Forgotten Survivors
Polish Christians Remember the Nazi Occupation
Edited by Richard C. Lukas
November 2004
220 pages, 55 photographs, 15 drawings, 6 x 9
Modern War Studies
Cloth ISBN 978-0-7006-1350-2, $29.95
Wanda Lorenc watched horrified as the first Wehrmacht soldiers stormed into Warsaw. Jan Porembski witnessed the mass executions of Polish civilians. Barbara Makuch became a courier for the Polish underground until she was caught and tortured. Jan Komski was thrown into the very first transport to Auschwitz and observed its rapid expansion firsthand. But, unlike the nearly three million other Polish Christians (and three million Polish Jews) who died during World War II, they survived.
Richard Lukas presents the compelling eyewitness accounts of these and other Polish Christians who suffered at the hands of the Germans. They bear witness to unspeakable horrors endured by those who were tortured, forced into slavery, shipped off to concentration camps, and even subjected to medical experiments. Their stories provide a somber reminder that non-Jewish Poles were just as likely as Jews to suffer at the hands of the Nazis, who viewed them with nearly equal contempt.
Zbigniew Haszlakiewicz remembers being brutally whipped and tortured—hung by his arms and legs, hands tied behind, and repeatedly stabbed: "I prayed to lose consciousness, but it was impossible. The Gestapo soon tired and started to drink beer and smoke cigarettes as they
sat at that big desk. And I hung like a hammock."
Lorenc tells of encountering starving Jews: "I broke an end off one loaf [of bread] and threw it to a woman in the group. An SS guard saw what I had done, rushed over to me and began to beat me with her stick. When I fell, she beat me with her boots. Two of my teeth dislodged and my mouth filled with blood. When I returned to the barracks, no one recognized me."
But Dr. Jan Moor-Jankowski also recalls: "One night they took a prisoner and hanged him. He died in front of our eyes. I remember seeing a tiny twig of a tree from the window. As time passed, I saw a bud on the twig and soon leaves came out. It was something that gave me hope."
Through the survivors' voices we also learn about the Polish underground, the Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota), the Jewish Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Home Army's heroic battle during the Warsaw Uprising in late 1944. Lukas places the narratives in their historical context and Jan Komski's drawings capture the horror of concentration camp life.
"While the Holocaust is well known, the fate of Polish Christians in the camps is far less so. This is a much needed, important, and moving book."--Piotr S. Wandycz, president, Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America
"Lukas pays special attention to the sufferings of Poland's Catholic majority, presenting stories from the resistance and the risings, from Auschwitz and Mauthausen, and from the death marches and forced labor camps. . . . A wonderful testament to the survival of the human spirit in adversity."--Norman Davies, author of God's Playground: A History of Poland

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www.remember.org/komski/

Like many of the young men in early months of the war, Jan Komski, a Polish Roman Catholic, was arrested on the Poland/Czechoslovakia border attempting to reach the newly formed Polish Army in France. He was carrying false identity papers under an assumed name of Jan Baras. He was first taken to the prison at Tarnow and then sent to Auschwitz, arriving there, along with 727 other Polish men, on June 14, 1940.

It was the very first prisoner transport to arrive in Auschwitz. The prisoners were given numbers 31 -758. Mr. Komski was given number 564. These early numbers were not tattooed on prisoners' arms, a lucky thing.

After two and one half years in the camp, Jan Komski and three comrades, Mieczyslaw Januszewski, Boleslaw Kuczbara, and Otto Küsel, participated in one of the most famous escapes in the history of that infamous camp. This escape was significant because it was among the first to be organized by the illegal camp resistance movement, and with the help of the local population.

In the morning of Dec 29, 1942, a two wheel cart drawn by two horses passed the gate at Auschwitz in the afternoon. It carried Kuczbara, dressed in a stolen SS uniform. Alongside walked three inmates, seemingly being escorted by the SS-man. They aroused no suspicion as Otto Küsel was known to all the Blockführers (SS Block Commanders). When they reached the check point at the border of the big sentry chain, Kuczbara showed the guards a cleverly forged pass. His uniform and the pass convinced them to allow the cart and the prisoners through. The men simply walked out of the camp.

They made it to the village of Broszkowice where they met a resistance woman who gave them civilian clothes. They spent the night at the home of Andrzej Harat, who actually rented the apartment above them to an SS officer.

Mr. Komski eventually reached the city of Krakow, where he was arrested in a routine roundup as he was sitting on a train awaiting departure for Warsaw. Any escaped prisoner would have been hanged very soon after his return to Auschwitz. But, Komski was not recognized and his identity papers now bore a different name.

All the people arrested in the round-up were taken in trucks to the Montelupi Prison,where they were unloaded and made to march through a gauntlet of guards. Komski was the last in line. Afraid he would be sent back to Auschwitz where he would surely be recongized, he pushed two armed guards out of the way and bolted into the street. Many guards pursued shouting and firing their rifles. Bullets whizzed by his head. One struck him in the ankle and he fell. The guards rushed up and started talking about killing him on the spot. They did not know he understood German. Mr. Komski says, he was certain he was going to die, and saw his friends and family all flash before his eyes. A visual thinker even in these circumstances, he even saw himself dead. But then one of the guards said they couldn't just shoot him in the street. They had to do it in the prison. They beat him, knocked him unconscious and brought him inside the walls. Revived somehow, he heard them say they were taking him to the prison hospital instead. There, bloody and beaten, his wound was bandaged and never changed. Luckily it did not become infected.

Three months later, his wound healed, he was sent to Auschwitz.

Approaching the front gate, he was afraid of being recognized by the SS. One prisoner, actually an informer, did recognize him but instead of turning him over to the SS, went to the prisoners who ran the office. Unbeknownst to him, those men were part of the camp resistance movement. They managed to cut orders sending Komski immediately to Auschwitz II, Birkenau, about 2 km from Auschwitz I. There he was never recognized.

Mr. Komski was eventually sent to Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany, then back to Krakow for interrogation, than to another camp in Poland, Gross Rosen. From there he was shipped to Sachsenburg and then finally Dachau. General Patton's boys liberated that camp on May 2, 1945.
www.remember.org/komski/
for his art go to; http://www.remember.org/komski/komski-drawings1-001.html

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from www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/106/261cooke.html

The Nazi assault on European civilization led, as everyone knows, to the massacre of millions of human beings. Following Hitler's lead, Nazis were implacable enemies of all the colored races, although for the sake of a temporary alliance with the Japanese those aspects of Nazi racism could be ignored. What seems strange from a purely intellectual point of view was the strained effort to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable varieties of Caucasians-inventing a fictitious "Nordic" type to inherit the Earth and relegating other Caucasians to perdition, especially Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs. Mediterranean types-Greeks and Italians-would also have been among the Untermenschen, if not for the alliance with Mussolini.

There were different circles in the Nazi Inferno, and the bottommost pit was reserved for the Jews and Gypsies. The Nazis regarded them as a toxic element in society and had little interest in them other than annihilating them as rapidly as possible. Those consigned to a slightly higher circle, the Slavs, were regarded as culturally worthless, although not actively harmful. Regarding the Poles, the Nazi aim was to wipe out their culture by destroying its artifacts and liquidating the educated elite that was its highest expression. The mass of Slavs were regarded as natural Sklaven, to be used as a source of cheap labor. Modern technology provided the weapons that made it feasible to attempt the utter devastation of Warsaw and Leningrad, and the Nazis undertook these tasks without any reservations. After all, the Master Race needed room to live, and these ancient masterpieces of art and architecture were to be replaced by better, German creations. In contrast, the Nazis apparently regarded Paris as a great prize, and did not plan the razing of its architecture.

An indicator of the Nazi mentality in Nazi-occupied Poland is the fact that the music of Frederic Chopin was forbidden.

Thus, there were differences in Nazi aims in regard to their victims. The amount of organizational effort expended on rounding up, cataloguing, and methodically dispatching Jews seems to be qualitatively different from the assault on the Slavs. (I suspect that is because Hitler's obsession with Jews left him with less time to articulate a plan for annihilating Slavs.) Were these differences felt by the victims themselves? If you are in a concentration camp, does it matter if you are going to be gassed or merely worked to death? If you are marked for death, does it matter whether you are marked because your grandparents practiced Judaism or because you yourself are a Catholic priest? Neither role can be denied without denying a very important part of one's humanity and constantly risking discovery.

The destruction of European Jewry is now a major area of historical study, given its impetus by the now-classic three-volume work of Raul Hilberg, a colleague and friend of the reviewer. The purely academic interest in this topic is justified because of its uniqueness: the careful planning of a massacre whose only goal was the removal of an ethnic group from the world, not because of greed for its possessions but merely to be rid of the people. The assault on the Slavs had a different, more mercenary motive, and has been comparatively less studied, except in the former Soviet Union where the primary interest was naturally more focused on the invasion of the USSR in 1941 and the suffering of Soviet citizens. Information about the two years preceding that invasion, the years of the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty by which Poland was partitioned, was suppressed, as was the reality of the postwar Soviet occupation of Poland.

The editor of the volume under review, Richard C. Lukas, Professor of History Emeritus at Tennessee Technological University, is America's foremost authority on the Nazi treatment of Christian Poles with his earlier books The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939-1944 [1986] and Did the Children Cry? Hitler's War Against Jewish and Polish Children, 1939-1945 [1994].

The volume under review represents one of the essential steps toward a fuller picture of the Polish resistance to Nazism. The twenty-eight authors report a range of experiences ranging from awful to ghastly during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Some links with the Jewish resistance are also mentioned in connection with these experiences. It is well known in Poland, unfortunately not elsewhere, that the Polish government in exile set up a special council to assist Jews against the Nazis, thereby exhibiting the same kind of solidarity with its Jewish citizens as was shown by the Dutch and the Danes. But the effort cost more on the Eastern front than it did in the West, as one can see from the civilian casualty rates for the various nations: 1,000 civilian deaths in Denmark out of a population of 4 million (less than 1 percent); 250,000 in Holland out of a population of 9 million (nearly 3 percent), but 2.5 million in Poland out of a population of 35 million (7 percent*). Of all the belligerent powers in the war, only the USSR and Yugoslavia, with civilian deaths at Nazi hands amounting to 10 percent and 9 percent of their populations respectively, suffered higher casualties.

What the Nazis would have done with ordinary Poles had they won the war is difficult to know. What they did with Polish intellectuals, however, was hardly different from what they did with Jews. Lawyers, doctors, musicians, professors, and priests all represented a concept of human dignity and worth that the Nazis would not tolerate in a subject people of supposedly inferior race. They had to be removed. A strong indicator of the Nazi mentality is revealed by the fact that the music of Chopin was forbidden. Music was not merely a matter of the sense of hearing to the Nazis. Those polonaises, mazurkas, and ballades could have real effects on the human spirit. The Nazis knew that, and were determined to prevent it.

What we learn in the camp narratives in this volume is the experiences of people who survived, some having undergone physical and mental trials that I am certain would have killed me. And of course, they tell us what they remember about those who did not survive. It would be pointless to recapitulate in a review the actual experiences of the survivors; those experiences varied greatly from one to another, and it would be unfair to deprive any of the narratives of their full context. The reader is urged to buy the book and read each of the stories in its entirety.

In reflecting on the book as a whole, one needs to fit it into a comprehensive picture of the interaction between perpetrator and victim. That we do not yet fully understand what was planned for the Poles and how the plans were frustrated by the Nazi defeat appears in a number of facts that seem to be anomalous amid the general suffering and degradation. Why, for instance, were there infirmaries in the camps, where prisoners could get minimal medical care? Given the general callousness toward all "non-Aryan" life, why bother saving the life or health of the prisoners? From a purely economic point of view, this seems to make no sense. Was there not a plentiful supply of slave labor for the occupiers? Likewise, the capriciousness of fate in the camps is striking. Some prisoners, doing their best to conform, were summarily executed on the whim of a guard. Others were able to take astonishing liberties with impunity. Was anything other than pure chance involved in these differences? These and other questions might be answered if a comprehensive study of the Polish experience from 1939 to 1946 were available. In the meantime, the reader of this collection of narratives can make his or her own conjectures. ∆

*This figure does not include Polish deaths at the hands of the Soviets. Altogether, Poland's 1939 population of 35 million had shrunk to 24 million in 1946. Even with the loss of the Ukrainian and Belarusan lands incorporated into the USSR, the total percentage of Polish (Christian and Jewish) losses is usually estimated at 6 million, or 17 percent. Ed.

www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/106/261cooke.html