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Sparkle (1)
Ever since I was a young girl, I’ve wanted to find out what happened to my grandfather’s family (as of October 1939, I knew he had six sisters, all married with children, and a mother; his father died when he was a teenager). The advent of the internet has made this research far easier, although still it is very complicated. Even basic records, particularly from Warsaw (85% of the city was destroyed by the Nazis in 1944 in retaliation for the Warsaw Uprising, and the traditional Jewish neighborhoods were burned to the ground in 1943 to liquidate the ghetto and quell it’s last gasp for life, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising), are hard to locate. Further, the more I read and learned about people’s behavior during the Holocaust as I research my grandfather’s family, the more complicated the bigger picture becomes. The Holocaust took normal moral order and made what was formerly black white. Two women also illustrate how people with different goals can work together to make a difference.
Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and Irena Sendlerowa (Sendler in English) are two courageous activist women who I recently learned about who provide stark contrasts in the underlying reasons for their exceptional humanitarian works. In 1943, as the Warsaw Ghetto was emptied and its inhabitants sent to die at Treblinka, Kossak-Szczucka, a married mother of grown children wrote and printed 5,000 copies of a pamphlet entitled “Protest.” The document called upon all Polish Catholics to rise to the occasion and do what they could to aid Polish Jews:
The world is looking at these atrocities, the most horrible throughout the whole history of mankind, and is silent. Slaughter of the millions of people is happening in ominous silence. The executioners are silent, they do not boast with what they are doing. England is silent, so is America… Silent are Poles. Polish political friends of Jews limit themselves to journalistic notes, Polish opponents of Jews show no interest in a matter that is alien to them. Dying Jews are surrounded only by Pilates washing their hands. Silence shouldn’t be tolerated anymore. If for no other reason — it is mean. Those who are silent in the face of murder – become partners of the killer. Those who do not condemn – approve.
But just as my heart soars and I consider her baseline of compassion and humanity, I remember that Kossak-Szczucka was also a raving anti-Semite. In Protest, she also wrote:
We Catholic Poles, form our voice. Our feelings toward Jews have not changed. We do not stop thinking about them as political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland. Moreover we do realize, that they still hate us more than Germans, that they make us co-responsible for their misfortune. Why? On which basis? It remains the secret of the Jewish soul. Nevertheless, that is a fact that is continuously confirmed. Awareness of those feelings, doesn’t relieve us from the duty to condemn the crime.
Yet this same woman was one of the founders of Żegota, the Polish-government-in-exile’s official effort to aid Jews in the early 1940s. Even before there was an organized response, Kossak-Szczucka and her adult children had already helped hundreds of Jews in Warsaw escape the ghetto and hide in the surrounding areas. I suspect that she hoped that once they were rescued, the grateful Jews would convert, but whatever her motives were, Kossak-Szczucka risked her own life -– and the lives of her family –- to save her sworn enemy. (Poland was the only country in which those caught aiding Jews were summarily executed along with their families.) I can only understand it as the absurd compassion of a religious zealot at work.
Ultimately, Kossak-Szczucka quit Żegota when the organization decided to recruit leaders of the Jewish underground into their ranks as equals. She wanted it to be a Christian operation only; Jews helping Christians save Jews did not appeal to her. However, she continued to hide and transport Jews to safety on her own. For her brave work, the avowed anti-Semite was rightfully named a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem in 1985.
Irena Sendlerowa, was also a Polish Catholic woman who risked her life to save Jews during World War II. As a social worker with
