In 1943 a young Polish woman, about 20,
was walking past the Warsaw ghetto when
she saw a young Jewish woman, the same
age, who had crawled through the barbed
wire. The Jewish girl was lying
on the sidewalk, too exhausted and
famished to move.
The Polish girl gathered up the Jewish
girl, took her home (where she
lived with her mother) and hid her. The
penalty for doing such a thing was death;
indeed, hundreds of such Poles were shot.
Also anti-Semitism in Poland was so
widespread that your neighbours, if they
suspected you of hiding Jews, would likely
inform the Nazis. After the war, elements
of the Polish resistance, which had
fought the Nazis, went about murdering
Poles who had helped Jews.
After a month the neighbours became
suspicious. ‘You must go,’ the Polish
girl told the Jewish girl, ‘or else
we will all be shot. But I’ll go with you.’
So for the next two years the Polish
girl and the Jewish girl hid in the
forest, slept in haystacks, appearing
at people’s doors at dusk to beg for
food.
One night as they were lying in
a haystack, the Jewish girl asked the
Polish girl: ‘What do you think of
Jews?’ ‘Jews are terrible people!’
the Polish girl answered vehemently.
‘They cut the throats of gentile
children to use their blood in the
Passover matza. They’re all rich.
They contol everything…’ She was,
you see, a virulent anti-Semite,
who hated Jews.
The Jewish girl burst into tears.
‘You’re not like that, of course!’
the Polish girl said. ‘How do you
expect me to believe anything else?
It’s what I’ve heard all my life.’
The people who rescued Jews in
Poland during the Holocaust
seem to have been of two sorts.
First there were religious Christians,
who did what they were convinced
Jesus would do. They did not
see themselves as heroic. Second,
there were people who acted not so much for
religious reasons, but out of sheer
compassion. A fair number of them
hated Jews; nor did their hiding Jews in
the attic change this. After the war
they continued to be anti-Semites.
When asked why they had risked their
lives to help people they so despised, they
often answered simply: ‘They were helpless. We couldn’t let them be murdered.’
This story fascinates me.
Racists and bigots, like the
Polish girl, are sometimes people
of extraordinary compassion and
kindness! She did what most people with the right views would not have done.
She had a good heart, we might say.
I’m not much of a humanist, because
I find it hard to get revved up about
humanity. At the same time,
if ‘awful’ people can act so well,
and for the best of reasons, one
can’t give up hope in a better world,
can one?
It has always seemed to
me that the single most
important human accomplishment was
to become someone who would do what these
people did. This largely explains my
respect for Christianity. Something
must be right about a religion that
leads people to do what these
Polish Christians did. But if I
may put religion aside for the
moment, a star of hope continues to twinkle inextinguishably in the human heart.
Best to all, Jim
Good thing she didn’t suggest “Adolf”, I don’t know exactly how I would have reacted. A stroke at 20 is rare, though…
I just love ). I was quoting it as odd in a different context, different country, is all. Also, from a person who claimed herself as antisemitic (she didn’t see herself as a racist for that matter…) and had a strange vision of our middle-century history.