Meager recognition of Polish heroism during WW2

How mistaken was Emanuel Ringelblum when, in the darkest years of the war, he wrote in his notes on Polish-Jewish relations:

“There are more such hide-outs on the Polish side. In them are hidden the deathless friendship and gratitude of those rescued from the jaws of the Nazi monster. The people who do this should be decorated with the Order of Humanitarianism. Their name will remain precious for us forever. They are heroes who have fought against the greatest enemy of mankind…. There are thousands of idealists like these in Warsaw and in the whole country, whether in the educated class or in the working class, who help Jews most devotedly at the risk of their lives. Every Jew snatched from the grip of the bloodthirsty Nazi monster had to have a Christian idealist watching over him day after day like a guardian angel… This Polish gallery of heroes could provide subjects for wonderful novels about these noblest of idealists, who didn’t fear the enemy’s threats on his red posters…”

And yet, twenty-five years later, Jewish historian Szymon Datner was forced to write with sadness in his Las Sprawiedliwych:

“How many Poles, young, old, and children gave their lives in the fight against the extermination of Jews? They will never receive any medals, they will never hear words of gratitude. They are dead. They usually died with those they attempted to save. They frequently died with their loved ones, their wives, their children, their parents, and sometimes even their neighbors. In towns and in villages, their bodies were burned together with the houses in which they sheltered Jews. Sometimes the oppressors ordered that Polish Christians and Jews be buried together in the same mass grave…”

This is the tragedy of Poland’s witness in the Second World War: the courage was real, the sacrifice immense, but the recognition has been meager. Tens of thousands of Poles risked everything, and many paid with their lives, yet too often their memory has been buried under distortion or outright silence. In Jerusalem, there is a square named for Konrad Adenauer, the successor to Bismarck and Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, and at Yad Vashem there is a denigrating exhibit on the Kielce affair, but no monument to the Christian martyrs of charity who perished because they gave shelter to their Jewish neighbors.

What kind of world honors the heirs of Germany but forgets the nameless Polish villagers who faced firing squads, who were burned alive in barns, who saw their children slaughtered beside them for the “crime” of giving bread or water or a place to hide? Where are their medals, where are their novels, where is their square or their monument?

Poland’s story has been twisted, its people slandered, its sacrifices minimized. Yet the truth remains: thousands of Poles, often poor and unknown, lived and died with a courage that should inspire humanity. They were ordinary men and women who, with nothing to gain and everything to lose, chose conscience over fear, compassion over self-preservation.

Perhaps the time has come to honor them properly. Let there be, in Washington, D.C., in front of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a monument to the Polish martyrs of charity, a testimony against the vicious legends that smear their name. For if their stories are not told, the world risks losing not only memory but also the example of the noblest courage humanity has ever known.

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Edward Reid on Facebook

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The true emphasis must remain, now and always, on the Polish rescuers. For too long recognition has flowed in only one direction, while the sacrifice of Polish families has been diminished, neglected, or brushed aside, as though their courage and their deaths mattered less.

Yet the honor belongs to those who, in the darkest shadows of terror, chose to act in a way that few in history have ever dared. They protected, they sheltered, they resisted, even when they knew with dreadful certainty that discovery would not mean the death of one individual, but the annihilation of entire families — fathers, mothers, children, grandparents — extinguished together for the crime of mercy.

Poles must not and should not accept responsibility for what became of the lives they saved, because the choice to save was itself an act of unfathomable love and moral greatness. What those rescued did with the lives that were handed back to them was not within the power of the rescuers to determine.

If some survivors went on to gratitude, then their voices add to the testimony of courage. But if others chose slander, betrayal, or ingratitude, if they distorted memory or maligned the very nation that had preserved them, then that shame belongs only to them, and it does not erase or lessen the sacrifice of those who risked everything for their sake.

Consider the example of Jerzy Kosiński, who, because of the compassion of Poles, survived the war in relative safety, protected at immense danger to those who gave him shelter. And yet, as a celebrated writer in the West, he used his pen not to honor the courage of his protectors but to defame them, portraying Poles as depraved and brutish, as though the hands that preserved his life had been those of monsters. Such ingratitude is a stain upon his legacy, but it does not and cannot tarnish the moral greatness of the nameless Poles who saved him. Their valor is eternal, his betrayal merely passing.

And this is why I insist that the focus must remain only on the courage of the rescuers themselves. Tens of thousands of Jews were saved by Polish hands, and yet the world speaks of them barely above a whisper, as though their sacrifice and their virtue were too inconvenient to remember. But I honor them, the Poles who risked everything — often for strangers whose names they did not know, who risked execution not only for themselves but for their children, who endangered entire villages simply by offering a piece of bread, a glass of water, a blanket against the cold. In a world where cruelty was law, they chose compassion, and that is the highest nobility a human being can ever achieve.

As the Gospel says: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Yet these Poles laid down their lives not only for friends but for complete strangers, for those who shared neither their faith nor their culture, and in so doing they fulfilled that verse in a way that echoes across time. Their love was sacrificial, their courage beyond comprehension, and their memory must never be erased.

Białka, near Parczew — December 1942

In the bitter winter of 1942, the German SS descended upon the small village of Białka in the Lublin region. As punishment for hiding a Jewish woman and aiding Jewish partisans, one hundred men were torn from their homes and executed near the local school. The Jewish woman was murdered as well. What followed was not only a massacre, but the deliberate silencing of a community — fathers and sons, brothers and neighbors — wiped out in a single day.

Among the dead were:

Karol Wałecki, 17, executed alongside his father Aleksander, 51.

Four Bartosiewicz brothers: Bronisław, 45; Ignacy, 48; Kazimierz, 35; Leon, 39.

Jan Bułtowicz, 70, murdered with his three sons: Bogusław, 19; Jan, 17; Zygmunt, 19.

Boys scarcely more than children: Aleksander Drogosz, 15; Czesław Grzywaczewski, 15; Konstanty Izdebski, 14; Aleksander Makówka, 16; Włodzimierz Łukaszcuk, 16; Franciszek Zaczkowski, 15; Zachariasz Stelmaszczuk, 18.

Entire families — the Izdebskis, the Łukaszczuks, the Stelmaszczuks — fathers and sons, brothers and cousins, slaughtered together.

The roll of names is long, but each was a life: Bronisław Bartosiewicz, Wacław Bielecki, Antoni Bylina, Jan Czernacki, Józef Czeberek, Feliks Drabik, Jan Giśka, Franciszek Gontarczyk, Stanisław Gontarczyk, Szczepan Grzywaczewski, Antoni Izdebski, Jan Izdebski, Michał Izdebski, Marian Jastrzulski, Antoni Jędruszczak, Stanisław Jędruszczak, Marian Jędruszczak, Bronisław Koperczuk, Jan Kot, Józef Krakowiak, Jan Kubicki, Bolesław Kuszyk, Józef Kunaszyk, Mieczysław Kunaszyk, Aleksander Łukaszcuk, Anastazy Łukaszcuk, Józef Łukaszcuk, Piotr Łukaszcuk, Emilian Majewski, Edward Majewski, Konstanty Majewski, Jan Makówka, Władysław Makówka, Bolesław Malon, Andrzej Mikulski, Marcin Mioduchowski, Stanisław Narusek, Józef Niścioruk, Czesław Panasiuk, Kazimierz Pisańczuk, Feliks Przystupa with his father Mikołaj, Stanisław Rojek, Paweł Szlachta, Edward Szwaj, Władysław Szwaj, Józef Wawer, Teofil Wałecki, Stanisław Wałecki, Szymon Wałecki, Franciszek Zaczkowski, Nikita Zając, Stanisław Zgierski, Bazyli Stelmaszczuk, Jan Stelmaszczuk, Józef Stelmaszczuk, Karol Stelmaszczuk, Marcin Stelmaszczuk, Władysław Stelmaszczuk, Zachariasz Stelmaszczuk.

And yet, even amid the slaughter, a few survived — crawling out from beneath the bodies of their loved ones: Antoni Stelmaszczuk, Stanisław Przeździecki, Bonifacy Walenciuk, Jan Bloch, Bronisław Suchorab, Michał Kondracki.

This was the price of mercy in occupied Poland: entire families executed for the crime of sheltering the persecuted. The blood of Białka joins the countless rivers of Polish martyrdom, where courage and compassion were met with the full cruelty of German reprisal.

Let us remember them — not as a list of names, but as men and boys who once had voices, families, and futures. Their sacrifice is carved into the memory of Poland and must never be forgotten.

So when someone dares to speak with contempt about Poland, remember Białka. Remember the thousands of villages just like it. Remember that Poles were selfless, altruistic, and noble — and then ask, with all honesty: would you have been so brave?

Edward Reid