Black Earth(116)

—

The fact that the Sznajder brothers so casually claimed to be with the Poles one moment and with the Soviets at another defies the logic of the postwar polemics. The great quarrel today is not between defenders of Nazis and defenders of the resistance. It is, rather, between the defenders of the two major groups who resisted the Germans behind the eastern front: the Polish Home Army and the Soviet partisans. Both of these groups were fighting the Germans, but both were also aspiring to control the same east European lands after the war—lands that were also the world homeland of the Jews. The German eastern empire overlapped with the territory of historic Jewish settlement, which overlapped with the interwar Polish state, which overlapped with the security zone that Stalin wished to establish between Moscow and Berlin after the war.

The Jewish question, in later polemics, became a tool in an argument about the right to rule: the Polish claim to national independence against the Soviet claim to revolutionary hegemony. Defenders of the Polish resistance claim that Soviet partisans could have liberated no one, since they were servants of advancing totalitarian repression. Defenders of Moscow maintain that the Home Army was fascist, since it was not an ally of the Soviet Union. In fact, on the Jewish question, the two groups were rather similar, since their similar form as quasi-state organizations was more important than their different ideologies.

Some distinguished soldiers and officers of the Home Army opposed both the German occupation of their country and the German policy of murdering all Polish Jews. Maurycy Herling-Grudziński, W?adys?aw Bartoszewski, Jan Karski, and Witold Pilecki all served in the Home Army. It was not at all uncommon for people who sheltered Home Army soldiers to also shelter Jews. Henryk Józewski, the interwar governor of Volhynia who had supported both the Promethean project in Soviet Ukraine and Revisionist Zionism, spent the war in the Polish underground. One of his many hiding places was in Podkowa, west of Warsaw, with the Niemyski family, whose main project was rescuing Jews. Northeast of Warsaw, in Ostrów Mazowiecka, Jadwiga D?ugoborska hid both local Home Army officers and Jews until she was executed by the Gestapo. Jerzy Ko?miński, like Karski and Pilecki a Home Army member who was dispatched to Auschwitz, chose not to correspond with his family when offered the chance. He did not want to endanger the Jews who were hiding in his house by revealing his home address. Micha? Gieru?a was another Home Army soldier who was hiding Jews. When he was denounced, some of the Jews he was sheltering were killed in his home. He and his wife were tortured by the Germans, but did not reveal the hiding place of the remaining Jews. They were then executed by hanging. As one of those Jewish survivors later put it, the Gieru?as “sacrificed their lives in exchange for ours.”

The Home Army also carried out some actions to save Jewish lives, or support Jewish struggles. Probably the most significant way the Home Army and other Polish political organizations aided individual Jews was by the production of false German documents. Their famous “paper mills” could generate German Kennkarten, indicating that Jews were, in fact, Poles: “Aryan papers,” as Jews called them at the time. Usually Poles took money or goods for this, but not always. The Home Army had a Jewish section, led by Henryk Woliński, which supplied information to foreign media beginning in early 1942. The official press organ of the Home Army, the Information Bulletin, reported on the Holocaust at every stage. The paratroopers who were dropped in British planes over Warsaw, their money belts stuffed with cash to help ?egota rescue Jews, were soldiers of the Home Army.

Thousands of Jews either joined the Home Army or claimed to have joined the Home Army as an explanation for their underground existence. In general, such a strategy could work only for the minority of Jews who could pass as Poles; others would almost certainly be denounced. The Warsaw region of the Home Army supplied the Jewish fighters of the ghetto with the weapons that they used to establish their authority and then more weapons that they used in the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943. In a few minor cases, small detachments of Jews were allowed to associate themselves with the Home Army. The Jews who fought in the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944 were not so much joining the Home Army (although some had done so) as joining in a battle that they saw as for their own freedom. As one of them described the thinking: “A Jewish perspective ruled out passivity. Poles took up arms against the mortal enemy. Our obligation as victims and as fellow citizens was to help them.”

In the opening days of the Warsaw Uprising, on August 5, 1944, one Home Army detachment liberated KZ Warschau (Concentration Camp Warsaw), which had been a major site of the murder of Jews and Poles. Most of its prisoners were foreign Jews, Greeks who had been transported from Auschwitz because they were deemed capable of heavy labor. Because this Home Army operation was entirely symbolic and without strategic significance, it was carried out entirely by volunteers. One of them was Staszek Aronson, a Jew who had jumped the train to Treblinka and had returned to Warsaw to fight in the Home Army. Many of the Jews liberated from the camp joined the uprising. But some of them were shot, still wearing their camp uniforms, by members of a smaller Polish underground group, the right-wing National Armed Forces (Narodowe Si?y Zbrojne, NSZ).