Stories of Polish Resistance: Examples of Courage During the Holocaust

1. STORIES OF POLISH RESISTANCE About half of the six million European Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish. In 1939 a third of the capital city Warsaw, and 10% of the entire country was Jewish. By 1945 97% of Poland's Jews were dead. These eleven examples of Polish resistance do not proport to give an overview of what happened in Poland during The Holocaust. They have been chosen to reflect the unimaginably difficult choices made by both Jews and non-Jews under German occupation – where every Jew was marked for death and all non-Jews who assisted their Jewish neighbours were subject to the same fate. These individuals were not typical; they were exceptional, reflecting the relatively small proportion of the population who refused to be bystanders. But neither were they super-human. They would recoil from being labelled as heroes. They symbolise the power of the human spirit – their actions show that in even the darkest of times, good can shine through… Witold Pilecki Irena Sendler Maximilian Kolbe Mordechai Anielewicz Emanuel Ringelblum Jan & Antonina Zabinski ZofiaKossak-Szczucka Father MarceliGodlewski Jan Karski Janusz Korczak Józef & WiktoriaUlma Created by With support from

2. STORIES OF POLISH RESISTANCE Witold Pilecki Irena Sendler Maximilian Kolbe Mordechai Anielewicz Emanuel Ringelblum Jan & Antonina Zabinski ZofiaKossak-Szczucka Father MarceliGodlewski Jan Karski Janusz Korczak Józef & WiktoriaUlma Irena Sendler Created by With support from

3. IRENA SENDLER 1910 - 2008 Irena Sendler was an exceptional woman who coordinated an Underground Network of rescuers that enabled many Jewish children to escape the Warsaw Ghetto and survive The Holocaust. Her father was a doctor who died during a typhus epidemic in 1917 after helping many sick Jewish families who were too poor to afford treatment. Out of gratitude, members of the community offered to support Irena’s family after his death and consequently there was a strong bond of friendship between Irena’s family and her Jewish neighbours. As a result she learnt to speak Yiddish, a skill that was invaluable in her later work. “My parents taught me, that if a man is drowning, no matter what his religion or nationality, you must help him, whether or not you can swim yourself.”

4. UNDER OCCUPATION & THE WARSAW GHETTO Irena was incapable of ignoring injustice and joined Warsaw’s Social Services department.She was a natural leader and became the heart of a network of women who had the shared aim of helping Warsaw’s poorest residents. Under German occupation it was illegal for Warsaw’s Social Services department to help Jews, so Irena altered client documents to continue supporting them. Although this was a very risky thing to do neither Irena nor her colleagues were deterred by the dangers. When the Warsaw Ghetto was created Irena gained entry by obtaining a Health Inspector pass so she could continue to smuggle in much needed supplies. Irena was distressed to see so many children suffer from starvation and was determined to do something more to help them. Irena’s network distributed food and medicines to the poorest members of Warsaw’s Jewish community.

5. RESCUE When residents of the Warsaw Ghetto stared to be deported to Treblinka death camp, Irena’s network stepped up their rescue operation by smuggling children out of the ghetto. This was dangerous as Germans killed those who helped Jews. Babies were sedated and hidden in tool boxes or medical bags and older children were smuggled out through the sewer system. But the risk remained, even after a child was living in a secret safe-house. If their real identities were suspected by a neighbour they would have to be relocated. This happened quite frequently. “How many mothers do most children have?” one child asked Irena. “So far I’ve had three.” Children were taken to ‘safe houses’ and given non-Jewish identities where they acclimatised to their new circumstances.

6. DESPERATE CHOICES It was desperately difficult to hand over a child to a stranger and Jewish families agonised over such a painful decision . Those who agreed felt it was the only chance their child had of surviving. Irena described this heart-wrenching sacrifice as a parent’s final act of love. “The real heroes were the mothers” she would say. She hoped to reunite the Jewish families after the war and kept meticulous records of each child, burying lists of their names in jars next to a friend’s apple tree. The tree beside which were buried the real names of the hidden children. In October 1943 she was arrested by the Gestapo and was driven away for interrogation. Although she was brutally tortured, Irena refused to provide any information and was sentenced to death, but on the morning of her execution she was pulled out of line and told to run. Her escape had been bought with a bribe from the Polish Underground.

7. RECOGNITION Lili Pohlman, a Holocaust survivor who was born in Krakow and hidden as a child in Lvov, championing the work of her close friend Irena Sendler. Irena was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in 1965. Her close friend Lili Pohlman spoke widely in the UK about Irena’s work and in 1999 students from Kansas made a play about her life - finally the world got to learn about this amazing woman and the network she coordinated. The tree of righteousness planted in Israel in Irena’s honour with the medal she received “I’ve tried to live a human life, which isn’t always easy”

8. STORIES OF POLISH RESISTANCE Witold Pilecki Irena Sendler Maximilian Kolbe Mordechai Anielewicz Emanuel Ringelblum Jan & Antonina Zabinski ZofiaKossak-Szczucka Father MarceliGodlewski Jan Karski Janusz Korczak Józef & WiktoriaUlma Maximilian Kolbe Created by With support from

9. Father Maximilian Kolbe 1894 - 1941 Raymond Kolbe was born in ZdunskaWola, Poland, to a devout Roman Catholic family. When he was 12 he had a vision of the Virgin Mary which changed his life, when he learned that he was to become a martyr. He entered a seminary at Lvov in 1910 and was ordained as a priest in 1918. He formed a group called “Knights of the Immaculate” which was dedicated to fighting for goodness, encouraging people to have an interest in religion and to perform charitable works. They published a journal which was designed to ‘illuminate the truth and show the way to true happiness.’ In 1930 he travelled to Nagasaki, Japan and published the journal in Japanese. Here, he did not try to impose Christianity, but respected Buddhism and Shintoism looking for ways to engage in dialogue. He returned to Poland in 1936 and three years later, when the Germans invaded, he resumed his pamphleteering work and offered assistance to Polish refugees, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Kolbe with student priests

10. Father Maximilian Kolbe 1894 - 1941 His work agitated the Nazi regime and he was imprisoned on many occasions, eventually being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This was the most notorious concentration camp that the Nazi’s built on Polish soil – more than a million of the six million European Jews that were murdered in the Holocaust died there. It was also were approximately 70,000 non-Jewish Poles were murdered. Although it was a terrible place of death, many remarkable stories of heroism have emerged from the testimony of survivors, - one such example is that of prisoner 16770 - Maximilian Kolbe. Kolbe was incarcerated in a part of the camp where Polish non-Jewish prisoners were kept. Even in these dreadful surroundings his instinct was to reach out to his fellow men. Auschwitz Survivors have reported that he shared his rations of soup or bread with others and, at night-time, moved from bunk to bunk, saying: 'I am a Catholic priest. Can I do anything for you?'  The prisoner bunks at Auschwitz (this photo was taken many years after the war)

11. Father Maximilian Kolbe 1894 - 1941 When it was reported that another prisoner had escaped from the camp, the Nazis decide to starve 10 others in retaliation. One of the selected men broke down and cried “My wife! My children! I will never see them again!” Hearing this, Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward and asked to die in his place. The Germans granted this request, probably because the young prisoner was more useful to them as a slave labourer than the much older, frailer Kolbe. After the war the prisoner that Kolbe replaced said 'I could only thank him with my eyes. I was stunned and could hardly grasp what was going on. The immensity of it: I, the condemned, am to live and someone else willingly and voluntarily offers his life for me - a stranger. Was this some dream?’

12. Father Maximilian Kolbe 1894 - 1941 Father Maximilian Kolbe died on 14 August, 1941 and his body was removed to the crematorium, without dignity or ceremony, like hundreds of thousands who had gone before him, and hundreds of thousands more who would follow. Another survivor declared that the when the news and circumstances of Father Kolbe's death became known it was like 'a shock filled with hope - like a powerful shaft of light in the darkness of the camp.' The cell in Auschwitz where Father Kolbe died is now a shrine and he was made a saint by Pope John Paul II in 1981. His story continues to inspire many people today.