Black Earth(123)

The dominant Roman Catholic Church in Poland took no stance against the mass murder of the millions of Jews who had lived for centuries among its adherents. Catholic doctrine at the time deemed Jews collectively responsible for the killing of Jesus, and Catholic teachings about modernity connected the blight of communism to Judaism. As a result, the motivations of Roman Catholics who rescued Jews had to arise from some sort of individualism, either their own or that of their parish priests. Such Roman Catholics tended to express religious beliefs that were unorthodox or heretical.

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Wilm Hosenfeld, a Roman Catholic Nazi German officer stationed in Poland, came to regard the Holocaust as a kind of second original sin. He served as the director of sports for German officers in occupied Warsaw. For whatever reason, he saw the deportation of the Jews from the city with clear eyes and declined to apply political or ideological rationalizations to the sin of murder. For him, the crucial question was simply whether or not the Jews of the ghetto were being deported to their deaths. If so, he wrote, there “is no honor in being a German officer.” After the destruction of the ghetto, he spoke of “a curse that can never be lifted.” He aided several Jews and Poles, rescuing some from certain death. He is remembered for finding and helping the pianist W?adys?aw Szpilman in the ruins of Warsaw during the final weeks of the German occupation. Hosenfeld was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison as a war criminal by the Soviets and died in captivity. Szpilman survived to tell Hosenfeld’s story.

Aleksandra Ogrodzińska, a Polish Roman Catholic, believed in miracles. In 1940, she and Vala Kuznetsov were colleagues in a Soviet workplace in the middle of marshy Polesia, in what had been eastern Poland before the Soviet invasion. After the Germans drove out the Soviets in 1941, Aleksandra lied to the new authorities, claiming that Vala was her domestic help. In this way she removed one Jewish woman from public view. In the weeks and months and years that followed, Aleksandra cried when she told Vala what was happening to the Jews. “Why do we deserve this?” Vala asked Aleksandra. “Just because we are Jews?” Aleksandra wept and tried to comfort Vala, and perhaps herself, by saying that a miracle that very night could liberate them and change everything.

Wonders and visions threaten religious institutions, because they challenge the monopoly of inspiration of the clergy. Gedali Rydlewicz escaped from a transport from Bia?a Podlaska, on the western edge of Polesia. She found her way to a man at the edge of a forest whom the people of the area called the “Saint.” Micha? Iwaniuk wrote religious poetry, blessed people on his own authority, and spoke to all and sundry of his visions. It is unclear whether he was Roman Catholic or Orthodox; Jewish sources are usually mute on the differences among various sorts of Christianity. In either case, he would have been a heretic and a blasphemer; he was certainly an outsider, living beyond the reach of religious and other institutions. Iwaniuk helped something like sixty Jews over the course of the war. When asked why he did so, he said that the Virgin Mary had appeared before him and instructed him to save people.

Roman Catholic nuns were outsiders of a different kind. They and their convents were entirely subordinate to the hierarchy and the teachings of their church. They kept a distance from the everyday politics of religion—as women in an institution directed by men and in which only men can serve as priests, and as people living in isolation from the world in pursuit of specific forms of devotion. Polish Roman Catholic nuns saved hundreds, if not thousands, of Jewish children. In some cases, they wanted to convert Jewish children to the Roman Catholic faith. Micha? G?owiński’s mother, when she found her son alive after the war, was happy to allow the nuns to baptize him in recognition of what they had done and risked. From the theological perspective of the Catholic Church, the rescue of souls was more important than the preservation of earthly lives. In the politics of the Catholic Church, the conversion of the children made them Christians.

For the nuns in their convents—women who had left their earthly families or who had none—children had a certain special appeal that older Jews might not have. Yet, in a rather large number of cases, Polish Roman Catholic nuns also rescued young Jewish men, who for any number of reasons did not belong in a convent. Anna Borkowska, for example, the mother superior of a Dominican convent near Vilnius, aided several Jews. One of her favorites was a passionate and intelligent young man called Aryeh Wilner, whom she called “Jurek” (a Polish diminutive for Jerzy, or George). After Wilner left the convent and went to Warsaw, he used “Jurek” as his nom de guerre in the Jewish underground and in his contacts with Poles on the Aryan side of the city. In 1943, Wilner was entrusted with the mission of securing support and arms from the Home Army before the uprising in the ghetto. Fighting broke out while he was beyond its walls, and so his descriptions of the motives of the ghetto fighters reached Poles and thus the world. The uprising was not about preserving Jewish life, he explained, but about rescuing dignity. His Polish interlocutors understood this in their own national romantic terms: that Jewish self-sacrifice was meant to redeem the Jewish nation. Wilner seems to have meant something more general. The ghetto uprising was about the dignity of human beings, and thus a challenge to everyone who might have done more but instead did less. If it was redemption, it was also rebuke.