Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation 1939-1944

511 Pages·2001·6.519 MB·English

by  Richard C. Lukas

TO THE MEMORY OF ALL THE VICTIMS OF THE HOLOCAUST
Also by Richard C. Lukas ...
Did the Children Cry?:
Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945
Winner of the Janusz Korczak Literary Award of the Anti-Defamation
League.
"Lukas ensures that the cries of the youngest and most vulnerable victims of
the Nazi terror are heard and recorded for posterity."
-The Polish Review
"He intersperses the endless numbers, dates, locations and losses with
personal accounts of tragedy and triumph. A well-researched
-Catalyst
"Lukas systematically catalogues the varied aspects of Nazi occupation
policies in Poland in a way that highlights how Polish children Jewish and
Christian-became major targets of German wartime savagery."
- Choice
"A strong book."
-The Canadian Jewish News
Based on eye-witness accounts, interviews, and prodigious research by the
author, who is an expert in the field, Did the Children Cry? is a unique
contribution to the literature of World War II, and a most compelling account
of German inhumanity towards children in occupied Poland.
263 pages • 5 '/2 x 8'/. • 16 b & w photos • $14.95pb • 0-7818-0870-7 • (44)
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FOREWORD by Norman Davies ix
CHAPTER ONE
The German Occupation of Poland 1
CHAPTER TWO
The Polish Government and the Origins of the Uunderground 40
CHAPTER THREE
The Military Underground in Operation 61
CHAPTER FOUR
Civilian Resistance and Collaboration 95
CHAPTER FIVE
Poles and Jews 121
CHAPTER SIX
The Polish Government, the Home Army, and the Jews 152
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Warsaw Uprising 182
AFTERWORD 220
NOTES 225
BIBLIOGRAPHY 273
APPENDIX A
Zegota: A Conspiracy of Good 287
APPENDIX B 310
They Were Killed for the Help They Gave
APPENDIX C 338
Righteous Among the Nations
APPENDIX D 340
Posters and Announcements
INDEX 345
MAPS
Poland, 1939-1944 6
Major German Camps in Poland 38
The history of wartime Poland is not a simple subject. Yet it is frequently
oversimplified and misunderstood. There are people who do not even know
that Poland fought against the Germans on the Allied side from start to
finish. If British and Americans think of it at all, they think of a country
which Hitler turned into the central laboratory of Nazi Germany's
Lebensraum and which was the site of what the Nazis named
euphemistically "The Final Solution of the Jewish Question."
Of course, it is absolutely true that German-occupied Poland was
subjected to the most rigorous policies of racial planning, and that the
genocide of the six million Jews was largely perpetrated there in
circumstances rightly described as uniquely evil. The point is: these
undoubted facts represent less than half the story. Between 1939 and 1945-
that is during the war years but for reasons mainly unconnected with the
conduct of the war-occupied Poland became the scene of numerous other
campaigns of exterminatory violence. What is more, Poland was not just a
land inhabited by Catholic Poles and Polish Jews. It contained a much richer
array of ethnic and religious groupings, each of whom have reason to view
their own particular sufferings as meriting the label of a "holocaust."
Not just Poles and Jews, but Poland's Germans, Ukrainians, Lithuanians,
Byelorussians, Tartars and Gypsies, Catholic, Orthodox, Uniate, Protestant,
Judaic and Moslem were all to pass through the mills of Hitler's and Stalin's
human engineering. The result was a variety of atrocities, great and small,
that knows no parallel. In 1939-1941, when the masters of the German zone
were concentrating on the forcible Germanization of Polish provinces
directly annexed to the Reich, the Soviet NKVD was conducting ethnic,
social and political purges in the eastern zone of occupation that destroyed
far more innocent lives than the SS could by that stage account for. In 1941-
1944, when German power engulfed not ony the whole of Poland but also
the Baltic states, Byelorussia and Ukraine, the Nazis' racial laboratory
consumed all manner of human categories, from the Polish intelligentsia to
the Slav slave-laborers. In 1944-1945, the Soviet juggernaut returned,
liberating certain categories of people while butchering, deporting or
breaking others.
Dr. Richard C. Lukas has rendered a valuable service by showing that no
one can properly analyze the fate of one ethnic community in occupied
Poland without referring to the fates of others. In this sense, The Forgotten
Holocaust is a powerful corrective. For the book was conceived at a time
when official communist historiography in Poland ignored ethnic
complications altogether, using the state censorship to enforce a highly
selective view of the wartime occupation where all crimes were attributed to
"Fascism" and all victims were described as "Polish citizens" or "people of
various nationalities." There was no specific mention of either Jews or
Catholics. By the same token, Holocaust studies in the West, which in the
nature of things focused on the Jewish tragedy and hence on Fascist
oppression, were giving an oversimplified, dialectical perception of wartime
realities.
The main thing is that American readers should receive a comprehensive
picture of occupied Poland, so that each and every one of the separate but
interlinked tragedies can be fully understood. Lukas's book marks an
important step in that direction. He chooses to concentrate on the impact of
the German occupation on the inhabitants of western and central Poland in
the early and middle years of the war, and on Polish-Jewish experiences in
particular. It is not a complete picture, but it is much nearer to completeness
than the great majority of English-language studies on occupied Poland. In
addition, it effectively puts to rest those most harmful stereotypes about
"Nazi murderers," "Jewish victims" and "Polish bystanders." In reality, the
murderers were not just Nazis; the victims were not just Jews; and
bystanding was one of the least representative of Polish wartime activities.
From time to time, it does no harm to indulge in what the Poles call
gdybologia, "whatifery." Americans would find their bearings in wartime
Poland more speedily by asking themselves what would have happened if a
part of their country had been occupied for six years by foreign racists intent
on reconstructing the racial makeup of, say, Chicago or New York. They
would have to wonder in what racial category of subhuman they would have