Jewish Gestapo Agents Inhibit Polish Rescuers Kurek

Your Life is Worth Mine: How Polish Nuns Saved Hundreds of Jews in German-Occupied Poland 1939-1945, by Ewa Kurek. 1997

The Much-Underappreciated Polish Rescue of Jews. The Danger of Jewish Gestapo Agents to Potential Polish Rescuers of Jews

This book provides much detail about the sacrificial life of Catholic nuns and their actions during the war on behalf of the needy children in general and Jewish ones in particular. It also gives the reader a good slice of Polish history during that tragic time. My review is based on the older 1997 edition.

DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THE NUMBER OF FUGITIVE JEWS SAVED BY POLES

There are widely divergent estimates on the total number of Polish Jews saved by Poles, ranging from 40,000-50,000 (Philip Friedman) to 100,000-200,000 (Joseph Kermisz). Kurek herself assesses the contribution of the Polish Catholic nuns as follows: “Two hundred rescuing convents and more than 1,200 saved Jewish children is tragically few when compared with the extermination of tens of thousands of Jewish children in Poland. Yet when it is taken into account that the rescuers were twenty thousand Polish nuns struggling against similar difficulties and subjected to the same inhuman occupation, the number becomes more significant.” (pp. 103-104).

UGLY, UNGRATEFUL ACCUSATIONS BY SOME JEWS

Some erstwhile Jewish children recall being subject to traditional church teachings about Jews being responsible for the Crucifixion of Christ. Others strongly repudiate any hints of such an experience (e. g., p. 187).

Kurek addresses scurrilous accusations, made by some Jewish individuals and groups, that the nuns’ motive for sheltering Jewish children was to convert them. She finds no support for this claim, and the testimonies of the Jews themselves do not indicate any pressure or enticement to convert. Of course, Jewish parents and rabbis had to individually decide whether death was preferable to the chance that a Jewish child would eventually prefer Christianity solely as the passive outcome of his/her experiences with Catholic “substitute parents”. But that is hardly the same thing as nuns rescuing Jews for the purpose of converting them!

INCURRED GERMAN-IMPOSED DEATH PENALTY CONSISTENTLY APPLIED TO RESCUERS OF JEWS

Scholar Ewa Kurek reminds us that, unlike in most German-occupied countries, the Germans had imposed an automatic death penalty for the slightest assistance to a Jew. In recent years, the nonsensical argument has been advanced (e. g, by post-Stalinist Jan T. Gross), that owing to the fact that Poles commonly risked the death penalty anyway (through such things as engaging in Underground activities, or participating in the black market) the death penalty was not a legitimate reason for more Poles not hiding Jews. This is nonsense. To begin with, a Pole was far less likely to be caught for being in the Underground than for hiding a Jew. In addition, as pointed out by Kurek, the Germans, in practice, did not impose the death penalty consistently: “For Poles to fight the Germans in the rank of the underground army, in clandestine activities or in partisan squads, was a sort of ennoblement. It was dangerous. If someone was caught by the Germans, he could be sentenced to death. Yet there was always a chance of survival. One could be taken to prison or a concentration camp, and, once there, escape or survive. But if a Pole was caught helping a Jew, death was certain.” (p. 33).

THE DANGER, TO POLISH RESCUERS, OF JEWISH GESTAPO AGENTS

In his memoir SURPLUS OF MEMORY, Yitzhak Zuckerman pointed out that he was as often accosted Jewish by szmalcowniks (szmalcowniki), or blackmailers, as Polish ones. In a similar vein, Kurek writes: “And the nuns also knew that among the szmalcowniks and Gestapo agents there were Jews. This is why the Semitic features of a person asking to admit a child was not sufficient.” (p. 58).

DO NOT JUDGE THE WARTIME CONDUCT OF POLES ANY MORE THAN ONE WOULD JUDGE THE WARTIME CONDUCT OF JEWS

The back of the book has Appendices that include testimonies of the nuns and testimonies of the rescued Jews. In one of the latter, Irit, R., having personally experienced both bad and good from Poles, makes the following thoughtful comments: “So I can say that I saw various types of people. But now, forty years later, how can one judge the Polish people? Our youth also judges the Jews as cowards who did not fight. Who has a right to judge those people? Those Jews and those Poles? One cannot judge Poles. Here they say that I like the Polish people, and that’s why I take this view. But it is not so. There is no black and white. In between here are other colors, and one has to be aware of this.” (p. 197). Hear that, Jewish accusers?

THE UNFOLDING POLOKAUST

Dr. Ewa Kurek also discusses the Germans’ genocidal murder of the Poles. She elaborates on the mass killings of Christian clergy and the destruction of church property (pp. 41-44). She also quotes estimates that the Germans murdered Polish gentiles and Polish Jews in a ratio of 10:1 during 1939-1941 and in a ratio of 2:3 during 1942-1944 (p. 17, 227). She cites entries from Emanuel Ringelblum’s diary that state that, ironically, Poles had tried to save their lives pretending to be Jews during the first indicated interval of time (p. 17, 224). Clearly, the genocidal priorities of the Germans had switched dramatically during the war. But they could have just as easily, and dramatically, switched again. Indeed, Kurek includes the testimony of Franciszka A., one of the rescued children currently living in Israel, who at least tentatively recognized the fact that, had the war lasted longer, the fate of the Poles would have eventually been the same as that of the Jews (p. 177).