Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto. An Epitaph for the Unremembered (review)

Abstract

Christians in the Warsaw Ghetto. An Epitaph for the Unremembered. By Peter F. Dembowski. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2005.Pp.xii, 160. $18.00.) In the writings about the Warsaw Ghetto, little is made of the some five thousand Christians of Jewish origin, mostly Catholics, who shared this plight. Jewish contemporary observers ignored this small group, or made disparaging comments about them. Afterwards, political factors dominated the writing of histories of these events. Archival sources were unavailable, and survivors were often too intimidated to speak out. So it has been left to Peter Dembowski, as an eye-witness, to describe the complexity and perils of lives and deaths in the Warsaw Ghetto. These Jewish Christians were a minority within a minority. Most of them had no sense of belonging to the Jewish community, and were only forced to accept this designation when expelled to the ghetto in February, 1941. There they shared the fate of 300,000 full Jews in being murdered in the series of enforced deportations to Treblinka in the summer of 1942. In Dembowski's view the Jewish Christian community ceased to exist in the early stages of the Nazi Aktion. Within the largely Jewish part of northern Warsaw, there already existed three Catholic parishes: St. Augustine, where the priests lived outside the ghetto, but were later forbidden to enter, and services ceased; All Saints, which was the largest church building in Warsaw, built in an imposing classical style ; and the Church of the Nativity, whose courageous priest resided there throughout the ghetto period, refusing to leave and helping Jews where he could. Like many others, these priests did not consider their Catholics to be Jews at all, and were shocked by the Nazi decision to include them in the ruthless isolation and persecution. Since most of the Jewish Christians were educated and assimilated to Polish society, they were often resented as enemies of Israel by the Yiddish-speaking majority of full Jews. But Dembowski, who knew many of them personally, takes a more favorable stance. For part, the Jewish Christians, usually of a higher social class, sought to maintain former contacts in Polish Catholic society, attended the church services with diligence, and avoided contact with the majority of Yiddish-speakers around them. For those who had lost any contact with Jewish roots, or had not been aware that they had any, the shock of being thrust into the ghetto was traumatic. …