The Polish Underground Home Army (AK) and the Jews: What Postwar Jewish Testimonies and Wartime Documents Reveal

Abstract

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. The attitude of the Polish Home Army (AK) to Nazi exterminationist policies is among the most controversial topics of wartime Polish–Jewish relations. Scholarly studies appearing since the 1980s have reconstructed the Home Army’s complex local and national organizations, its many sub-divisions and departments, its policies and objectives, as well as its sacrifice in the Warsaw Uprising of August–September 1944. In this article, I will analyze Holocaust survivor testimonies as a source for evaluating the attitude and behavior of the Home Army towards the Jews during the Second World War. Archival repositories used will include testimonies preserved at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale, and the Shoah Foundation Visual Archive at the University of Southern California. I will demonstrate that the widely held view in collective Jewish memory and Jewish historiography that the Home Army was hostile is largely confirmed by these sources. At the same time, however, the same sources reveal that a substantial minority of the testimonies—approximately 30 percent—tells stories of a Home Army that rescued and protected Jews. The second part of this article compares testimonies to the documentary record, asking whether or not the behavior of the Home Army as a whole reflected the experience of Jews as reflected in postwar testimonies. The article will give more concrete form to the debate over the Polish underground’s attitude and behavior towards the Jews during the Second World War.