Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust

Nazi German poster in German and Polish (Warsaw, 1942) threatening death to any Pole who aided Jews

Under the Nazi German occupation of Poland in World War II, where conditions for both Jews and Poles were extraordinarily cruel, many Polish individuals, organizations and communities attempted to rescue Polish Jews. Some estimates put the number of Poles involved in rescue efforts of Jews in the hundreds of thousands, and credit them with helping to save tens of thousands of Jews; many Poles were murdered by the Nazi occupiers for offering assistance to Jews, which was a capital crime.

Background to rescue efforts

Poland’s total pre-World War II population is estimated at 35,100,000, of which 3.1 million were Jewish. The responses of non-Jewish Poles to the Holocaust against their Jewish fellow Poles covered an extremely wide spectrum, ranging from acts of altruism at the risk of endangering their own and often their families’ lives, to indifference, to active participation in killings.

The number of Polish Christians who rescued their Jewish countrymen from the Nazi prosecution has never been determined, and it is the subject of scholarly debate. Poles provided varying degrees of assistance to Jews, in organized fashion and through individual efforts. Some Poles gave food to Jews or left food in places Jews would pass on their way to work. Others directed Jews who managed to escape from the ghettos to people who could help them. Some Poles sheltered Jews for one or a few nights before telling them to leave. Many fewer assumed full responsibility for the Jews' survival, knowing that the Nazis punished those Poles who helped Jews by killing them and their families. It is mostly the group that took full responsibility who qualify for the title of the Righteous Among the Nations. To date, a total of 6,066 Poles have been officially recognized by Israel as the Polish Righteous among the Nations for their efforts in rescuing Polish Jews during the Holocaust, making Poland the country with the highest number of Righteous in the world.

According to Gunnar S. Paulsson, the number of rescuers that meet Yad Vashem's criteria is perhaps 100,000, and there may have been two or three times as many who offered minor forms of help, while the majority "were passively protective." In an article published in the Journal of Genocide Research, Hans G. Furth estimated that there may have been as many as 1,200,000 Polish rescuers. Władysław Bartoszewski, a wartime member of Żegota, has estimated that between 1 and 3 percent of the Polish population was actively involved in rescue efforts; Richard C. Lukas estimated that upwards of 1,000,000 Poles were involved in such rescue efforts, "but some estimates go as high as three million." Lukas also cites Władysław Bartoszewski, a wartime member of Żegota, as having estimated that "at least several hundred thousand Poles ... participated in various ways and forms in the rescue action." Teresa Prekerowa has estimated that between 160,000 and 360,000 Poles assisted in hiding Jews, amounting to between 1 and 2.5% of the 15 million adult Poles she categorizes as "those who could offer help. Prekerowa arrived at her estimate by assuming that it took two or three non-Jewish Poles to hide on Jew, while other sources indicate that a much higher number was involved (e.g., Paulsson, who estimates it took a "dozen or more" people to be involved for each person hidden). Prekerowa's estimate only counts those who were involved in directly hiding Jews and does not count those who were involved in other types of rescue efforts. It also assumes that each Jewish person who hid among the non-Jewish populace stayed through out the war in only one hiding place and as such had only one set of helpers.

John T. Pawlikowski, referring to claims by Polish and Polish-American writers, wrote that claims of hundreds of thousands of rescuers struck him as "highly inflated and without sufficient documentary evidence.". Pawlikowski offers no explanation for why he feels this way nor does he specify any methodological problems with how these estimates were arrived at. Martin Gilbert has written that under Nazi regime, rescuers were an exception, albeit one that could be found in towns and villages throughout Poland.

Likewise, there is no official number of how many Polish Jews were hidden by their Christian countrymen during wartime. Lukas estimated that the number of Jews sheltered by Poles at one time might have been "as high as 450,000." However, concealment did not automatically assure complete safety from the Nazis, and the number of Jews in hiding who were caught has been estimated variously from 40,000 to 200,000.

An average Jew who survived in occupied Poland depended not on the actions of a single person, but on many acts of assistance and tolerance. As Paulsson notes: "nearly every Jew that was rescued was rescued by the cooperative efforts of dozen or more people". During the six years of wartime and occupation, the average Jew was sheltered in seven different locations, had three or four sets of documents, two or three encounters with blackmailers, and faced recognition as a Jew multiple times. Israel Gutman has written that the majority of Jews who were sheltered by Poles were hidden "in exchange for what amounted to a ransom."

Efforts at rescue were encumbered by several factors. The threat of the death penalty for aiding Jews was one of them; it was responsible for the fact that some Poles refused to help Jews, or even informed Germans about them. There is general consensus among scholars that Polish collaboration with the Nazis was not commonplace. However, there were people who blackmailed the hiding Jews or turned them over to the Nazis. These blackmailers were often organized into criminal gangs and were often mutli-ethnic, consisting largely of Poles, Germans (often corrupted German officers) and some Jews. The vast majority of these individuals, according to Jan Grabowski, joined the criminal underworld only after the German occupation and were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews and the Poles who were trying to help them. According to one reviewer of Paulsson, with regard to the extortionists, "a single hooligan or blackmailer could wreak severe damage on Jews in hiding, but it took the silent passivity of a whole crowd to maintain their cover." He also notes that "hunters" were outnumbered by "helpers" by a ratio of one to 20 or 30.

Michael C. Steinlauf writes that even more than the fear of the death penalty for aiding the Jews, the major obstacle limiting Polish aid to Jews was popular attitudes towards Jews, which made individuals uncertain of what their neighbors' responses would be to attempts at assistance. A number of authors have noted the negative effects of the significant hostility towards Jews by Poles in the general population and within the the organizations and parties that comprised the Polish underground, the majority of which favored a policy of eventual removal of Jews from Poland. According to Mordecai Paldiel, former Director of the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, Polish landscape at the time contained "a widespread antisemitism that militated against a serious attempt to render succor to the afflicted Jews — difficult as such undertakings would have been in light of the Nazi terror machine which operated with a special brutality against the Polish population." Paldiel writes that the notion that Poles stood only to profit at the disappearance of Jews was "commonplace," and that a feeling of both relief at the disappearance of Polish Jewry was as widespread as the revulsion at the methods employed by the Nazis. A Yad Vashem study of Żegota cites an interview in which the organization's Deputy Chairman, Tadeusz Rek, reports to the representatives of the Polish government-in-exile "that the overwhelming majority of Polish society are hostile toward those extending relief [to the Jews]."

The 1980s saw the publication of scholarly studies that challenged earlier assumptions about Polish behavior during the war, amongst these were beliefs that a large segment of the Polish population provided assistance to Jews during the war; that the death penalty for aiding Jews was the main obstacle to providing aid, and that anti-semitic attitudes had been marginal in Poland during the war and remain so. Alina Cala's study of Jews in Polish folk culture found a persistence of traditional Christian antisemitism, including the belief in the blood libel claim against Jews. Johnathan Zimmerman writes that Cala's findings on attitudes of Polish peasantry during and after the war confirm what he describes as a growing consensus among scholars that an active stance by Poles towards Jews during the Holocaust either to assist or to betray was a marginal phenomena. Cala describes this as an indifference resulting from antisemitic propaganda both before and during the war, as well as the persistence of religious antisemitism. Nechama Tec, who herself survived the war aided by a group of Catholic Poles, noted that Polish rescuers worked within an environment that was hostile to Jews and unfavorable to their protection, in which rescuers feared both the disapproval of their neighbors and reprisals that such disapproval might bring. Tec also noted that Jews, for many complex and practical reasons, were not always prepared to accept assistance that was available to them. Some Jews did not expect help from their neighbors — in fact, some were surprised to have been aided by people who expressed antisemitic attitudes before the war. Steinlauf notes that despite these uncertainties, Jews were helped by thousands of individual Poles throughout the country. He writes that "not the informing or the indifference, but the existence of such individuals is one of the most remarkable features of Polish-Jewish relations during the Holocaust." Paulsson and Pawlikowski write that overall, such negative attitudes were not a major factor impeding the survival of sheltered Jews, or the work of the rescue organization Żegota.

Emanuel Ringelblum, Jewish historian, politician and social worker, known for his Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto praised the dedication of the Poles who risked their lives to save Jews. He wrote: "There are thousands [of idealists] like these in Warsaw and the whole country… The names of the people who do this, and whom the Poland which shall be established should decorate with the “Order of Humanitarianism”, will remain in our memory as the names of heroes who saved thousands of human beings from certain death by fighting against the greatest enemy the human race has even known" While offering praise for the heroic individual rescue efforts (Ringelblum and his family were themselves sheltered by Poles until their betrayal to the Nazis), he had a harsh judgment of the behavior of Polish civil society and the underground: "Polish fascism and its ally, anti-Semitism, have conquered the majority of the Polish people. It is they whom we blame for the fact that Poland has not taken an equal place alongside the Western European countries in rescuing Jews." Ringelblum wrote his chronicles in Polish, hoping to find a readership among Poles and a handful of Jewish survivors after the war. Indeed, the fact that the Polish Jewish community was decimated during World War II, coupled with stories about Polish collaborators, has contributed, especially among Israelis and American Jews, to a lingering stereotype that the Polish population has been passive in regard to, or even supportive of, Jewish suffering.

Punishment for aiding the Jews

Public execution of Michał Kruk and several other people in Przemyśl.

On November 10, 1941, the death penalty was expanded by Hans Frank, governor of occupied Poland, to apply to Poles who helped Jews "in any way: by taking them in for the night, giving them a lift in a vehicle of any kind" or "feed[ing] runaway Jews or sell[ing] them foodstuffs." The law was made public by posters distributed in all major cities. Nazi death squads carried out the mass executions of entire villages that were discovered to be aiding Jews on a communal level.

The Ulma family (father, mother and six children) of the village of Markowa, near Łańcut, where many families concealed their Jewish neighbors, were executed by the Nazis. In the villages of Białka near Parczew and Sterdyń near Sokołów Podlaski, 150 villagers were massacred for sheltering Jews. In November 1942, the Ukrainian SS squad executed 20 villagers from Berecz in Wołyń Voivodeship for giving aid to Jewish escapees from the ghetto in Povorsk.

Entire communities that helped shelter Jews were killed in the now-extinct village of Huta Werchobuska near Złoczów, in Zahorze near Łachwa, and in Huta Pieniacka near Brody. The same fate met the villagers of Stara Huta near Szumsk.

Several hundred Poles were massacred with their priest, Adam Sztark, in Słonim on December 18, 1942, for sheltering Jews in a church. In Huta Stara near Buczacz, Polish Christians and the Jewish countrymen they protected were herded into a church by the Nazis and burned alive on March 4, 1944.

Michał Kruk and several other people in Przemyśl were executed on September 6, 1943, for the assistance they had rendered to the Jews. Altogether, in the town and its environs 415 Jews (including 60 children) were saved, in return for which the Germans killed 568 people of Polish nationality.

Jews in Polish villages

Some Polish villages that provided shelter from Nazi apprehension offered protection for their Jewish neighbors, and also offered aid for refugees from other villages and escapees from the ghettos. Postwar research has confirmed that communal protection occurred in Głuchów near Łańcut with everyone engaged, as well as in the villages of Główne, Ozorków, Borkowo near Sierpc, Dąbrowica near Ulanów, in Głupianka near Otwock, and Teresin near Chełm.

The forms of protection varied from village to village. In Gołąbki, the farm of Jerzy and Irena Krępeć provided a hiding place for as many as 30 Jews; years after the war, the couple's son recalled in an interview with the Montreal Gazette that their actions were "an open secret in the village [that] everyone knew they had to keep quiet" and that the other villagers helped, "if only to provide a meal." Another farm couple, Alfreda and Bolesław Pietraszek, provided shelter for Jewish families in Ceranów near Sokołów Podlaski, and their neighbors brought food to those being rescued.

Two decades after the end of the war, a Jewish partisan named Gustaw Alef-Bolkowiak identified the following villages in the Parczew-Ostrów Lubelski area where "almost the entire population" assisted Jews: Rudka, Jedlanka, Makoszka, Tyśmienica, and Bójki. Historians have documented that a dozen villagers of Mętów near Głusk outside Lublin sheltered Polish Jews.

Antonina Wyrzykowska, one of the Righteous, and her husband provided shelter for seven Jews who had survived the Jedwabne massacre, in which approximately 1,000 Jews had been murdered by their Polish neighbors. Wyrzykowska successfully hid the seven in two bunkers in her home her home in nearby Yanczewka from July 1941 until liberation 28 months later. She was able to successfully evade searches by the Gestapo by keeping sheep on top of the hidden bunkers, and spreading gasoline to make it difficult for bloodhounds to pick up the scent of the hidden. After liberation, Wyrzykowska was taunted and beaten by her neighbors for having hidden Jews, and the Wyrzykowska’s were forced to leave their home and ultimately the region. Antonina Wyrzykowska was afraid to appear on camera for a 1998 documentary on the Jedwabne massacre.

In some documented cases, Polish Jews who were hidden were circulated between locations in a village. Farmers in Zdziebórz near Wyszków, by turns, sheltered two Jewish men who later joined the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) Polish resistance. The entire village of Mulawicze near Bielsk Podlaski took responsibility for the survival of an orphaned nine-year-old Jewish boy. Different families took turns hiding a Jewish girl at various homes in Wola Przybysławska near Lublin, and around Jabłoń near Parczew many Polish Jews successfully sought refuge.

Impoverished Polish Jews, unable to offer any money in return, were nonetheless provided with food, clothing, shelter and money by some small communities; historians have confirmed this took place in the villages of Czajków near Staszów as well as several villages near Łowicz, in Korzeniówka near Grójec, near Żyrardów, in Łaskarzew, and across Kielce Voivodship.

In tiny villages where there was no permanent Nazi military presence, such as Dąbrowa Rzeczycka, Kępa Rzeczycka and Wola Rzeczycka near Stalowa Wola, some Jews were able to openly participate in the lives of their communities. Olga Lilien, recalling her wartime experience in the 2000 book To Save a Life: Stories of Holocaust Rescue, was sheltered by a Polish family in a village near Tarnobrzeg, where she survived the war despite the posting of a 200 deutsche mark reward by the Nazi occupiers for information on Jews in hiding. Chava Grinberg-Brown from Gmina Wiskitki recalled in a postwar interview that some farmers used the threat of violence against a fellow villager who intimated the desire to betray her safety. Polish-born Israeli writer and Holocaust survivor Natan Gross, in his 2001 book Who Are You, Mr. Grymek?, told of a village near Warsaw where a local Nazi collaborator was forced to flee when it became known he reported the location of a hidden Jew.

Jews in Polish cities

In Poland's cities and larger towns, the Nazi occupiers created ghettos that were designed to imprison the local Jewish populations. The food rations allocated by the Germans to the ghettos condemned their inhabitants to starvation. Smuggling of food into the ghettos and smuggling of goods out of the ghettos, organized by Jews and Poles, was the only means of subsistence of the Jewish population in the ghettos. The price difference between the Aryan and Jewish sides was large, reaching as much as 100%, but the risk was also great. Hundreds of Polish and Jewish smugglers would come in and out the ghettos, usually at night or at dawn, through openings in the walls, underground tunnels and sewers or through the guardposts by paying bribes.

The Polish Underground urged the Poles to support smuggling. The punishment for smuggling was death, carried out on the spot. Among the Jewish smuggler victims were scores of Jewish children aged five or six, whom the German shot down en masse at the ghetto exits and near the walls. While communal rescue was impossible under these circumstances, many Polish Christians concealed their Jewish neighbors. Paulsson, in his research on the Jews of Warsaw, documented that Warsaw's Polish residents managed to support and conceal the same percentage of Jews as did residents in other European cities under Nazi occupation.

Ten percent of Warsaw's Polish population was actively engaged in sheltering their Jewish neighbors. It is estimated that the number of Jews living in hiding on the Aryan side of the capital city in 1944 was at least 15,000 to 30,000 and relied on the network of 50,000–60,000 Poles who provided shelter, and about half as many assisting in other ways.

Organizations dedicated to saving the Jews

Among the organizations created and run by ethnic Poles and Jewish underground activists dedicated to saving the Polish Jewish community, Żegota, the Council to Aid Jews, was the most prominent. It was unique not only in Poland, but in all of Nazi-occupied Europe, as there was no other organization dedicated solely to that goal. Żegota concentrated its efforts on saving Jewish children toward whom the Germans were especially cruel. It is estimated that about half of the Jews who survived the war (more than 50,000) were aided by Żegota with various forms of assistance – financial, legalization, medical, child care, and help against blackmailers. Perhaps the most famous member of Żegota was Irena Sendler, who managed to successfully smuggle 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto. A study by Yad Vashem concluded that a number of Polish sources overestimated the levels of support Żegota provided to Jews, saving perhaps only a few thousands of Jews; nonetheless the study concurs that the activities of Żegota "constitute one of the most brilliant chapters in the efforts to extend relief to Jews.".

Besides Żegota, there were few smaller, less effective organizations, which on their actions agenda included help to the Jews. Some were associated with Zegota.

Jews and the Church

The Roman Catholic Church in Poland provided many Jews with food and shelter during the war. Clerical frocks gave no immunity to Polish priests and monks who faced the death penalty for aiding persecuted Jews, just as ordinary Poles did. Nearly every Catholic institution in Poland looked after a few Jews, usually children with forged Christian birth certificates and an assumed or vague identity. In particular, convents of Catholic nuns in Poland played a major role in the effort to rescue and shelter Polish Jews, with the Franciscan Sisters credited with the largest number of Jewish children saved. These efforts were supported by local Polish bishops and the Vatican itself. The convent leaders never disclosed the exact number of children saved in their institutions, and for security reasons the rescued children were never registered. Jewish institutions have no statistics that could clarify the matter. Systematic recording of testimonies did not begin until the early 1970s. In the villages of Ożarów, Ignaców, Szymanów, and Grodzisko near Leżajsk, the Jewish children were cared for by Catholic convents and by the surrounding communities. In these villages, Christian parents did not remove their children from schools where Jewish children were in attendance.

Historians have determined that in some villages, Jewish families survived the Holocaust by living under assumed identities as Christians — with the knowledge of their neighbors, who did not betray their identities. This has been confirmed in the villages of Bielsko (Upper Silesia), in Dziurków near Radom, in Olsztyn Village near Częstochowa, in Korzeniówka near Grójec, in Łaskarzew, Sobolew, and Wilga triangle, and in several villages near Łowicz.

Unfortunately, classical types of Catholic anti-Semitism and religious nationalism existed in wartime Poland; particularly anti-Semitic right-wing Christian propaganda and church sermons were a negative influence with some in the senior Polish priesthood still hostile toward the Jews — an attitude well-known before the war. After the war, convents were often unwilling to return children to Jewish institutions that asked for them and refused to disclose the adoptive parents' identities, forcing government agencies and courts to intervene.

Jews and the Polish government

Witold Pilecki (Auschwitz concentration camp photo) volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, in order to gather information for the Polish resistance and create a resistance within the camp

Efforts to aid Jews took place amid a great deal of tension between the Polish Jewish community and the Polish government in exile. With two members on the National Council, Polish Jews were the only pre-war Polish minority represented in the government in exile, although there were no Jewish representatives in the Delegatura, the supreme political body of the underground within Poland. According to David Engel, the loyalty of Polish Jews to Poland and Polish interests was held in doubt by the exile government. In turn, according to David Engel and Daniel Stola, the fate of Polish Jews was of secondary concern to the government-in-exile, which primarily concerned itself with the fate of Polish people in general, reestablishing independent Polish state and establishing itself as an equal partner amongst the Allied forces. The relative weakness of the Polish government, along with it's dependence on Western powers who were at least nominally opposed to anti-semitism, as well as a belief in the influence of Jewish opinion on Western politics, finance and media, led to a greater responsiveness of the government in exile to Jewish demands. In contrast to the underground within Poland, which essentially operated on behalf of Poles only, the government in exile was subject to the scrutiny of the West, in particular American and British Jews, who found it easier to denounce Polish anti-Semitism rather than to criticize their own governments for inaction in regard to saving their fellow Jews. Nonetheless, for a long time, the government policies towards the Jews were mostly a continuation of its pre-war policies.

The Polish government in exile suffered from insufficient information about the situation in occupied Poland. As Stola points out: "the great majority of Polish Jews had been killed before the government-in-exile received and understood the news of the Final Solution".. Nonetheless it was the first to inform the Western Allies about the Holocaust, although early reports were often met with disbelief and disregarded - first by the Polish and even Jewish leaders themselves, then, for much longer, by other Western leaders. Witold Pilecki, member of Polish Armia Krajowa resistance, and the only person who volunteered to be imprisoned in Auschwitz, begun sending his reports on the Nazi concentration camps as early as 1940. Jan Karski, who had been serving as a courier between the Polish underground and the Polish government in exile, was smuggled into the Warsaw Ghetto and reported to the Polish, British and American governments on the situation of Jews in Poland.

File:Jan Karski.jpg

Before a wall map of the Warsaw Ghetto at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Jan Karski recalls his secret 1942 missions into the Nazi prison-city-within-a-city. Photo by E. Thomas Wood, 1994.

The government in exile often publicly expressed outrage at reports of mass murders of Jews conveyed to it by the underground:

in 1942, for example, Directorate of Civil Resistance, part of the Polish Underground State, issued a declaration:

For nearly a year now, in addition to the tragedy of the Polish people, which is being slaughtered by the enemy, our country has been the scene of a terrible, planned massacre of the Jews. This mass murder has no parallel in the annals of mankind; compared to it, the most infamous atrocities known to history pale into insignificance. Unable to act against this situation, we, in the name of the entire Polish people, protest the crime being perpetrated against the Jews; all political and public organizations join in this protest.

However, according to Michael C. Steinlauf, only on rare occasions did appeals to Poles to help Jews accompany these statements. Steinlauf points out that in one speech made in London by Prime Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the Polish Armed Forces, Władysław Sikorski, promising equal rights for Jews after the war, the promise was omitted from the printed Polish version of the speech. Stola points out that such hesistancy in appeals to the general population to aid the Jews diminished after reports of the Holocaust became more accepted, particularly after the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, when Sikorski made an appeal to "[his] compatriots to extend every help and protection to those [Jews] being murdered."

The Polish government and its underground representatives issued declarations that people acting against the Jews (blackmailers and others) will be punished by death. However, according to Joseph Kermish, among the thousands of collaborators sentenced to death by the Special Courts and executed by the Polish resistance fighters who risked death carring out their verdicts, very few were blackmailers or informers who had persecuted Jews. This, according to Kermish, led to increasing an boldness of the blackmailers in their activities. Prekerowa notes that the death sentences only began to be issued in September 1943, which meant that blackmailers were able top operate undeterred for there years from the time of the sealing of the Jewish ghettos in Autumn 1940. However, Poland, with its unique underground state, was the only country in occupied Europe to even have such extensive, underground justice system. Overall, it took the Polish underground until late 1942 to legislate and organize non-military courts which were authorized to pass death sentences for civilian crimes, such as non-treasonous collaboration, extortion and blackmail. These same courts also operated with regard to due process (obviously limited by circumstances) and as such it could take months to get a death sentence passed, much as in regular judicial systems.

The Polish government transmitted messages from Jewish underground and threw it weight with their requests for retaliation on German targets if the atrocities are not stopped - a request that was dismissed by the Allied governments. The Polish government also tried, without much success, to increase the chances of refugees from Poland finding safe haven in neutral countries, and to prevent deportations of Polish Jews back to Nazi-occupied Poland.

The government in exile also provided special assistance - funds, arms and other supplies - to Żegota and Jewish resistance organizations (like ŻOB and ŻZW), particularly from 1942 onwards. In 1943 a Jewish affairs section was set up by the Government Delegation for Poland of the Underground State; it was headed by Witold Bienkowski and Wladyslaw Bartoszewski. Its purpose was to organize activities concerning the Jewish population, to keep in touch with Zegota, and to process material regarding the fate of the Jews for transmission to the government in exile in London. Later that year, General Władysław Sikorski, issued an announcement:

Any Pole who collaborates in their acts of murder, whether by extortion, informing on Jews, or by exploiting their terrible plight or participating in acts of robbery, is committing a most serious offense against the laws of the Polish Republic" and called upon the Polish population to extend aid to the persecuted Jews.

While there was Polish Jewish representation in the London-based government in exile, the underground Delegate's Bureau and the Armia Krajowa exhibited an ethno-nationalism that excluded Jews. The attitudes of the Delegate's Bureau and the AK was one which saw Jews and ethnic Poles as separate entities, and communications from the underground to the government-in-exile showed a favorable attitude towards an ethnically homogeneous Poland free of Jews. Historian Israel Gutman has noted that AK leader Stefan Rowecki advocated the abandonment of the long-range considerations of the underground and the launch of an all-out uprising should the Germans undertake a campaign of extermination against ethnic Poles, but that no such plan existed while the extermination of Jewish Polish citizens was under way.

Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the National Council of the Polish government in exile, committed suicide in May 1943, in London, in protest against the indifference of the Allied governments toward the destruction of the Jewish people, and the failure of the Polish government to rouse public opinion commensurate with the scale of the tragedy befalling Polish Jews. In his suicide note he wrote:

The responsibility for the crime of the murder of the whole Jewish nationality in Poland rests first of all on those who are carrying it out, but indirectly it falls also upon the whole of humanity, on the peoples of the Allied nations and on their governments, who up to this day have not taken any real steps to halt this crime. by looking on passively upon this murder of defenseless millions tortured children, women and men they have become partners to the responsibility. I am obliged to state that although the Polish Government contributed largely to the arousing of public opinion in the world, it still did not do enough. It did not do anything that was not routine, that might have been appropriate to the dimensions of the tragedy taking place in Poland.

Overall, as Stola notes, Polish government was just as unprepared to deal with the Holocaust as were the other Allied governments.

Individual testimonies

In the postwar years, Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust recalled their experiences with the nation's villages in interviews and autobiographies. Emanuel Ringelblum, who chronicled the deportation of Jews from the town of Zbąszyń and later documented Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto wrote that in Głowno, Jews "who went out to a village in search of food usually returned with a bag of potatoes." Eva Safszycka, who escaped from the ghetto in Siedlce, said: "I met with so much kindness from the Poles, so many were decent and helpful that it is unbelievable."

Leon Kahn, who traveled with his father around Powiłańce near Lida, recalled: "At each house, we knocked and explained our plight. Only a few turned us down.... Very soon our wagon was filled with butter and eggs and flour and fresh vegetables, and my father and I wept at their kindness." Zygmunt Srul Warszawer, who survived by hiding near the village of Wielki Las, frequently requested assistance from farmers. Asked in interview if he had ever been refused, Warszawer indicated that though some farmers feared to allow him into their homes or barns, when it came to food, no one turned him down; "In twenty-six months, not once."

Luba Wrobel Goldberg, a Holocaust survivor, recalled in her autobiography that Lendowo in Brańsk "became a refuge for a lot of wandering Jews, they called this village the Garden of Eden."

Partial list of communities

Below is the partial list of Polish communities engaged in collective rescuing of Jews during the Holocaust, as described in literature mentioned below. Spelling of some of the names of settlements and counties has been revised in accordance with the currently available geodata. Occasionally, the below links lead to disambiguation pages listing villages known by the same name in the same geographical area of prewar and postwar Poland.

For list of settlements and their gminas in alphabetical order, please use table-sort buttons.

Settlement	Area	Settlement	Area	Settlement	Area
Białka	Parczew	Sterdyń	Sokołów	Bolimów	Skierniewice
Główne	Sierpc	Ozorków	Sierpc	Borkowo	Sierpc
Dąbrowica	Ulanów	Głupianka	Otwock	Osiny	Łuków
Wola Przybysławska	Lublin	Jabłoń	Parczew	Kańczuga	Przeworsk
Czajków	Staszów	Zdziebórz	Wyszków	Parczew	Ostrów
Rudka	Lublin	Jedlanka	Łuków	Makoszka	Dębowa Kłoda
Tyśmienica	Gmina Parczew	Bójki	Ostrów	Niedźwiada	Opole
Mętów	Głusk	Gołąbki	Lublin	Króle Duże	Ostrów
Dąbrowa Rzeczycka	Stalowa Wola	Kępa Rzeczycka	Stalowa Wola	Wola Rzeczycka	Stalowa Wola
Rzeczyca Okrągła	Stalowa Wola	Głuchów	Łańcut	Mulawicze	Bielsk
Drzewica	Opoczno	Ceranów	Sokołów	Poniatowa	Lublin
Bielsko	Upper Silesia	Dziurków	Radom	Olsztyn Village	Częstochowa
Korzeniówka	Grójec	Łaskarzew	Garwolin	Sobolew	Garwolin
Wilga	Łowicz	Siedlce	Masovia	Wielki Las	Pisz
Lendowo	Brańsk	Teresin	Chełm	Powiłańce	Lida
Kajetanówka	Lublin	Ożarów	Kielce	Ignaców	Lublin
Szymanów	Masovia	Grodzisko	Leżajsk	Białka	Parczew
Sterdyń	Sokołów	Okopy	Kisorycze	Rokitno	Wołyń
Tarnopol	Tarnopol V.	Berecz †	Wołyń	Huta Werchoducka †	Złoczów
Zahorze †	Łachwa	Dubeczno	Lublin	Kozaki	.
Stara Kubra	Radziłów	Bełżec	Tomaszów	Sobibór	Włodawa
Treblinka	Małkinia	Serock	Warsaw	Sikórz	Płock
Urzędów	Lublin	Milanówek	Warsaw	Mielec	Rzeszów
Goszcza	Miechów	Gawłuszowice	Mielec	Chrząstów	Mielec
Majdan Nepryski	Bełżec	Głowaczowa	Dębica	Grodzisk	Warsaw
Wołomin	Warsaw	Zabłudów	Białystok	Nowosady	Brańsk
Baranki	Białystok	Araje	Białystok	Zawyki	Białystok
Niedźwiada	Opole Lubelskie	Runów	Grójec	Gorzyce	Dąbrowa
Przydonica	Nowy Sącz	Ubiad	Nowy Sącz	Klimkówka	Nowy Sącz
Jelna	Gródek	Słowikowa	Nowy Sącz	Librantowa	Chełmiec
Piszczac	Biała Podlaska	Kolonia Dworska	Piszczac	Rożki	Krasnystaw
Zamość	Lublin	Radzymin	Wołomin	Otwock	Warsaw
Miedzeszyn	Warsaw	Praga	Warsaw	Żoliborz	Warsaw
Obórki	Brodnica	Woronówka †	Ludwipol	Kościejów	Bełżec
Kulików	Bełżec	Bar	Gródek	Zawołocze †	Ludwipol
Bereźne	Kostopol	Korzec	Wołyń	Stara Huta	Szumsk
Kosów	Kołomyja	Międzyrzec	Równe	Niżniów	Czortków
Ułaszkowce	Czortków	Hanaczów	Lwów	Ostra Mogiła †	Skałat
Konińsk †	Sarny	Borowskie Budki	Kisorycze	Świnarzyn	Dominopol
Bereźne	Kostopol	Janówka	Tarnopol	Wólka Kotowska	Łuck
Huta Stepańska	Wołyń	Przebraże	Wołyń	Zdołbunów	Bereźne
Huta Brodzka †	Lwów	Adamy †	Lwów	Netreba †	Wołyń
Karaczun †	Kostopol	Złoczów	Rakowiec	Pańska Dolina	Wołyń
Kurdybań	Wołyń	Bortnica †	Wołyń	Zameczek	Wilno
Żeniówka	Wołyń	Wsielub	Nowogródek	Mieżańce	Raduń
Dźwinogród	Buczacz	Huta Stara †	Buczacz	Hołosko Wielkie	Lwów
Berecz †	Wołyń	Matejkany	Wilno	Białozoryszki †	Wilno
Potok Górny	Tomaszów	Bybło	Rohatyn county	Jazłowiec	Buczacz
Dołha	Tarnopol	Słonim	Nowogródek	Hucisko Oleskie	Tarnopol
Settlement	Area	Settlement	Area	Settlement	Area

Further reading

• Malgorzata Melchior, The Holocaust Survivors who passed as non-Jews – in Nazi occupied Poland and France. The comparison of the Survivors’ experience1, Warsaw University
• Gunnar S. Paulsson, “The Demography of Jews in Hiding in Warsaw, 1943–1945,” Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, volume 13 (2000), at pages 78–103.
• Gunnar S. Paulsson, “Evading the Holocaust: The Unexplored Continent of Holocaust Historiography,” in John K. Roth and Elisabeth Maxwell, eds., Remembering for the Future: The Holocaust, p. 257, in an Age of Genocide (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave, 2001), volume 1, pp.302–318.
• Gunnar S. Paulsson, “Ringelblum Revisited: Polish-Jewish Relations in Occupied Warsaw, 1940–1945,” in Joshua D. Zimmerman, ed., Contested Memories: Poles and Jews during the Holocaust and Its Aftermath (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp.173–92.
• Gunnar S. Paulsson, Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940–1945 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002). Monograph.
• John T. Pawlikowski, Polish Catholics and the Jews during the Holocaust, in , Google Print, p. 107-123 in Joshua D. Zimmerman, Contested Memories: Poles and Jews During the Holocaust and Its Aftermath, Rutgers University Press, 2003, ISBN 0813531586
• Tadeusz Piotrowski (1997). "Assistance to Jews". Poland's Holocaust. McFarland & Company. pp. p.112-128. ISBN 0-7864-0371-3. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help); Cite has empty unknown parameters: |chapterurl= and |coauthors= (help)
• Nechama Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland, Oxford University Press US, 1987, ISBN 0195051947, Google Print
• Irene Tomaszewski, Tecia Werbowski, Zegota: The Rescue of Jews in Wartime Poland, Price-Patterson, 1994, ISBN 0969577168