Black Earth(121)

Poles who had rescued Jews were sometimes troublesome in the new communist order, since they drew attention to the social basis of Soviet rule (the far larger number of Poles who had stolen from Jews) as well as to the hollowness of the Soviet characterization of the war (fascists against the USSR and its peaceful citizens). Thus, individual Poles who resisted the Germans and resisted the Soviets and drew attention to the special Jewish plight were a hindrance to memory policy. Witold Pilecki, who volunteered for Auschwitz and fought in the Warsaw Uprising, was shot by the Polish communist regime as a spy. W?adys?aw Bartoszewski, who had been sentenced to Auschwitz by the Germans and who had worked ably to rescue Jews in ?egota, was sentenced to prison by the communists for his service in the Home Army. Jan Karski, who had voluntarily entered the Warsaw ghetto and had tried to explain to western leaders the character of the Final Solution, was in emigration after the war, and so beyond the reach of Polish communist authorities. Soviet propaganda slandered him as an antisemite. In Palestine, Witold Hulanicki, the Polish diplomat who supported Jewish revolutionaries, was murdered, most likely on Soviet instructions. The most effective rescuer of Jews in eastern Europe, the amateur diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, was arrested by Soviet counterintelligence and held in the infamous Lubianka and Lefortovo prisons. He died in Soviet custody, although to this day no one knows the details.

As the example of Wallenberg illustrates, the total need to allocate good and evil extended beyond the Polish and Jewish questions. The Soviet return to Europe meant the establishment of friendly, which is to say communist, regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, as well as in Poland. In none of these places would the robbery of Jews be challenged, and in none of them would the murder of Jews enter history as a distinct subject. Nowhere would the people who risked their lives to rescue Jews be regarded as heroes. Those who helped Jews were portrayed as those who somehow got more money for saving them than they did by killing them. Rescuers in eastern Europe generally tried to conceal what they had done, so as not to arouse the interest of neighbors who might want to search for Jewish valuables. The powerful and enduring myth of Jewish gold and jewelry in the houses of rescuers reflects the mindset of those many Poles and east Europeans who robbed and killed Jews, not that of those who helped them. But since under Stalinism no contrary moral discourse could appear, materialism was all that remained.

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Klimenty Sheptyts’kyi was another Polish citizen and rescuer of Jews who was punished by the Soviets after the war. He was a Greek Catholic churchman, an archimandrite of the Studite Order of monks, representing a faith that in its liturgy was eastern, like the Orthodox Churches of Ukraine and Russia, but in its institutional hierarchy was western, in that it was one of the many smaller Catholic churches subordinate to the Vatican. Following the instructions of his brother Andrei, who was the metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church, Klimenty and other monks and priests hid more than a hundred Jews, many of them children, in their cathedral complex, Saint Jura, in Lwów—which they, as Ukrainians, called Lviv.

Andrei Sheptyts’kyi was the only Christian churchman of such high rank to act decisively against the mass murder of Jews. He had initially welcomed the German invasion as a liberation from Soviet rule, which had targeted not only his church but an increasing number of his flock. Without ever changing his opinion about the evil of the Soviet regime, he quickly came to believe that Nazi occupation was worse. Aside from his labor of rescue, which was of course secret, he protested to Himmler, protested to Hitler, and asked the pope to intervene to protect Jews. He told Pius XII that Jews were “the first victims” of German rule and that National Socialism meant “hatred of everything that is honorable and beautiful.” He issued pastoral letters reminding his flock of the divine commandment not to murder. He also classified murder as a reserved sin, which meant that Greek Catholics who killed human beings had to confess personally to him. Because Andrei Sheptyts’kyi was aged and crippled, these confessions were his way of being informed about what he understood as a deluge of sinfulness among his people. Hearing confession required him to face the truth, time after time, of what many Ukrainian Christians were doing to Jews. He died in November 1944, not long after the return of the Red Army. The Soviets forcibly subordinated the Greek Catholic Church to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church, which they had long before humiliated and tamed. When Klimenty refused to renounce his faith, he was sentenced to prison in Soviet Russia, where he died in 1951.

The Sheptyts’kyi brothers were no doubt unusual human beings, and Andrei was acting from a position of some authority. As an archbishop of the Catholic Church, he was far less vulnerable to German oppression than the vast majority of the population and the vast majority of churchmen. His church was also in a special position, in that its believers had been subject to Soviet occupation in 1939–1941, when the Soviet Union annexed eastern Poland. Many of the Ukrainian nationalists whom the Germans induced to collaborate after 1941 were Greek Catholics. Although many of these young men did not heed the instructions of their metropolitan, they would have reacted negatively had the Germans arrested or killed Sheptyts’kyi. In this sense his status was something like that of a diplomat, and his ability to exploit the buildings of the cathedral complex to save Jews resembled the ability of diplomats to extend state protection.