The Polish Underground and the Extermination of the Jews

Abstract

DESPITE the fifty years which have elapsed since the end of the Second World War, historians still have a long way to go before they can be seen to have provided a full and objective representation of the intricate problems connected with the relations between the Polish underground and the Jewish population during the most tragic period in its history, the moment of its near total annihilation. A large number of archival documents on this subject remain inaccessible to many researchers. First and foremost this applies to much of the official documentation of the Office of the Government Delegate for the Homeland and the Home Army, which until recently was kept in the Archive of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party. Polish historiography has given extensive coverage to only one of many aspects of the Polish underground's attitude towards the Jews-the help which they were given-and it has greatly exaggerated the scope of that aid. The subject of Jewish-Polish relations, including the attitude of the Polish underground towards the Jews during the Nazi occupation, still evokes strong emotions, and, in the face of political pressures, that has made a factual analysis of this complicated problem extremely difficult. The primary factor which determined the character of the relations between Poles and Jews was the totally different treatment meted out by the Germans to the two groups. German terror directed at the Polish population was extremely cruel from the very start. The Polish nation found itself in the most difficult situation to have arisen in all its history. However, the terror used against the Jewish population was, from the very beginning of the occupation, infinitely more brutal and was directed towards all Jews, without exception. Special anti-Jewish orders, compulsory marks of identification, a ban on the use of public transport, confiscation of property (including all goods produced), incessant labour roundups in the city streets, systematic humiliations, and bullying-all this destroyed the social and economic life of the Jewish population. There followed additional calamities in the form of imprisonment in ghettos and finally total extermination.