators of the death of a rabbi—a Jesus figure—in the Warsaw ghetto. (Internet: .)
At this point the invasion of Poland by the Nazis begins and a series of short scenes with ominous and sad music depict the occupation of the city and the sealing off of the Jewish Quarter which now becomes the Warsaw Ghetto. Now the Nazis lock the Jewish Quarter and force the Czerniakow character to come to them and cut a deal to get the key, which he does by appointing Yehudah as the head of the Jewish police who will co-operate with the Polish police and the German occupation authorities.

The last maamar (Chassidic version of Last Supper Yn 13-17 OJBC) of Rebbe (who is now wearing a Star of David armband, as are the rest of Rebbe’s talmidim) comes as a reply to Shimon the Zealot. Shimon the Zealot speaks in the upper room to all the Rebbe’s talmidim disciples) in an impassioned manner about the boxcars leading to a death camp and the need for underground resistance fighters. When the other Shimon (Kefa or Peter) vows his part in protecting the Rebbe (Yn 13:37 OJBC), Rebbe goes to the window and looks out. With a revelatory flutter-cut Rebbe sees the tarnegol (rooster) in the wooden crate cage in the back of the passing truck, and Rebbe announces prophetically the coming betrayal. Yehudah, wearing his Chassidic garb, departs into the Warsaw night.

In the next scene Shimon Kefa and Rebbe pass the security point where Yehudah is able to flag them through, checking their passes, which are “work permits” allowing them to leave the Jewish Ghetto. Yehudah gives Rebbe a kiss on the cheek. The Polish police at the checkpoint see this and look at each other knowingly. Shimon Kefa accompanies Rebbe to a Cathedral and waits outside while Rebbe goes up to the door to knock.

Inside the Cathedral, a Catholic S.S. officer is leaving the confessional booth where he has been confessing to Father Kayafenski. Father Nikodimski follows him out and ushers Rebbe into the vestibule of the Roman Catholic church to have a meeting with Father Kayafenski. Since it is Pesach season, Father Nikodimski hopes that the senior priest will use his ecumenical influence with a Catholic S.S. officer to have the food rations increased for the Jewish people in the Ghetto. Father Nikodimski leaves Rebbe alone in the vestibule with Father Kayafenski.

In this scene between Rebbe and Father Kayafenski, Rebbe is invited to enter the sanctuary, but he refuses because of the tzelamim (idols, images, any physical object or statue worshiped as deity). The scene that unfolds is similar in some respects to the Grand Inquisitor scene in the Brothers Karamazov. Finally, Father Kayafenski becomes angry and exits the vestibule, going outside through the front door. Rebbe begins to tear down the tzelamim, using a tall white metal candelabrum to shatter the images including that of a San Gennaro statue with the money fastened all over it). Then the Catholic S.S. Officer and Father Kayafenski burst into the sanctuary with other soldiers and police and Rebbe is bound and taken out of the Catholic church.

On the steps outside a Nazi soldier seizes Shimon Kefa, shouting, “You were with him!” Shimon Kefa curses Rebbe, and just then a truck goes by with a tarnegol (rooster) in the wooden crate cage in the back of the passing truck. Then Kefa stares at Rebbe in shock and remorse.

At the railroad terminal, in front of several empty boxcars, the Nazi soldiers cut Rebbe’s payos with their bayonets and beat him up, shouting, “You killed our G-d, we kill you.” They force Rebbe to put on a striped Holocaust death camp prison uniform, then take him to the top of a gallows, then pierce his wrists and feet with their bayonets and put him on a gallows with two other Jews in stripped Holocaust death camp prison uniforms where they leave him hanging in the middle. As a shot of Warsaw reveals the horrific evil going on throughout the city, the body of Rebbe is tossed in the boxcar with the other two Jews. We see the boxcar slowly going into the dusk of the approaching night toward the death camps.

Then, in their death camp uniforms, the talmidim (minus Yehudah as in Yn chp 21 OJBC) awaken in a boat near the shore in Lake Galilee to find themselves amazingly no longer in the Polish ghetto but now in modern Eretz Yisroel (previewed in the wedding vision earlier). The talmidim have a sense of the presence of the Moshiach. As they see Rebbe in his kaftan with his Star of David armband, standing on the seashore, they follow his instructions and throw out their net. The fish we saw at the beginning are seen again, symbolizing the world-wide fishing expedition (fishing for lost unredeemed men) of Moshiach’s Kehillah. For the camera pulls up from the fish in the giant net in an aerial shot which becomes a satellite shot of Israel and then a space station shot of the whole world as the music swells.

1 Although arrested by the Germans, Rev. Albin Jaroszewicz was not killed. His fate is described later on in the text.

2 On the activities of the Benedictine Samaritan Sisters of the Cross of Christ in Niegów-Samaria, Henryków, and Pruszków, see Zygmunt Zieliński, ed., Życie religijne w Polsce pod okupacją 1939–1945: Metropolie wileńska i lwowska, zakony (Katowice: Unia, 1992), 334–37; Ewa Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jewish Children in German-Occupied Poland, 1939–1945 (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1997), 129–30, 164–66.

3 Rev. Władysław Korniłowicz, chaplain of the Institute for Blind Children run by the Franciscan Sisters Servants of the Cross outside Warsaw, sheltered and assisted Jewish converts and Jews who escaped from the ghetto. See Mateusz Wyrwich, “Obcy we własnym mieście,” Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, no. 3 (2009): 82 (testimony of Tomasz Prot). Jan Kott, a Jew who was baptized as a child, wrote: “Father Korniłowicz baptized many of the Jews who were part of the long-assimilated Warsaw intelligenstsia. I do not know how many of these conversions were truly religious and how many were prompted by the threat of a wave of anti-Semitism. Undoubtedly Father Korniłowicz’s apostolic gift also played a major role.” See Jan Kott, Still Alive: An Autobiograpgical Essay (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 15.

4 Before the war Rev. Jan Zieja was a professor at the clerical seminary in Pińsk, in Polesie (Polesia). He was a well-known preacher and author of works on religious subjects. During the war he provided many Jews with baptismal and birth certificates, temporary shelter, and food, and found hiding places for them. See his account in Władysław Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewinówna, Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, Second revised and expanded edition (Kraków: Znak, 1969), 819–20. Some of his activities are detailed in this study.

5 In interwar Poland the combination birth and baptismal certificate issued by Roman Catholic parishes had the status of official state documents. During the German occupation a birth and baptismal certificate issued by a Roman Catholic parish allowed the bearer to obtain a Kennkarte, an identity card introduced by the Germans. Kennkarten were issued to Poles 15 and older. To receive a Kennkarte, a person had to fill out an application and provide documents such as a birth certificate, prewar Polish identity document, marriage certificate, etc. Poles were obliged to make a formal declaration of their Aryan ethnicity. Upon receiving the card, applicants were fingerprinted. Since Polish-speaking civil servants were involved in the process, the cards were frequently forged, which allowed for members of the underground or Polish Jews to get a new identity. Moreover, illegal printing shops manufacturing Kennkarten operated in occupied Poland. The cards were widely available on the black market. According to the Gestapo, in 1943 in Warsaw there were up to 150,000 fake cards in circulation.

6 The Persecution of the Catholic Church in German-Occupied Poland: Reports Presented by H.E. Cardinal Hlond, Primate of Poland, to Pope Pius XII, Vatican Broadcasts and Other Reliable Evidence (London: Burns Oates, 1941; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1941).

7 Marcin Libicki and Ryszard Wryk, eds., Zbrodnie niemieckie w Wielkopolsce w latach 1939–1945 (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2004), 140.

8 The massacre of thousands of Roman Catholic clergy by the Nazi Germans was not the largest massacre of Catholic clergy in the Twentieth Century. The Spanish Left, especially Communists and Socialists, managed to butcher 13 bishops, 4,184 diocesan priests, 2,365 members of religious orders of men, and 283 nuns in a shorter span, just before and during the Civil War in Spain (July 1936 to April 1939). The vast majority of the victims were killed in 1936. The highest concentration of killings took place in Catalonia; virtually every Catholic church was set on fire in Barcelona. The cruelty and barbarity with which the Catholic clergy of Spain was put to death often exceeded the methods used by the Nazis and the Soviets. See William James Callahan, The Catholic Church in Spain, 1875–1998 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2000); Michael Burleigh, Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and Politics, from the Great War to the War on Religion (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 127–35. For some examples of the horrific fate of the Spanish clergy see and . The anti-clerical bloodbath perpetrated by the Spanish Left was exceeded only by the Soviet strike against the Russian Orthodox Church over a much longer period (between 1918 and 1938), when, according to the calculations of Canadian historian Dimitry Pospielovsky, about 600 bishops and 40,000 Orthodox priests were physically eliminated, that is between 80 and 85 percent of the clergy existing at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1917.

9 Franciszek J. Proch, Poland’s Way of the Cross 1939–1945 (New York: Polish Association of Former Political Prisoners of Nazi and Soviet Concentration Camps, 1987), 32–36; “Dachau”, Encyklopedia katolicka, volume 3 (Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 1979), columns 965–67.

10 For a detailed account of the fate of the Catholic clergy in Dachau see Bedřich Hoffmann, And Who Will Kill You: The Chronicle of the Life and Suffering of Priests in the Concentration Camps (Poznań: Pallottinum, 1994). See also the following memoirs by Polish priest prisoners of Dachau: Stanisław Grabowski, Follow Me: The Memoirs of a Polish Priest (Roseville, Minnesota: White Rose Press, 1997); Memoir of Fr. Czesli W. (Chester) Kozal, O.M.I. ([United States]: Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, 2004); Kazimierz Majdański, You Shall Be My Witnesses: Lessons Beyond Dachau (Garden City Park, New York: Square One Publishers, 2008); Henryk Maria Malak, Shavelings in Death Camps: A Polish Priest’s Memoir of Imprisonment by the Nazis, 1939–1945 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012). The Austrian Jesuit, Rev. Johann Lenz, who was imprisoned in Dachau wrote glowingly of the Polish priests. In the last years of the war, when the camp was hit with epidemics of typhus, at first the infirmary was run by orderlies who would steal the contents of parcels that patients received from families and friends. As the typhus epidemic progressed, some of these died, while other orderlies fled for their lives, along with the SS guards, so that eventually the care of the dying was left to the priests. Meanwhile, the dauntless Polish priests “had achieved the seemingly impossible and obtained permission from the SS authorities to work among the dying in the typhus isolation block.” See John M. Lenz, Christ in Dachau, or Christ Victorious: Experiences in a Concentration Camp (Vienna: n.p., 1960). For information on the resistance activities of priests in Dachau and other camps, see Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz, Resistance in the Nazi Concentration Camps, 1933–1945 (Warsaw: PWN–Polish Scientific Publishers, 1982), chapter 13 (“Religious life in the concentration camps”), 348–65.

11 Roman Dzwonkowski, “Represje wobec polskiego duchowieństwa katolickiego na ziemiach północno-wschodnich II RP 1939–1941,” in Michał Gnatowski and Daniel Boćkowski, eds., Sowietyzacja i rusyfikacja północno-wschodnich ziem II Rzeczypospolitej (1939–1941): Studia i materiały (Białystok: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu w Białymstoku, 2003), 75–93; Roman Dzwonkowski, “Represje wobec polskiego duchowieństwa katolickiego pod okupacją sowiecką 1939–1941,” in Piotr Chmielowiec, ed., Okupacja sowiecka ziem polskich (1939–1941) (Rzeszów and Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Nardowej–Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, 2005), 139–49.

12 By way of comparison, in Belgium, a country with a much smaller Catholic population than Poland, at the outbreak of the war, there were 9,700 priests, with a further 12,000 seminarians, 12,700 monks, and 49,600 nuns. See Bob Moore, Survivors: Jewish Self-Help and Rescue in Nazi-Occupied Western Europe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 169. In 1929, France had some 46,500 diocesan priests (almost 50,000 in 1939), 7,000 priests who were members of religious orders, and 117,000 nuns. The number of clergy in Italy was even greater, with 129,000 nuns in 1936.

13 Andrew Turchyn, “The Ukrainian Catholic Church During WWII,” The Ukrainian Quarterly, volume XLI, no. 1–2 (Summer/Spring 1985), 57–67. Out of some 2,800 priests and male religious, 25 were arrested and several were sent to concentration camps, where all but one survived. Rev. Omelian Kovch, of Przemyślany, who was arrested for providing false baptismal certificates to Jews, perished in the Majdanek concentration camp.

14 Surprisingly, but perhaps very tellingly, in a survey conducted in the early part of 2007, by the Mannheimer Foschungsgruppe Wahlen institute for Germany’s ZDF public television program, Germans—who consider themselves to be a tolerant nation but are often contemptuous of the “nationalistic” and “anti-Semitic” Poles—declared that Poland was, by far, the country in the European Union that they disliked the most. Almost one quarter (23 percent) of Germans polled openly declared their animosity toward Poland. (The next most loathed country, Romania, came in only at 11 percent.) It must be borne in mind that Poland was the country that Germany most directed its fury and destruction at during the Second World War, and where the Germans killed six million people, half of them Jews and half Christians. Since it is considered politically incorrect to voice anti-Semitic views, contemporary Germans continue to channel their contempt at Poland. In certain Leftist constitencies in Western Europe, there is an obscene resurgence of antipathy toward Poland, often peppered with anti-Catholic rhetoric. A prominent example is Pilar Rahola, a Catalan member of the Spanish extreme Left and self-styled human rights activist, who wrote in El País, a leading Spanish daily, on March 17, 2007: “Without any doubt, Poland is the key to the wickedness that culminated in the extermination of two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe.” The curious symbiosis of the views of the extreme Right and Left is all too reminiscent of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which unleashed the most tragic episode in Twentieth Century European history.

15 Rev. Zawadzki penned his exploits in the parish chronicle, Kronika parafialna rzymskokatolickiej parafii św. Trójcy w Będzinie, which is reproduced in part in Bolesław Ciepiela and Małgorzata Sromek, eds., Śladami Żydów Zagłębia Dąbrowskiego: Wspomnienia (Będzin: Stowarzyszenie Autorów Polskich Oddział Będziński, 2009), 162–64.

16 Testimony of Jakub Sender, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 1225.

17 Jan Przemsza-Zieliński, Zagłębie Dąbrowskie w II wojnie światowej: Wrzesień 1939 – okupacja – ruch oporu – wyzwolenie 1945 (Sosnowiec: Sosnowiecka Oficyna Wydawniczo-Autorska “Sowa-Press,” 1995), 38–39.

18 Stanisław Wroński and Maria Zwolakowa, Polacy Żydzi 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 1971), 321.

19 Tadeusz Kosibowicz, Story of Rescue, September 2014, The Polish Righteous, Internet: .

20 Krystyna Dębowska, et al., eds., Siostry zakonne w Polsce: Słownik biograficzny, vol. 1 (Niepokalanów: Wydawnictwo Ojców Franciszkanów, 1994), 280.

21 Martin Dean, ed., Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, in association with the United States Memorial Museum, 2012), volume II, Part A, 558.

22 Gabriel Michalik, “Lwy pana hrabiego,” Gazeta Wyborcza, November 29, 2005.

23 Esther Farbstein, Hidden in Thunder: Perspectives on Faith, Halachah and Leadership during the Holocaust, volume 1 (Jerusalem: Mossad Harav Kook, 2007), 119.

24 Zygmunt Zieliński, ed., Życie religijne w Polsce pod okupacją hitlerowską 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Ośrodek Dokumentacji i Studiów Społecznych, 1982), 444; Eva Feldenkreiz-Grinbal, ed., Eth Ezkera—Whenever I Remember: Memorial Book of the Jewish Community in Tzoyzmir (Sandomierz) (Tel Aviv: Association of Tzoyzmir Jews and Moreshet Publishing, 1993), 553, 565–66; Testimony of Izrael Kaiser, February 3, 1947, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 2350.

25 After the Soviet “liberation” of Poland and installation of a puppet regime, Rev. Jan Stępień was wanted by the Communist Security Police. He had to assume false identities while moving from place to place. He was arrested on July 5, 1947, underwent a show trial for spying, subversion, and cooperating with Jesuit plotters in the Soviet Union, and sentenced to death on November 29, 1947. On the intervention of Adam Cardinal Sapieha and Bishop Jan Kanty Lorek, his death sentence was commuted to 15 years imprisonment. He was released in April 1955, after the death of Stalin. He was interrogated by Józef Różański (Goldberg), the head of the Investigation Department of the Ministry of Public Security and notorious sadist who persecuted members of the anti-Communist underground with zeal. (Józef Różański is buried in Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery.) In his memoirs, Rev. Stępień recalled that only two of his interrogators, out of more than a dozen, were non-Jews. See Leszek Żebrowski, “Księża niezłomni: Godnie przeżył swój czas,” Nasz Dziennik, March 31–April 1, 2007. During the years 1944–1954, 167 of the 450 top positions in the Ministry of Public Security, or 37.1 percent, were occupied by people of Jewish origin. Ethnic Poles accounted for 49.1 percent, and the balance were filled for the most part by Soviet officers (Russians, Belorussians, and Ukrainians), who accounted for 10.2 percent of the cadre. Of the 107 voivodship Security Office heads and their deputies, 22 were Jews. See Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, “Żydzi w kierownictwie UB: Stereotyp czy rzeczywistość,” Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, no. 11 (November 2005): 37–42; Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, ed., Aparat bezpieczeństwa w Polsce: Kadra kierownicza, volume 1: 1944–1956 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2005).

26 Abraham Kronenberg, ed., Khurbn Bilgoraj (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1956); Polish translation: Zagłada Biłgoraja: Księga pamięci (Gdańsk: Słowo/obraz.terytoria, 2009), 179, 182.

27 Barnet Litvinoff, The Burning Bush: Antisemitism and World History (London: Collins, 1988), 92.

28 Yehuda Chamiel, “On the Brink of the Holocaust,” in Yitzchak Ivri, ed., Book of Kehilat Ostrolenka: Yizkor Book of the Jewish Community of Ostrolenka (Tel Aviv: Irgun Yotzei Ostrolenka in Israel, 2009), 343.

29 The promotion of business initiatives (such as cooperatives) for ethnic Poles, who were grossly underrepresented in Polish commerce, was unfairly labeled by many Jews as being anti-Semitic.

30 Ryszard Adamczyk, Izbicy dni powszednie: Wojna i okupacja: Pamięrnik pisany po latach (Lublin: Norbertinum, 2007), 64.

31 Michael A. Nevins, Dubrowa–Dabrowa Bialostocka: Memorial to a Shtetl, 2^nd edition (River Vale, New Jersey: n.p., 2000), 19.

32 Magdalena Siek, ed., Archiwum Ringelbluma: Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawskiego, vol. 8: Tereny wcielone do Rzeszy: Okręg Rzeszy Gdańsk-Prusy Zachodnie, rejencja ciechanowska, Górny Śląsk (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2012), 321.

33 Magdalena Siek, ed., Archiwum Ringelbluma: Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawskiego, vol. 9: Tereny wcielone do Rzeszy: Kraj Warty (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny im. Emanuela Ringelbluma, 2012), 71.

34 Regina Smoter Grzeszkiewicz, “Kapłani Zamojszczyzny prześladowani i zamordowani podczas II wojny światowej,” Internet: .

35 Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, and Volker Reiss, ‘Those Were the Days’: The Holocaust through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 4; Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, eds., Nazism 1919–1945: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts, volume II: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (New York: Schocken, 1988), 939.

36 Moshe Weiss, “To Commemorate the 50^th Anniversary of the Liberation from Auschwitz,” The Jewish Press (Brooklyn), January 27, 1995; Henryk Schönker, Dotknięcie anioła (Warsaw: Ośrodek Karta, 2005), 28–30. Leon’s son, Henryk, also became a local hero of sorts when a story spread that he had smashed a bicycle belonging to a German soldier. Although this rumour proved to be untrue, no one betrayed him.

37 Rhoda G. Lewin, ed., Witnesses to the Holocaust: An Oral History (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 139.

38 Testimony of Józef Saks, October 1945, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 1023.

39 Father Kolbe’s beatification and subsequent canonization gave rise to an ugly campaign of vilification by uninformed sources, who hold themselves out as “experts” on Polish-Jewish relations. The pernicious charges against Father Kolbe were thoroughly discredited at the time, but have been revived in recent years. In fact, Father Kolbe rarely touched on the topic of Jews in his writings, and only on a few occasions expressed restrained criticism about their influence on Polish society. In 1982, two historians—Daniel L. Schlafly, Jr., a Catholic, and Warren Green, a Jew—undertook extensive research on Father Kolbe’s prewar activities. In their report, “The Charges and the Truth,” published in the St. Louis Jewish Light (June 30, 1982), they stated that, in all of Father Kolbe’s published works, there were only 14 references to Jews, some very positive, five negative, and none racist. Another charge levelled at Father Kolbe had to do with Mały Dziennik, the popular daily newspaper produced at his friary, which was accused of promoting anti-Semitism. Father Kolbe was away in Japan for much of the 1930’s and issued instructions not to publish articles that could be construed as being anti-Semitic. See Michael Schwartz, “The Deputy Myth,” The Persistent Prejudice: Anti-Catholicism in America (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 1984), 235–38. The tone for the hatred spewed on Father Kolbe was set by Rabbi Lev K. Nelson, who wrote in the Boston Jewish Advocate (November 4, 1982): “…the sainted Kolbe was a notorious anti-Semite during the Hitler regime in Poland … How can we possibly say that Kolbe is Kosher when his whole life has been unclean—seared by the disease of anti-Semitism and sullied by the spewing of hatred towards human beings of a different faith? Is it irony or poetic justice that the man who was indirectly responsible for crowding Auschwitz with its victims, was in turn compelled to share their bitter lot and witness the result of the preaching of hatred!” Anne Roiphe, a literary editor of the liberal Jewish-American periodical Tikkun, who appears not to appreciate that the Nazis also built camps for and engaged in the systematic destruction of Christian Poles, especially the clergy, made the following remarks in A Season For Healing: Reflections on the Holocaust (New York: Summit Books, 1988), at p.130: “Father Kolbe was a nationalist of great fervor. His objection to the Nazis was nationalistic not moral … A known anti-Semite, even one caught in the machinery to kill the Jews, hardly seem a candidate for sainthood, at least to Jews. In making a pilgrimage to the camp and marking the death of Father Kolbe, [Pope John Paul II] seems once again to diminish the death of all Jews who died there.” Joseph Polak, director of the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation at Boston University, called a modest shrine erected in the Auschwitz cell where Father Kolbe was put to death “a landmark etched only in thoughtlessness and cruelty”. See his “Auschwitz Revisited: Icons, Memories, Elegies”, Midstream, June/July 1990, 17–18. In his best seller, Chutzpah (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), Alan M. Dershowitz wrote, at p.143, that Father Kolbe was “a notorious anti-Semite who almost certainly would never have sacrificed his life for a condemned Jewish inmate. (In fact, it is unlikely that Kolbe ever even met a Jew at Auschwitz, since the Polish prisoners were kept entirely separate from the Jews.)” On August 1, 1994, The New York Times ran a letter from Alfred Lipson, Senior Researcher, Holocaust Resource Center and Archives, City University of New York, in which Lipson stated: “The Polish priest’s canonization caused a controversy because of past anti-Semitism, especially his attacks on Jews in his popular publications and preachings.” David M. Crowe, an American historian and former member of the Education Committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., wrote in his study The Holocaust: Roots, History, and Aftermath (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2008), at p.371: “Kolbe was a Franciscan priest from Łódź who operated a religious center near Warsaw. He was arrested on several occasions by the Germans for helping refugees. [Crowe neglects to point out that many, if not most, of the refugees were Jews. M.P.] But most of Father Kolbe’s fame came from his willingness to die in place of another prisoner in Auschwitz. In 1971, questions were raised about his beatification after it was discovered that Kolbe was an anti-Semite who accepted the fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion as authentic. [Many people did at the time, including Winston Churchill. M.P.]. He wrote about the ‘perverse Jewish-Masonic press’ and claimed that the Talmud ‘breathes hatred against Christ and Christians.’ [It is unlikely that these were Father Kolbe’s word. In any event, reputable scholars acknowledge that that description of the Talmud is accurate. See, for example, Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton, New Jersey and Oxford: Princeton Univerity Press, 2007). M.P.] He also thought that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for Jewish sins. [This is a totally preposterous charge which goes contrary to all evidence. Moreover, the Holocaust did not get underway until after Kolbe’s death. M.P.] In 1982, Pope John Paul II canonized him as a ‘martyr of charity.’”

40 According to a report of the order’s provincial from October 1940 found in the Niepokalanów archives: “During the course of the year 1940, Niepokalanów housed and fed many refugees. Among the first group of 3,500 refugees were 2,000 Jews. After the departure of the first group of refugees in the spring of 1940, a second group of exiles from Pomerania was housed in the friary. This group now also has departed. At the writing of this report, the monastery awaits the arrival of another 2,000 displaced persons. See Claude R. Foster, Mary’s Knight: The Mission and Martyrdom of Saint Maksymilian Maria Kolbe (West Chester, Pennsylvania: West Chester University Press, 2002), 630.

41 Antonio Ricciardi, St. Maximilian Kolbe, Apostle of Our Difficult Age (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1982), 248.

42 Entry for “Glowno,” in Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland, Internet: , translated from Pinkas hakehillot Polin, volume 1 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976), 81–84.

43 In the early part of the war, many of Europe’s major cities witnessed anti-Jewish riots and pogroms carried out by the local population. Such occurrences were instigated or orchestrated by the Germans in Prague, Paris, the Hague, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Oslo, and Kaunas. After the outbreak of the violence, the Germans assumed the role of “protectors” of the Jewish population. See Tomasz Szarota, “Anti Jewish Pogroms and Incidents in the Occupied Europe,” Daniel Grinberg, ed., The Holocaust Fifty Years After: 50^th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Papers from the Conference Organized by the Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw, March 29–31, 1993 (Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute of Warsaw, n.d.), 108–23; Tomasz Szarota, On the Threshold of the Holocaust: Anti-Jewish Riots and Pogroms in Occupied Europe: Warsas–Paris–The Hague–Amsterdam–Antwerp–Kaunas (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2015).

44 According to some reports, Archbishop Gall also raised this matter with the German authorities. See Andrzej Żbikowski, ed., Polacy i Żydzi pod okupacją niemiecką 1939–1945: Studia i materiały (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej—Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, 2006), 554, 641.

45 Aleksander Bieberstein, Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1985), 38–39, 223.

46 Tatiana Berenstein and Adam Rutkowski, Assistance to the Jews in Poland 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Polonia Publishing House, 1963), 40; Bartoszewski and Lewinówna, Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, 2^nd ed., 824; Tomasz Pawlikowski, Adam Stefan Kardynał Sapieha (Lublin: Test and Towarzystwo im. Stanisława ze Skarbimierza, 2004), 82‒86; Andrzej Chwalba, Okupacyjny Kraków w latach 1939–1945 (Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 2011), 157; Jarosław Sellin, “Arcybiskup Adam Stefan Sapieha a Holokaust,” Kwartalnik Historii Żydów, no. 4 (2014): 774–85.

47 Wiktor Jacewicz and Jan Woś, Martyrologium polskiego duchowieństwa rzymskokatolickiego pod okupacją hitlerowską w latach 1939–1945, 5 volumes (Warsaw: Akademia Teologii Katolickiej, 1977–1981), here in volume 4 (1978), 460.

48 Władysław Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewinówna, eds., Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej: Polacy z pomocą Żydom 1939–1945, First edition (Kraków: Znak, 1966), 166.

49 Mira Ryczke Kimmelman, Echoes from the Holocaust: A Memoir (Knoxville, Tennessee: University of Tennessee Press, 1997), 145.

50 Testimony of Marta Bik-Wander, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 1333.

51 Thousands of ethnic Poles were killed by their non-Polish neighbours in Eastern Poland in the latter part of September and the first part of October 1939, often with the encouragement of the Soviet invaders. The legendary Polish courier Jan Karski, who was honoured by Israel for his efforts to inform an unresponsive West about the realities of the Holocaust, paints a stark and alarming picture of what he witnessed under the Soviet occupation in a report filed in February 1940, before the Holocaust got underway: “The Jews have taken over the majority of the political and administrative positions. But what is worse, they are denouncing Poles, especially students and politicians (to the secret police), are directing the work of the (communist) militia from behind the scenes, are unjustly denigrating conditions in Poland before the war. Unfortunately, one must say that these incidents are very frequent, and more common than incidents which demonstrate loyalty toward Poles or sentiment toward Poland.” The full report, in its two versions, can be found in Norman Davies and Antony Polonsky, eds., Jews in Eastern Poland and the USSR, 1939–46 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 260–71. The conduct of many Jews in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland in 1939–1941 inhibited Polish sympathy for the Jews subsequently. For more on this little known chapter of wartime history see Mark Paul, Neighbours on the Eve of the Holocaust: Polish-Jewish Relations in Soviet-Occupied Eastern Poland, 1939–1941, Internet: .

52 See the respective accounts in Paweł Machcewicz and Krzysztof Persak, eds., Wokół Jedwabnego (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej–Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, 2002), volume 1, 409; volume 2, 196–98, 238, 330, 517. See also Dean, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, volume II, Part A, 898, 900, 909. Rev. Bryx was also a part of a local Polish delegation that, in the fall of 1941, appealed successfully to the German authorities to suspend the order to create a closed ghetto in Knyszyn.

53 Tadeusz Krahel, Archidiecezja wileńska w latach II wojny światowej: Studia i szkice (Białystok: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej–Oddział w Białymstoku, 2014), 111.

54 Zieliński, Życie religijne w Polsce pod okupacją 1939–1945, 52; Krahel, Archidiecezja wileńska w latach II wojny światowej, 111.

55 Władysław Świacki, “Pamiętnik przechowany w beczce” (Grajewo: Towarzystwo Przyjaciół 9 PSK, 2007), 173–76.

56 George Gorin, ed., Grayever yizker-bukh (Grayevo Memorial Book) (New York: United Brayever Relief Committee, 1950), xxxii–xxxiii. Various dates are given for Rev. Pęza’s death. The most authoritative—that on his tombstone—is July 15, 1943. Witold Jemielity gives the date of Rev. Pęza’s execution as July 15, 1941—see Witold Jemielity, “Martyrologia księży diecezji łomżyńskiej 1939–1945,” Rozporządzenia Urzędowe Łomżyńskiej Kurii Diecezjalnej, no. 8–9 (1974): 53; whereas Jacewicz and Woś give the date as August 15, 1943—see Jacewicz and Woś, Martyrologium polskiego duchowieństwa rzymskokatolickiego pod okupacją hitlerowską w latach 1939–1945 volume 2, 184.

57 Asher Tarmon, ed., Memorial Book: The Jewish Communities of Manyevitz, Horodok, Lishnivka, Troyanuvka, Povursk, and Kolki (Wolyn Region) (Tel-Aviv: Organization of Survivors of Manyevitz, Horodok, Lishnivka, Troyanuvka, Povursk, Kolki and Surroundings Living in Israel and Overseas, 2004), 418.

58 Dean, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, volume II, Part A, 841.

59 Dean, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, vol. II, Part A, 966; Tadeusz Krahel, Doświadczeni zniewoleniem: Duchowni archidiecezji wileńskiej represjonowani w latach okupacji sowieckiej (1939–1945) (Białystok: Polskie Towarzystwo Historyczne–Oddział w Białymstoku, 2005), 45–46. In his memoir, Rev. Horba does not confirm Bronowski’s story of having turned to Bronowski to defend Poles in Soviet courts. Rev. Horba says he did not know Bronowski personally before he came seeking shelter in the company of Dr. Majzel, a local Jewish doctor, and his wife. Ibid., 209.

60 Testimony of Mojżesz Bielak in Jerzy Diatłowicki, ed., Żydzi w walce 1939–1945: Opór i walka z faszyzmem w latach 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny and Stowarzyszenie Żydów Kombatantów i Poszkodowanych w II Wojnie Światowej, 2009), volume 1, 291–92.

61 Andrzej Żbikowski, ed., Archiwum Ringelbluma: Konspiracyjne Archiwum Getta Warszawy, vol. 3: Relacje z Kresów (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny IN-B, 2000), 471, 492 (Wilno), 554, 724 (Lwów); Samuel D. Kassow, Who Will Write Our History?: Emanuel Ringelblum, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Oyneg Shabes Archive (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007), 275 (when the Germans imposed a heavy levy on the Jewish community in Chełm in late 1939, the local Polish intelligentsia contributed food and money); Siek, Archiwum Ringelbluma, vol. 9, 121 (Włocławek); Daniel Blatman, En direct du ghetto: La presse clandestine juive dans le ghetto de Varsovie (1940–1943) (Paris: Cerf; Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005), 470 (Poles contributed 100,000 złoty in Rzeszów). The latter source also mentions that, when the Germans rounded up the Jews of Olkusz in May 1942, and held them in the local high school for three days without food or water before deporting the Jews, the Polish population brought them water and food.

62 On Rev. Kazimierz Grochowski see Tadeusz Krahel, “W Generalnym Okręgu Białoruś (c.d.),” Czas Miłosierdzia: Białostocki Biuletyn Kościelny, no. 12, December 1998; Tadeusz Krahel, “Ksiądz Kazimierz Grochowski,” W Służbie Miłosierdzia: Białostocki Biuletyn Kościelny, no. 2, February 2009; Krahel, Archidiecezja wileńska w latach II wojny światowej, 195. See also the testimony of Salomon Szlakman, in Michał Grynberg and Maria Kotowska, comp. and eds., Życie i zagłada Żydów polskich 1939–1945: Relacje świadków (Warsaw: Oficyna Naukowa, 2003), 522–25; Żbikowski, Archiwum Ringelbluma, vol. 3, 356.

63 Żegota: Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland (1942–1945), Documentaries International Film & Video Foundation, Washington, D.C., 1998.

64 Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine, 208.

65 Until the fall of 1943 Danish Jews were unmolested. SS general Dr. Werner Best, the German in charge in Denmark, gave a free hand to Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz, the martime attaché at the German embassy in Copenhagen, to do whatever was necessary to derail the planned deportation of the Jews. Duckwitz flew to Sweden, where he secretly met with President Per Albin Hannson. The Swedish president assured him that should the action against the Danish Jews take place, Sweden would in principle be ready to admit them. When the round-up of Jews was about to begin, Duckwitz made his way back to Sweden to alert the Swedish government to be ready to admit the fleeing Jews. The local German naval command warned the Danish underground of the impending fate of the Jews, disabled the German harbour patrol, and turned a blind eye to the rescue operation. The Jews who were transported to Sweden by Danish boatmen were allowed entry. Since the rescue operation took place with the connivance of the local German naval command, there were no casualties either among the Jews or among the boatmen. During the initial stages of the rescue operation, only well-to-do Danish Jews could afford the short passage to Sweden. Private boatmen set their own price and the costs were prohibitive, ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 kroner per person ($160 to $1600 U.S. in the currency of that period). Afterward, when organized Danish rescue groups stepped in to coordinate the flight and to collect funds, the average price per person fell to 2,000 and then 500 kroner. The total cost of the rescue operation was about 12 million kroner, of which the Jews paid about 7 million kroner, including a 750,000 kroner loan which the Jews had to repay after the war. See Mordecai Paldiel, The Righteous Among the Nations (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem; New York: Collins, 2007), 105–9; Leni Yahil, The Rescue of Danish Jewry: Test of a Democracy (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 261–65, 269. Since the rescue operation took place with the connivance of the local German naval command, there were no casualties either among the Jews or among the boatmen. As Sofie Lene Bak’s Nothing to Speak of: Wartime Experiences of the Danish Jews 1943–1945 (Copenhagen: Danish Jewish Museum, 2011) makes clear, “it can no longer be ignored that money was the hinge on which the whole escape apparatus turned.” Money was needed to organize the fishermen and their boats and ensure there were enough of them. The price was based on supply and demand. Some fishermen earned a fortune at the Jews’ expense. The average price was 1,000 kroner per person. There were some payments of 50,000 kroner, but an average of 10,000 kroner for a family of four people. The monthly wage for a skilled worker in 1943 was 414 kroner. However, in the case of Denmark, charging these exorbitant amounts has been justified. We are told that the demands for payment must be viewed in relation the danger of the crossing, the risks of losing their boats, which would bring a loss of earnings, and the ability to support their families, as well as the possibilities of arrest. However, there were no Germans policing the strait between Denmark and Sweden during October 1943, and not a single boat with Jewish refugees was captured at sea by the Germans. While the Danish rescue is universally extolled without reference to the minimal risk it entailed for the rescuers and the handsome compensation they took (in fact, most historians suppress this information), conversely, the Polish rescue effort is deprecated without reference to the death penalty the Germans imposed on the Poles for providing any form of assistance and the fact that hundreds if not thousands of Poles paid with their lives for this “crime.” See, for example, Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich at War (New York: The Penguin Press, 2009), 64, 390–91. (At the same time, Evans downplays German guilt. Ibid., 555, 560.) Pointedly, Danish journalist and researcher Bo Lidegaard rejects those who would hold other European nations in opprobrium for not saving their Jews: “The history of the Holocaust tells a different story, and the terms of occupation, local conditions, and much else differed radically from place to place and over time, making the situation unique in each case. The special Danish example cannot be used to reproach others who experienced the German occupation under far worse conditions than Denmark.” See Bo Lidegaard, Countrymen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013), 348.

66 The Belgian Comité de Défense des Juifs, which represented a broad cross-range of the Jewish community, was involved in propaganda, finance, false papers, and material aid. It is believed to have helped 12,000 adults and 3,000 children, of whom 2,443 were supported financially, and instrumental in indirectly assisting perhaps another 15,000 people. The Comité used at least 138 separate secular or religious institutions and at least 700 individual families to hide the children. These operations required huge amounts of resources and money, especially for monthly subventions to families and institutions to feed and clothe the children. It began fundraising by appealing to rich Jews and by making richer Jews pay double for services in order to subsidize the rescue of poorer Jews. The committee was able to get a loan for the sum of BFr 3 million from the Banque de Bruxelles, and monthly subventions from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, initially for SFr 20,000 and raised progressively to SFr 100,000, which were smuggled from Switzerland into Belgium. Additional funding came from other individuals and organizations. The committee’s total expenditure during the occupation was estimated to have reached BFr 48 million. See Bob Moore, “Integrating Self-Help into the History of Jewish Survival in Western Europe,” in Norman J.W. Goda, ed., Jewish Histories of the Holocaust: New Transnational Approaches (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 193–208, here at 196–97.

67 Grzegorz Berendt, “Cena życia—ekonomiczne uwarunkowania egzystencji Żydów po ‘aryjskiej stronie’,” in Zagłada Żydów: Studia i materiały (Warsaw: Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, IFiS PAN, 2008), volume 4, 110–43.

68 Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz (New York: Random House, 2006), 162 (footnote).

69 Kurek. Your Life Is Worth Mine, 91.

70 Michał Grynberg, Księga sprawiedliwych (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 1993), 459–60.

71 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives, Internet: .

72 Testimony of Irena Bialer, August 10, 1948, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 4109.

73 The Stelmachowski Family, The Polish Righteous, Internet: .

74 Ewa Kurek, Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach: Udział żeńskich zgromadzeń zakonnych w akcji ratowania dzieci żydowskich w Polsce w latach 1939–1945 (Lublin: Clio, 2001; Lublin: Gaudium, 2004), 151–53.

75 Maria Winnicka, The Polish Righteous, Internet: .

76 See also the testimony of Aviva Unger, Yad Vashem Archives, file O.33C/3/4297. Jewish agents and informers for the Gestapo and Kripo were common both inside and outside the ghettos. Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer has acknowledged that Jewish agents caused “tremendous damage.” See Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 148. On their activities, see Mark Paul, Patterns of Cooperation, Collaboration and Betrayal: Jews, Germans and Poles in Occupied Poland during World War II, Internet: . In some cases, however, Poles have been wrongly accused in this regard. In his memoir, Alexander Bronowski recounts his arrest in Warsaw by the Sicherheitspolizei (security police) after one of their informers, a Jew from his native Lublin, recognized him. Ironically, the Polish “Blue” police, to whom Bronowski was handed over by the Sipo for temporary safekeeping, proved to be his saviours. Staff sergeant Wacław Nowiński not only rescued Bronowski, but Nowiński and his family also selflessly assisted and sheltered other Jews. See Alexander Bronowski, They Were Few (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), 30–33. See also his account in Bartoszewski and Lewin, Righteous Among Nations, 142–44. Yet Mordecai Paldiel, a historian at the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem, repeatedly covers up the fact that it was a Jew who betrayed Alexander Bronowski, even though Paldiel finds time to describe Bronowski’s fate in various publications. Paldiel is so preoccupied with railing against Christian Poles that, in connection with Bronowski’s betrayal, he lays the blame on “local anti-Semites” and for good measure adds: “Spotting a Jew on the street had become a sort of sport in Warsaw.” See Paldiel, The Righteous Among the Nations, 289–90; Mordecai Paldiel, Sheltering the Jews: Stories of Holocaust Rescuers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 53, 153 (twice).

77 Testimony of Helen Fagin (Helena Neimark), Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, University of Southern California, Interview code 11964.

78 Adam Kopciowski, Zagłada Żydów w Zamościu (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2005), 194.

79 Grynberg, Księga sprawiedliwych, 49.

80 Tomasz Szarota, U progu Zagłady: Zajścia antyżydowskie i pogromy w okupowanej Europie (Warsaw: Sic!, 2000), 49; Wojciech Jerzy Muszyński, “Trzeciak Stanisław,” in Encyklopedia “Białych Plam” (Radom: Polskie Wydawnictwo Encyklopedyczna, 2006), volume 17, 214.

81 Żbikowski, Polacy i Żydzi pod okupacją niemiecką 1939–1945, 389, 418.

82 Anna Poray, comp. and ed., Polish Righteous: Those Who Risked Their Lives, Internet: —Cieslakowski, Jan.

83 Testimony of Henry Frankel, Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, University of Southern California, Interview code 20142.

84 David Götzel (Goetzel, later Gilbert) removed his young daughter, Miriam or Micki, passing as Maria Kurkowska, from a convent outside Warsaw, where she had been sheltered for about a year, when he and his wife left their separate hideouts and went to for Hotel Polski in July 1943. Miraculously, all three of them survived after their deportation to Bergen-Belsen. See David Gilbert, as told to Tim Shortridge and Michael D. Frounfelter, No Place To Run: A True Story (London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2002), 111, 113, 142, 159, 167. Three teenaged girls from the Warsaw ghetto, Pnina, Dina and Ariela, who were placed in a convent by Irena Adamowicz, a member of the Polish underground, in early 1943, left the safety of the convent for Hotel Polski. See Hela Rufeisen-Schüpper, Pożegnanie Miłej 18: Wspomnienia łączniczki Żydowskiej Organizacji Bojowej (Kraków: Beseder, 1996), 126; Hella Rufeisen-Schüpper, Abschied von Mila 18: Als Ghettokurierin zwischen Krakau und Warschau (Köln: Scriba Verlag, 1998), 199.

85 Zofia Szymańska, Byłam tylko lekarzem… (Warsaw: Pax, 1979), 145–77.

86 Andrzej W. Kaczorowski, “W szarym domu,” Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, no. 11 (November 2010): 61.

87 Władysław Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewin, eds., Righteous Among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews, 1939–1945 (London: Earlscourt Publications, 1969), 167.

88 “Identification Issued to Lucie Kritz in 1933 and Restamped by the Soviet Government in 1940,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archives, Internet: .

89 Helen Gougeon, “Lives Lived: Irena Krzysztoporski Abramowicz,” The Globe and Mail (Toronto), February 7, 2000.

90 Heather Laskey, Night Voices: Heard in the Shadow of Hitler and Stalin (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 66, 89–90, 95.

91 Polacy ratujący Żydów w czasie Zagłady: Przywracanie pamięci / Poles Who Rescued Jews During the Holocaust: Recalling Forgotten History (Warsaw: Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland and Museum of the History of Polish Jews, 2013), 119; Wionczek Mieczysław, The Polish Righteous, Internet: .

92 Some of the nuns were former students of Professor Radlińska. She continued to teach in underground institutions and assisted other Jews in finding shelter with Poles, although she herself was destitute and depended entirely on the goodwill of her benefactors. See Isaiah Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 306; Irena Lepalczyk, Helena Radlińska życie i twórczość (Toruń: Adam Marszałek, 2001), 122; Andrzej W. Kaczorowski, “W szarym domu,” Biuletyn Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej, no. 11 (November 2010): 57–64.

93 Halina Aszkenazy-Engelhard, Pragnęłam żyć: Pamiętnik (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Salezjańskie, 1991), 80–88, 92–93, 107–108, 114. See also the expanded version of this memoir: Halina Aszkenazy-Engelhard, Dzień, noc, dzień (Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza, 2005), as well as her testimony, Yad Vashem Archives, file O.3/442.

94 Jan Pietrzykowski, Towarzystwo Salezjańskie w Polsce w warunkach okupacji 1939–1945 (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2015), 152.

95 Aszkenazy-Engelhard, Pragnęłam żyć, 98–100.

96 Wroński and Zwolakowa, Polacy Żydzi 1939–1945, 334; Testimony of Halina Rajman, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 4495.

97 Grynberg, Księga sprawiedliwych, 115–16; Testimony of Adela Domanus, February 27, 1965, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 6102.

98 Grynberg, Księga sprawiedliwych, 115–16.

99 Her testimony is found in Jakub Gutenbaum and Agnieszka Latała, eds., The Last Eyewitnesses: Children of the Holocaust Speak, volume 2 (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 114–16.

100 Magdalena Marczyńska, Uśmiecham się, jak chciałaś (Warsaw: Baobab, 2008), 22, 28–34, 62, 70, 194–95.

101 Dean, Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945, volume II, Part A, 560; Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine, 197–204.

102 Kurek, Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach, 240. In some cases, convents requested some reimbursement for the cost of sheltering Jewish children when they were reclaimed after the war. As Donald Niewyk points out, these requests for payment “must be viewed compassionately in light of the desperate poverty of these institutions.” See Donald L. Niewyk ed., Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 151.

103 Testimony of Pola Richter, October 22, 1947, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 5399; Rysia Sobol-Masłowska, Fakty i wspomnienia, Second edition (Haifa: Ayalon, 1973), Part One, 117–18, 204–207; Diane Armstrong, Mosaic: A Chronicle of Five Generations (Milsons Point, N.S.W.: Random House, 1998), 392–94; Jolanta Chodorska, ed., Godni synowie naszej Ojczyzny: Świadectwa nadesłane na apel Radia Maryja (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Sióstr Loretanek, 2002), Part Two, 164–65. An official German announcement of January 28, 1944 concerning the death sentence imposed on 84 people, five of them specifically for sheltering or otherwise helpng Jews, including Bronisław Jarosziński (sic) of Stryj, is found in Wroński and Zwolakowa, Polacy Żydzi 1939–1945, 442.

104 Ola (urodzona w 1937) [Aleksandra Leliwa-Kopystyńska], “Niemów nikomu!” Midrasz, no. 1 (129), January 2008: 42–49.

105 Testimony of Hanka Arbesfeld, Ghetto Fighters House Archives (Israel), catalog no. 4918, registry no. 02850collection.

106 Bartoszewski and Lewinówna, Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, 2^nd ed., 410–13.

107 Diana Binder, “Abandoned”, in Arnold Geier, Heroes of the Holocaust (New York: Berkley Books, 1998), 211–25; Dena Axelrod, “‘My Name is Barbara,’” in Peter Tarjan, ed., Children Who Survived the Final Solution (New York: iUniverse, 2004), 192–204; Emily Taitz, ed., Holocaust Survivors: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 2007), volume 1, 15–17; Testimony of Witold Weinman, September 13, 1946, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 1945; Testimony of Henryk Weinman, February 1948, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 3362; Testimony of Stanislaw Kornacki, September 20, 1958, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 5635; Testimony of Dena Axelrod, Yad Vashem Archives, file 7786.

108 Testimony of Marian Marzynski, October 24, 1997, Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, University of Southern California, Interview code 34729, Internet: . Marzyński also made the following bizarre claim: “See, during the war, when people were dying, the Catholic Church functioned like there was no war [sic]. People were dressing up. They were going to church, they were singing the songs. They were connected to their God. So I played this game. It was oppressive, of course, but at the same time it made me busy.” See Azmat Khan’s interview with Marian Marzynski, “Before I Was Anybody, I Was a Child survivor of the Holocaust,” February 4, 2013, Internet: .

109 The Goldstein brothers, among others, were sheltered at the Ks. Siemca Institute in Warsaw; A. Filipowski and the Krakowiak brothers were sheltered at the boarding school in Częstochowa. Jewish boys who made their way to the orphanage on Litewska Street, located near the Warsaw ghetto, were transferred out soon after their arrival there. The orphanage was closed permanently by the Germans in the fall of 1943. See Pietrzykowski, Towarzystwo Salezjańskie w Polsce w warunkach okupacji 1939–1945, 149–50, 155; Zieliński, Życie religijne w Polsce pod okupacją hitlerowską 1939–1945, 745–46. Julian Ostrowski and several other Jewish boys were sheltered by the Salesians in Przemyśl. Dis account is set out later. See Kurek, Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach, 204. Accounts from the Salesian parishes in Lwów (Our Lady of Ostra Brama) and Warsaw (Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus) are set out elsewhere in the text. Rev. Wawrzyniec Kapczuk, a Salesian, is believed to have assisted Jews in Kraków. See Pietrzykowski, Towarzystwo Salezjańskie w Polsce w warunkach okupacji 1939–1945, 155.

110 Wanted by the Gestapo in Kraków, Rev. Jan Mazerski escaped to Warsaw. Artur Ney, who found shelter at Ks. Siemca Institute, knew Fr. Mazerski under his assumed identity of Jan Kapusta. (Rev. Jan Kapusta, who had been arrested by the Soviets in Eastern Poland in November 1939, was deported to the Gulag and released only in December 1955.) During the Warsaw Uprising of August 1944, Rev. Mazerski took refuge in the convent of the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament in the New Town Market Square. The convent was bombed by the Germans on August 31, 1944, killing 36 nuns, 4 priests (Rev. Jan Mazerski, Rev. Józef Archutowski, Rev. Michał Rozwadowski, and Fr. Leonard Hrynaszkiewicz), and about one thousand civilians, among them Jews who had taken refuge there. See Sylwester Jędzrzejewski, “Jan Mazerski SDB (1901–1944), biblista i orientalista,” Seminare, volume 35 (2014), no. 3: 11–19.

111 Pietrzykowski, Towarzystwo Salezjańskie w Polsce w warunkach okupacji 1939–1945, 150.

112 Artur (Arthur) Ney describes his stay with the Salesian Society at length in his autobiography, Arthur Ney, W Hour (Toronto: Azrieli Foundation, 2014), 98–109. The references to the nun who cared for him when he was a farmhand and the chaplain who protected him when he joined the underground are found, respectively, at pp. 82–83 and 119. His stay with the Salesians in Głosków after the war is described at pp. 145–57. See also his testimony (Artur Ney) dated January 15, 1947, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 2227, which is reproduced in part in Wroński and Zwolakowa, Polacy Żydzi 1939–1945, 331–32.

113 Zieliński, Życie religijne w Polsce pod okupacją hitlerowską 1939–1945, 745–46; Ewa Rogalewska, “Siostry szarytki i księża salezjanie: Zapomniana karta ratowania Żydów w Białymstoku i Supraślu,” in Aleksandra Namysło, ed., “Kto w takich czasach Żydów przechowuje?...”: Polacy niosący pomoc ludności żydowskiej w okresie okupacji niemieckiej (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej–Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, 2009), 56–73; Ewa Rogalewska, “Zagłada, opór, pomoc: Miasteczko Supraśl na skraju Puszczy Knyszyńskiej,” in Adam Sitarek, Michał Trębacz, and Ewa Wiatr, eds., Zagłada Żydów na polskiej prowincji (Łódź: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego; Instytut Pamięci Narodowej–Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, Oddział w Łodzi, 2012), 216–17; Ewa Rogalewska, Getto białostockie: Doświadczenie Zagłady—świadectwa literatury i życia (Białystok: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej Oddział w Białymstoku, 2013), 200–10; Pietrzykowski, Towarzystwo Salezjańskie w Polsce w warunkach okupacji 1939–1945, 150–51.

114 Zieliński, Życie religijne w Polsce pod okupacją hitlerowską 1939–1945, 745–46; Ewa Rogalewska, “Siostry szarytki i księża salezjanie: Zapomniana karta ratowania Żydów w Białymstoku i Supraślu,” in Namysło, “Kto w takich czasach Żydów przechowuje?...”, 56–73; Ewa Rogalewska, “Zagłada, opór, pomoc: Miasteczko Supraśl na skraju Puszczy Knyszyńskiej,” in Sitarek, Trębacz, and Wiatr, Zagłada Żydów na polskiej prowincji, 216–17; Rogalewska, Getto białostockie, 200–10.

115 Israel Gutman and Sara Bender, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust, volume 4: Poland (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), Part 1, 163.

116 It was widely known that the young daughter of Reb Moshe of Grodzisko was sheltered in an orphanage in that village run by nuns, yet no one betrayed her. See Bertha Ferderber-Salz, And the Sun Kept Shining… (New York: Holocaust Library, 1980), 199.

117 Wiktoria Śliwowska, ed., The Last Eyewitnesses: Children of the Holocaust Speak (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 65–66. Sister Longina was also murdered together with the boys, all but one of whom were Catholic Poles.

118 Testimony of Ludwik Brylant in Katarzyna Meloch and Halina Szostkiewicz, eds., Dzieci Holocaustu mówią…, volume 3 (Warsaw: Midrasz and Stowarzyszenie “Dzieci Holocaustu” w Polsce, 2008), 174–77.

119 Michał Głowiński’s account is recorded in Śliwowska, The Last Eyewitnesses, 56–70, where the quotations can be found, in his autobiography The Black Seasons (Evanston, Illinois: Northweestern University Press, 2005), and in Kurek, Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach, 191–96.

120 Testimony of Cyla Sznajder (Huss), January 25, 1960, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 5699.

121 The children were not required to undergo baptism despite the claim levelled by one of them, Włodzimierz Berg, now William Donat, born in 1938, who declared his desire to be baptized only after the Germans had left that area and was thus no longer in imminent danger. See Żeńskie zgromadzenia zakonne w Polsce 1939–1947, volume 6 (Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 1991), 226–27; Sylwia Szymańska, Ludność żydowska w Otwocku podczas Drugiej wojny światowej (Warsaw: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, 2002), 85; Alexander Donat, The Holocaust Kingdom: A Memoir (London: Secker & Warburg, 1965), 341–54; Emily Taitz, ed., Holocaust Survivors: A Biographical Dictionary (Westport, Connecticut, and London: Greenwood Press, 2007), volume 1, 96–97.

122 Testimony of Ewa Goldberg, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 5518; Żeńskie zgromadzenia zakonne w Polsce 1939–1947, volume 6, 226–27.

123 Jakoba Blidsztejn (Danuta Dąbrowska), The Polish Righteous, Internet: ; Żeńskie zgromadzenia zakonne w Polsce 1939–1947, volume 6, 226–27; Testimony of Danuta Dąbrowska (Jakoba Blidsztejn), Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), recor group 301, number 5719.

124 Żeńskie zgromadzenia zakonne w Polsce 1939–1947, volume 6, 226–27. Halina Rotensztein (born in 1933) and her sister were sheltered in the convent in Nowe Miasto nad Pilicą. See the testimony of Halina Rotensztein, Ghetto Fighters House archives (Israel), catalog no. 4802, registry no. 18845collection.

125 “Sprawiedliwi z okolic Treblinki: Apolonia Kret (siostra Benedykta),” May 13, 2009, Internet: .

126 “Double Life of Gitta,” Genealogy Research Stories, Polin Travel, Internet: . The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum claims that a Jewish committee had to pay a “redemption” fee Gitta Rosenzweig’s release from the convent. See “Life in the Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust— Photograph,” Internet: .This is an unwarranted smear that is intended to diminish the value of the nuns’ rescue effort. The convent accepted Gitta without any expectation of payment and cared for her in dire circumstances, putting the nuns’ lives at risk, when food was scarce, thus depriving Christian children of the food allocated to the Jewish ones. It is not surprising, therefore, that the head of the convent may have suggested to the Jewish organization that reclaimed her, and was well funded by American Jews, to make a contribution to the orphanage for the benefit of other children who remained there in impoverished circumstances. What is surprising, however, is the apparent lack of any effort on the part of the rescued person to have Yad Vashem confer recognition on her selfless benefactors.

127 Grynberg, Księga sprawiedliwych, 496.

128 The Zelwerowicz Family, The Polish Righteous, Internet: ; “Hanne Feigenbaum (nee Zaitman, born on 14.5.1931.) about Her Parents and Their Families, Live in Warsaw ghetto, Escape from It and Hiding, Live in Łodz after the War and Way to Israel,” Vistual Shtetl, Internet: . See also Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, 234.

129 “Żadne dziecko nie zginęło,” Nasz Dziennik (Magazyn), March 14–15, 2014; Teresa Antonietta Frącek, “Ratowały, choć za to groziła śmierć,” Part 2, Nasz Dziennik, March 12, 2008.

130 Bianca Lerner, “Humanity in the Midst of Death,” in Peter Tarjan, ed., Children Who Survived the Final Solution (New York: iUniverse, 2004), 212–18; Eugene Bergman, Survival Artist: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland, 2009), 107.

131 Wroński and Zwolakowa, Polacy Żydzi 1939–1945, 310–11.

132 Małgorzata-Maria Acher, Niewłaściwa twarz: Wspomnienia ocalałej z warszawskiego getta (Częstochowa: Święty Paweł, 2001).

133 Michael Zylberberg, A Warsaw Diary, 1939–1945 (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1969), 133, 141.

134 See Zuzanna Rabska’s testimony in Żbikowski, Polacy i Żydzi pod okupacją niemiecką 1939–1945, 627–28, and Janina Hera, Polacy ratujący Żydów: Słownik (Warsaw: Neriton, 2014), 61 n.125. Zuzanna Rabska, the daughter of Aleksander Kraushar, a renowned Jewish convert, was married to Władysław Rabski, an author who was a parliamentarian for the National Democracy (Narodowa Demokracja). Her son-in-law, Zbigniew Stypułowski, was the political leader of the National Armed Forces (Narodowe Siły Zbrojne).

135 Oral history interview with Romana Koplewicz, October 8, 1993, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

136 There are numerous recorded cases of interrogations of Jews passing as Catholics by German officials, and not one of them mention the involvement of Polish priests. See, for example, the account of Elzbieta [Elżbieta] Szandorowska from Warsaw: “In May 1943, the Germans arrested seventeen people in our boarding house, including my mother and the rest of our family. They took us to the Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Avenue. Throughout the entire night, I taught Christian prayers to one of the Jewish girls who [had] been arrested. The next day the Germans were in a very good mood because they had found diamonds sewn into the trousers of one of the Jewish men. So they allowed my family to go free the next day. They freed a couple of Jewish people, too, because they had extremely convincing documents and they had passed the so-called religion examination, which consisted of reciting Catholic prayers.” See Richard C. Lukas, ed., Out of the Inferno: Poles Remember the Holocaust (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989), 161. Lidia Kott was interrogated by two Gestapo officers on Szucha Street: “They told her to say her prayers, asked her to tell them the shape of the host, and tried to get her to say that it was square. … The investigations began all over again, now with the assistance of three experts: a Jew, a Ukrainian, and a Pole.” See Kott, Still Alive, 77. Braunia Szul, then a 14-year-old girl, and her mother were also brought to the Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Street and interrogated by Germans: “When we arrived there, they started to ask us about religion, if I know the religion prayers, so I knew the [Catholic] prayers by heart. We were prepared for that, you know.” See the interview with Braunia Sztul, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, May 19, 1995. The testimony of Wanda Ziemska, who was interrogated by the Gestapo in Warsaw and made to recite prayers, but released after a Polish policeman vouched for her, is found in Gutenbaum and Latała, The Last Eyewitnesses, volume 2, 348. For another account from Warsaw mentioning interrogation by the German authorities about Christian prayers and customs (and release after a Pole vouched for the two Jewish women), see Vladka Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall: Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York: Holocaust Library, 1979), 192–93. Lala Fishman (née Klara Weintraub) was one a number of women arrested in street sweeps in Kraków who were interrogated by the Germans and made to recite Catholic prayers. See Lala Fishman and Steven Weingartner, Lala’s Story: A Memoir of the Holocaust (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 188. For additional examples of interrogations conducted by Germans, sometimes using Polish interpreters, see: Yehuda Nir, The Lost Childhood: A Memoir (San Diego, New York, and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), 67; Halina Zylberman, Swimming Under Water (Caulfield South, Victoria: Makor Jewish Community Library, 2001), 56; Bartoszewski and Lewinóna, Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej, 2^nd ed., 276; Theresa Cahn-Tober, Hide and Seek: A Wartime Childhood (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002), 68–69; Małgorzata Melchior, Zagłada a tożsamość: Polscy Żydzi ocaleni na “aryjskich papierach”: Analiza doświadczeń biograficznego (Warsaw: IFiS PAN, 2004), 236; Halina Grubowska, Haneczko, musisz przeżyć (Montreal: Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation, 2007), 45. The next series of accounts pertain to questioning by the regular and criminal police. Jadwiga Krall and her six-year-old daughter, Hanna, were accosted in the spring of 1943 by a blackmailer in the Aryan part of Warsaw. Because they had no money to pay him, he turned them in to the police, who tested their claim that they were Catholics by asking questions about Catholic prayers. “Suddenly the voice of a woman could be heard in the police station demanding to know why the police were accusing her sister of being Jewish. The woman, who eventually succeeded in getting Krall and her daughter out of the police’s hands, was Maria Ostrowska, who had previously provided Krall with the birth certificate of her sister, who lived outside Warsaw.” See Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 5: Poland, Part 2, 569–70. Alina Margolis describes her interrogation by the police after being apprehended with her friend Zosia, who was recognized as a Jew. While Margolis was able to recite the prayers asked of her, thanks to having observed her Polish childhood nanny, her friend Zosia could not correctly describe the size of a Communion host. However, both were eventually released through a bribe arranged by a Polish acquaintance. See Alina Margolis-Edelman, Ala z elementarza (London: Aneks, 1994), 109–11; Alina Margolis-Edelman, Tego, co mówili, nie powtórzę… (Wrocław: Siedmioróg, 1999), 112–13; available also in French translation: Je ne répéterai pas, je ne veux pas le répéter (Paris: Autrement Littératures, 1997). For other examples, see Isaiah Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution: Collective and Individual Behavior in Extremis (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 152 (Kraków); Elsa Thon, I Wish It Were Fiction: Memories, 1939–1945 (Hamilton, Ontario: Mekler & Deahl, 1997), 63; Melchior, Zagłada a tożsamość, 170, 236; Christine Winecki, The Girl in the Check Coat: Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland and a New Life in Australia (London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2007), 70–71. It appears that examinations of religious knowledge carried out by Polish policemen tended to be perfunctory and rather superficial.

Historian Gunnar Paulsson cites no evidence in support of his claim that “some [Catholic priests] could be found who were prepared to rule on a suspect’s Aryanness, knowing the consequences of a negative ruling.” See Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 106. In fact, the one memoir that refers to a priest who allegedly “trapped” his Jewish victims, Alina Margolis and her friend Zosia, is based on a hearsay account that is directly contradicted by the memoir of one of the victims herself. Jacob Celemenski spins a rather elaborate tale of two Jewish girls who were caught by a secret agent and taken to a police station, where the police commandant “called a priest, who trapped them with his first question.” See Jacob Celemenski, Elegy For My People: Memoirs of an Underground Courier of the Jewish Labor Bund in Nazi-Occupied Poland, 1939–45 (Melbourne: The Jacob Celemenski Memorial Trust, 2000), 180–81. As noted earlier, Alina Margolis-Edelman’s memoir is quite clear that the interrogation was conducted by a policeman, and does not mention any priest. Jews were also known to act as interrogators of Jews. Two Jewish women from Stanisławów and Lwów, posing as Poles, were detained at as they left the train station in Warsaw and were taken to a police station where they were questioned by two police officers: “They examined each of us in minute religious matters, and went over all our documents. They spoke only Yiddish during all of this, and even sang some Yiddish songs. Then they started arguing: the first one wanted to let us go and the other to turn us over to the Germans. We were finally freed after two hours of interrogation...” See the account of F.I. in Trunk, Jewish Responses to Nazi Persecution, 305. In another case, a Jewish boy who was sheltered by the Salesian Society in Przemyśl recalled the arrival of Germans who came looking for Jewish boys, accompanied by a Jew dressed as a priest. Fortunately, the Jewish boys passed the religion test they were administered. See Kurek, Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach, 204.

Generally, Jews who passed as Poles, even from assimilated milieux, mastered only a few basic prayers and their knowledge of Catholic rituals was often spotty and superficial. For example, Jewish survivors admit not knowing that priests rubbed ashes on foreheads on Ash Wednesday, that unlike Easter Christmas fell on a fixed date (December 25^th), and that on Good Friday Polish Catholics visited specially erected symbolic tombs of Jesus in churches and not cemeteries. Nor did they know how to conduct themselves at mass, for example, taking the communion host with one’s hand as opposed in the mouth. See Melchior, Zagłada a tożsamość, 147; Yehuda Nir, The Lost Childhood: A Memoir (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1989), 217; Janina Brandwajn-Ziemian, Młodość w cieniu śmierci (Łódź: Oficyna Bibliofilów, 1995), 87–88; Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall, 172; Taitz, Holocaust Survivors, volume 2, 396. Some Jews came to realize that their guise as Christian Poles was not as foolproof as they had believed, but this had not caused them to be betrayed. One Jew who called on farmhouses in the Urzędów area, pretending to be a Christian, recalled: “I would cross myself, bless Jesus Christ, and ask for something to eat. I had made up a story in case questions were asked. Most farmers were not talkative. Viewed suspiciously, sometimes I would be given soup or bread and asked to leave quickly: sometimes I was just told to go. Later it dawned on me that I was crossing myself incorrectly, touching my chin rather than the chest.” See David Makow, Dangerous Luck: Memories of a Hunted Life (New York: Shengold Publishers, 2000), 28. When a local police commander sent a suspected Jewish teenager who was passing as Christian to the pastor of Krzesk near Łosice, the priest did not betray her despite the fact that she was unable to answer basic questions about the Christian faith. See Stella Zylbersztajn, A gdyby to było Wasze dziecko? (Łosice: Łosickie Stowarzyszenie Rozwoju Equus, 2005), 52.

137 Gutman and Bender, The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations, volume 4: Poland, Part 1, 332, 507, Part 2, 886; Aleksandra Mianowska, The Righteous Among the Nations, Yad Vashem, Internet: .

138 Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 653; Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, Getto warszawskie: Przewodnik po nieistniejącym mieście, Second revised and expanded edition (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie Centrum Badań nad Zagładą Żydów, 2013), 674–75; Peter F. Dembowski, Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto: An Epitaph for the Unremembered (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 61–62; Teresa Antonietta Frącek, “Ratowały, choć za to groziła śmierć,” Parts 3 and 4, Nasz Dziennik, March 15–16 and March 19, 2008.

139 Noemi Szac-Wajnkranc, Przeminęło z ogniem (Warsaw: Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1947).

140 Janina David, A Touch of Earth: A Wartime Childhood (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1966; New York: Orion Press, 1966), passim, especially at pp.25, 27, 75–78, 94–95, 97, 99, 123, 161, 162, 185. See also Janina David, A Square of Sky: Memoirs of Wartime Childhood (London: Eland, 1992), passim.

141 Testimony of Halina Złotnik, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 302, number 93.

142 Oral history interview with Lidia Kleinman Siciarz, by Katie Davis, January 11, 2000, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

143 Testimony of Urszula Peiper, February 15, 1946, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 4721.

144 Kurek, Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach, 227–29.

145 Teresa Antonietta Frącek, “Ratowały, choć za to groziła śmierć,” Part 6, Nasz Dziennik, April 4, 2008; “Wspomnienia Jerzego Bandera,” Virtual Shtetl, Internet: ; Jerzy Bander, My ocaleni i inne opowiadania (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Książkowe IBiS, 2011); Anna Kołacińska-Gałązka, ed., Dzieci Holocaustu mówią..., vol. 5 (Warsaw: Stowarzyszenie “Dzieci Holocaustu” w Polsce, 2013), 287.

146 Teresa Antonietta Frącek, “Ratowały, choć za to groziła śmierć,” Part 6, Nasz Dziennik, April 4, 2008.

147 Polska Agencja Prasowa, “Nowi Sprawiedliwi wśród Narodów,” Nasz Dziennik, November 9, 2014; Teresa Antonietta Frącek, “Ratowały, choć za to groziła śmierć,” Part 4, Nasz Dziennik, March 19, 2008.

148 Elżbieta Rączy, Pomoc Polaków dla ludności żydowskiej na Rzeszowszczyźnie 1939–1945 (Rzeszów: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej–Komisja Ścigania Zbrodni przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu, 2008), 73–74, 80–81. Fryda Einsiedler (later Fieda Stieglitz), born in 1933, received a great deal of assistance from Polish farmers in the vicinity of her village of Grodzisko Dolne near Leżajsk, before she arrived at the convent in Przemyśl approximately four months before the entry of the Soviet army. She described the nuns as being “very kind” and stated that, although all the children were taught religion, the nuns did not force the Jewish children to become Catholics. See the testimony of Fryda Einsiedler, February 15, 1946, Archive of the Jewish Historical Institute (Warsaw), record group 301, number 1348; testimony of Frieda Stieglitz, Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive, University of Southern California, Interview code 23942. See also Israel Gutman, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Righteous Among the Nations: Rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust: Supplementary Volumes (2000–2005), volume II (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2010), 576 (this entry states, mistakenly, that Fryda Einsiedler remained at the home of Maria Korzystko until liberation).

149 Some accounts go out of their way to claim that priests and nuns in Poland instilled anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish teachings in their Jewish charges. One can also encounter similar charges in accounts from other countries. For example, Adele Lazanowski Zaveduk, whose mother arranged through an underground agency to place her and her sister with a widow in the small village of Brou near Chartres, recalled visiting the Catholic church daily and attending Mass every Sunday and holidays. “In church we learned that the Jews killed Jesus, and they were bad people.” She states, in the context of her reunion with her mother after the war: “because we were raised as Catholics, we had been taught that Jews killed Jesus Christ. … It was some time before I could think about what my parents’ reaction to our Catholic training must have been, especially after the price they had paid for being Jews.” See Elaine Saphier Fox, ed., Out of Chaos: Hidden Children Remember the Holocaust (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 102–3.

150 Kurek, Dzieci żydowskie w klasztorach, 204.

151 Nahum Bogner, At the Mercy of Strangers: The Rescue of Jewish Children with Assumed Identities in Poland (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2009), 47; Leah Blumenkrants-Frid, Rikud ha-simhah veha-ʻetsev ([Lohame ha-Getaʼot]: Bet lohame ha-getaʼot: [Israel]: Be-yahad, 2005). Lea (Lila) Fried/Rosenthal/Blumenkrantz was given over by her mother to her good friend, Janina Walęga, after one of the Aktions in Tarnów. After sheltering the child for a period of time, Walęga brought her to Przemyśl and placed her in a convent.

152 Elżbieta Rączy and Igor Witowicz, Poles Rescuing Jews in the Rzeszów Region in the Years 1939–1945 / Polacy ratujący Żydów