Black Earth(114)

Pilecki was a patriot, who believed that Auschwitz was simply one more test of Polish character, a test that some people failed and some people passed. Pilecki’s major preoccupation was the possibility of Polish resistance, within the camp and without. Indeed, once he had escaped he immediately rejoined the Polish underground, and fought in 1944 in the ranks of the Home Army in the Warsaw Uprising. Nevertheless, Pilecki had no difficulty seeing and recording the distinct horror of German policy towards the Jews. At the time the gassings of Jews began, Pilecki had a labor assignment that allowed him to walk from the barracks to a tannery. He wrote of the murdered Jews from this perspective: “Over a thousand a day from the new transports were gassed. Their corpses were burned in the new crematoria.” And then of everyone else: “As we marched to the tannery, raising dust from the gray path, we could see the beautiful sunrise, pinkening the lovely flowers in the orchards and the trees by the path. On the way back we saw young couples taking a stroll, inhaling the charm of spring, or women peacefully pushing their children in strollers. And then arose a thought that would stay in the mind, knock against the inside of the skull, disappearing perhaps for a moment, but then again stubbornly seeking an exit or an answer to the question: ‘Are we all people?’ The ones walking through the flowers and the ones going to the gas chambers? The ones marching beside us with rifles and we who have been prisoners for years?”

Karski and Pilecki were men whose primary loyalty was to a Polish state, or to the traditions that they associated with a Polish state, open to redefinition after its destruction and fragmentation. They always claimed that what they did was entirely uninteresting, a matter of duty, nothing more than anyone would or at least should have done in their place. They were curiously unaffected by the absence of actual state institutions, internalizing the obligations arising from membership in a polity while constantly reconsidering for themselves just what those obligations meant—always in the direction of demanding more rather than less of themselves. Their entire posture makes no sense without Polish statehood, but their actions went far beyond what anyone but they themselves expected.

A third outstanding member of the Polish underground, W?adys?aw Bartoszewski, would later make the point, repeatedly and with some irritation, that individuals who worked on behalf of Jews did not first ask the Polish nation for permission to do so. As it happened, the young Catholic activist Bartoszewski was on the same transport to Auschwitz as Pilecki and 1,703 other Polish men on September 22, 1940. While Pilecki remained at Auschwitz to organize and to report, Bartoszewski was released in April 1941 (as some people were) and returned immediately to the Polish underground in Warsaw. Among many other commitments, he became active in ?egota, an umbrella group of organizations in Warsaw and other cities that worked to rescue Jews.

Some 28,000 Jews were hiding in Warsaw on the Aryan side, beyond the ghetto; of these, some 11,600 survived. Of the 28,000, some 4,000 received help in the form of money, food, shelter, and emotional support from members of ?egota. Most of the money came from the Joint, an American Jewish nongovernmental organization, but was delivered in the money belts of Polish paratroopers dropped from British planes. ?egota was a Polish government organization, and as such represented the first state policy (and one of very few) designed to keep Jews alive. Once the money was delivered, which was no minor undertaking, everything depended upon the people of ?egota.

Among ?egota’s leaders in Warsaw there was a certain dominance of members of the Polish Socialist Party. It had been the largest party in Warsaw before the war, counting many Jewish members and voters, and had opposed the prewar regime and its policy of Jewish emigration. A good deal of rescue involved socialists helping fellow party members whom they had known before the war. In general, ?egota’s leaders had experienced German oppression. Its director, Julian Grobelny, was arrested by the Germans and then spent much of the war in hospital. Irena Sendlerowa, who along with other women rescued a large number of Jewish children, had been imprisoned by the Gestapo. Bartoszewski and Tadeusz Rek had both been in Auschwitz; Adolf Berman had escaped the Warsaw ghetto.

At the same time, a number of people active in ?egota were also from the antisemitic Right. The most outspoken of these was Zofia Kossak. She was the founder of the civil organization that preceded ?egota, and her significance as a rescuer is indisputable. She was concerned for the souls of Catholics who could stand by and do nothing while mass murder took place before their eyes. She was also worried that after the war Jews would blame the killing on the Poles. Antisemitic rescue was not as contradictory as it might appear. Almost no one rescued Jews from a sense of obligation to Jews; a few people rescued Jews out of a sense of obligation to fellow human beings. The antisemitic rescuers tended to dislike Jews and want them out of Poland, but nonetheless regarded them as human and capable of suffering. In some cases, antisemites who rescued Jews thought of themselves as protecting Polish sovereignty by resisting German policy; in other cases they were acting from a sense of charity.