Betrayals Jews By Poles In Ignorance Example Cosby

Quiet Hero, by Rita Cosby. 2010

Polish Unawareness of the German Gassing/Cremation of Jews (Adds to the Nonsense of “Polish Complicity in the Holocaust”); Polish Guerrilla Life; Warsaw Uprising, etc.

Instead of repeating other reviewers, I focus on matters of direct historical significance. This is based on the testimony of Ryszard Kossobudzki (later Anglicized to Cosby), as interviewed by Rita Cosby, his journalist daughter.

DELAYED POLISH KNOWLEDGE THAT DEPORTED JEWS WERE BEING SYSTEMATICALLY MURDERED

How soon, after the start of Operation Reinhard (the Nazi mass gassings and cremations of Jews in the German-occupied General Government), did the Poles realize that this was going on? “Rys”, while visiting his cousin in Lublin, climbed a church steeple to see the environs. He saw in the distance a camp (later identified as Maidanek/Majdanek) amidst conflicting rumors as to what went on there. He recognized the chimney and the smoke, and, after a shift of wind, noticed the sickening stench, which they all mistook for burning garbage. Finally, all this was quite late in the Holocaust of Polish Jews. (Spring 1943). (pp. 68-69).

It is obvious that, in the absence of hindsight, distantly-originating sights and smells do not translate into certainty about human bodies being cremated, still less the scale of these acts (Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?), and the nationality of the people being cremated.

Thus, complaints that Poles were “complicit in the Holocaust”, if only in terms of betraying fugitive Jews (at whatever scale, and for whatever just or unjust reason) are fallacious because they assume that the Polish betrayers were cognizant of the fact that the Jews deported from the ghettos were being extermination. As the example above shows, this was not necessarily so.

THE UNFOLDING POLOKAUST

The young “Rys” (short for Ryszard, the Polish for Richard) went through the 1939 German-Soviet conquest of Poland. He described the carnage he saw. Then things only got worse. Ryszard comments: “While the general Polish population was not as actively persecuted as the Jews, times were still hard under the occupation. German soldiers treated the Poles like animals, and supplies were stringently rationed… [Non-Volksdeutsche]…were forced to trade on a newly emergent black market for their survival.” (p. 48).

The Polish intelligentsia (notably the politicians, teachers, priests, artists, etc.) were systematically exterminated by the Germans. (p. 53). In time, 3 million Polish gentiles were murdered by the Germans along with the 3 million Polish Jews. (p. 289). [Owing to the Holocaust supremacism that rules western societies, it is hardly surprising that some reviewers, of this book, report never before having heard of the 3 million Polish victims.]

As a teenager, “Rys” joined the ORLETA (Young Eagles), a Scout-like organization that became part of the Polish guerrilla movement (A. K., or Armia Krajowa). He was involved in scattering leaflets, and, later, falsified his age as 16 in order to actively participate in A.K. combat. Also, “…the Resistance made bombs, assassinated Gestapo agents, derailed trains, blew up bridges, aided Jews in hiding, and printed more than eleven hundred anti-Nazi periodicals.” (p. 61). “The Germans were ruthless, and would torture anyone they caught whom they suspected of involvement with the Resistance.” (p. 65). To reduce the danger of betrayals under torture, everyone in the A.K. knew each other only by the nom de guerre.

POLISH GUERRILLA LIFE

“Rys” devotes considerable attention to his combat participation in the ill-fated, Soviet-betrayed Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Although there was nominally tens of thousands of A.K. soldiers participating, only the equivalent of about 2,500 of them could be said to be “adequately” armed. (p. 87). Some weapons had been hidden in the nearby woods but, with the Germans swarming around Warsaw, the Polish fighters lacked access to them. (p. 86).

THE SOVIET-BETRAYED WARSAW UPRISING (1944)

“Rys” describes Polish ingenuity during the Warsaw Uprising: “When Warsaw’s water supply was cut off, the Poles collected rainwater from bomb craters and shared water from wells. When the Nazis were running daily air raids and shelling relentlessly with heavy artillery, the Poles made primitive weapons such as homemade grenades out of unexploded shells or Molotov cocktails using gasoline. They created launchers out of car springs, which could carry the weapons almost two hundred feet.” (p. 89).

Both sides made mistakes during the Uprising. Some 500 Poles lost their lives when an “abandoned” German tank turned out to have a time bomb (although more recent evidence suggests that it could have been an explosive accidently set off, not a boobytrap: p. 278). “Rys” and his men shot to pieces a unit of Germans that had blundered too close to the Polish positions. At another time, his men raised helmets on sticks to successfully deceive the Germans into exhausting their ammunition on nonexistent Polish fighters, thereby becoming forced to surrender: p. 273).

The Germans used human shields (Polish women and children) around their tanks, and then ran them over. All in all, the carnage of the Uprising is described by “Rys” in quite a graphic manner. So are the horrors of combatants and civilians evacuating through Warsaw’s sewers. “Rys” also pays tribute to the Polish women in the Uprising. (p. 143).

THE AFTERMATH

After the surrender of the Uprising, “Rys” was deported into Germany, and became a POW incarcerated at Stalag IV B. He saw the bright fires of the February 1945 Allied bombing of Dresden. The Germans approached the Poles with the offer of freedom, in return for being parachuted into Poland to fight the Soviets. (p. 207). All the Poles refused. Later, “Rys” and hundreds of other POWs escaped in order to avoid falling into Soviet hands, and successfully walked to the American lines.

This book has a moving ending. “Rys” and his daughter open up a suitcase, thought long thrown away, full of wartime mementos that “Rys’ hasn’t looked at for 60 years. (p. 259-on). Father and daughter later visit Poland, including all the wartime locations, and get to meet Poland’s President Kaczynski. And so on…