Polish Witnesses to the Shoah

We are asking those of you who still remember the circumstances of the Time of Humiliation to summon up scenes and images from memory. We are appealing to Poles who helped rescue Jews, to Polish witnesses of the persecution of the Jews and of the Holocaust … The aim is to recount events, including those whose narrators would rather forget about them, or never return to them.

The Warsaw weekly Polityka issued this appeal to its readers on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The people who were born before or during the war and who found themselves on one side or the other of the ghetto wall are the last participants in, and witnesses to, the history of the Jews there. The appeal for recollections of scenes that 'cannot be forgotten' generated 225 submissions, 82 of which are included here.

Half a century later, when the eye-witness reports were written - and sixty-six years later published here in English for the first time - the dilemmas, emotions and doubts about their attitudes and the behaviour of their loved ones are finally revealed. Various themes are examined in this book: the guilt felt by those who were unable to help, the cruelty of German and some Polish people, the suffering of the children, the apparent lack of resistance put up by the Jewish victims, the courage shown by a few.

Why did many of the respondents wait as long as half a century to submit their testimony, to bear witness? The reasons differed in every case: the appeal for 'scenes that cannot be forgotten' helped many people to reach inside themselves, and to free themselves from pain, from agonizing concealed thoughts, and from that very sense of guilt with which the authors of these reminiscences have burdened themselves. The author of one account speculates that his parents lacked the courage to shelter Jewish children whose parents they knew. 'For fifty years', he writes, 'I have refrained from speaking about this matter with anyone. Nor do I think my parents ever discussed it. I have never forgotten it. It remains vivid, shameful, and burning to this day.

Sometimes harrowing, sometimes uplifting, these stories give an insight into the people behind the faceless numbers.

The publication of this book would not have been possible without the generous support of Craig Gottlieb, and of the Irena Kozlowska-Fiszel and Edmund Kon Fund.