Jews, Catholics plan friendship memorial

Poland's Catholic church has agreed to turn the house where the late Pope John Paul II was born into a memorial of the Jewish-Catholic friendship.

During his four-day stay in Poland, the German-born Pope Benedict XVI Saturday paid a brief stop in Wadowice, the birthplace of his predecessor and mentor John Paul II, to enter and bless the house, the Washington Post reported.

Some 20 years ago the house was turned into a museum. About 200,000 pilgrims from Poland and around the world annually visit the site, containing memorabilia of the late pope, whom his countrymen praise as "our greatest Pole."

Local authorities and Polish Catholic church dignitaries have agreed to add an exhibit in memory of the Jews who lost lives in the Holocaust during Nazi German occupation in World War II.

The memorial was the idea of Ron Balamuth, a New York psychoanalyst and descendant of the Jewish owners of the house, the report said. It took some time before the church showed interest in the project.

In March, a Polish businessman bought the house on behalf of the church and all parties agreed the house should be the memorial for both John Paul II and the Jews of Wadowice.

PRAISE FOR A U.S. DIPLOMATS’S MEMOIRS ON PIUS XII

Father Peter Gumpel Hails New Book

ROME, JUNE 16, 2004 (Zenit.org).- The relator of the cause of beatification of Pope Pius XII describes the memoirs of U.S. diplomat Harold Tittmann as a «gust of salutary truth». Tittmann's book «Inside the Vatican of Pius XII», newly published by Doubleday, offers an eyewitness accounts of how and when the Holy See and Pope Pius XII himself acted in regard to Nazism, but it covers the evolution of relations between the Pope and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.

In this interview with ZENIT, Father Peter Gumpel, who has read the book, talks about its novel contributions and historical context.

Q: Can you explain the history and context of the circumstances referred to in Harold Tittmann's book of memoirs?

Father Gumpel: Tittmann was a war hero. A pilot in the First World War, he was brought down and seriously wounded. Because of his wounds, he lost his right leg, a kidney and half a lung. He entered the diplomatic service in 1920. He worked in the U.S. Embassy in Paris and then for 11 years, from 1925 to 1936, in Rome. After a period in the Department of State, in 1939 he was transferred to Geneva. In 1940 he was sent to Rome as assistant to Myron Taylor, personal representative to the Holy See appointed by Roosevelt. When Italy declared war on the United States in December 1941, Tittmann sought refuge in the Vatican, which he left only in 1944 with the arrival of the Allied troops.

His memoirs are very interesting because he was an eyewitness. He had daily contacts with Secretary of State Luigi Maglione, with Domenico Tardini, and with Giovanni Battista Montini, and he often met with the Pontiff, Pius XII.

Q: What relevant novelties does this book contribute?
Father Gumpel: For those who are familiar with the material in the archives and who have specialized in the study of this historical period, there are no great novelties. Tittmann's correspondence with the United States confirms the Holy See's absolute independence in its opposition to the Nazis and its endeavor to support the victims of the conflict.

For those, instead, who are not familiar with the archive material and have only read books that are hostile to the Holy See, Tittmann's volume is a gust of salutary truth. In this connection, the volume takes on notable importance to make the general public know how much and in what way the Holy See worked in those years.

Q: What were relations like between the Holy See and the U.S. government at that time, when the Nazi regime dominated Europe?

Father Gumpel: Despite a certain anti-Roman and anti-papal culture spread by Protestant groups, relations between the Holy See and the U.S. government were good. Before the outbreak of the second world conflict there was already parallel action between Pius XII and the U.S. government to avoid the war. Pius XII and Roosevelt also acted in agreement to avoid Italy entering the war.

Pacelli met Roosevelt personally during his visit to the U.S. in 1936. Relations became more intense when Roosevelt named Taylor as personal representative to the Holy See. This was the context in which Tittmann worked.

Q: When the United States decided to support the Soviets in the struggle against Hitler, many American Catholics asked the Holy See if this was possible. What was the Pontiff's response?

Father Gumpel: As soon as Hitler attacked Russia in 1941, a serious problem arose with American Catholics. The Soviet Union needed war materiel and Roosevelt agreed to provide it. The problem was due to the fact that in 1937, Pope Pius XI had published the encyclical «Divini Redemptoris», which prohibited Catholics from giving any help to the Bolsheviks. Roosevelt asked Pius XII to find a solution to this problem.

The Pontiff decided not to intervene publicly, but he gave instructions to apostolic delegate Amleto Cicognani and, more specifically, to Archbishop John Timothy McNicolas of Cincinnati, to inform American Catholics with a letter that the attitude to the Communists remained that way, but that it was not against the Russian people. The Nazis' aggression was pounding the Russian people, who had to be helped. This is why Catholics did not oppose aid to the Russians.

Q: What was Tittmann's opinion in regard to Pope Pius XII?
Father Gumpel: He had an excellent opinion of him. Tittmann writes that Pius XII was «a charming man», with great spiritual gifts. «Pope Pius XII was often described as a political Pope. ... Very possibly, the future will rate him a saint», Tittmann states.

ZENIT Daily dispatch - The World Seen from Rome
16. juni 2004

JAN KARSKI, A Hero for Catholics and Jews

It is said of the Poles that they are among the few people who would send out cavalry to fight tanks but they are the only people who would expect to win. By their refusal to give way to Hitler over Danzig, they did as much a any nation to start the destruction of German Nazism. Through their defiance of a regime imposed on them by the Kremlin, they did more than any nation to bring down Soviet communism.

Jan Kozielewski-he took de nom de guerre Karski when Poland was invaded jointly by the Wehrmacht and the Red Army in September 1939-was a Polish hero of the resistance to both Nazi and communist tyranny, but he will be remembered, above all, as a courageous witness to the Holocaust. He was the first person to inform Anthony Eden, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other allied leaders, in 1942, of the Nazi extermination camps and to give them a detailed account of the genocide of the Jews.

Mr. Karski was born into a Catholic family in Lodz and educated by the Jesuits. Poland’s grimy second city was a haunted feel today. Its giant textile mills are broken down; its alleys daubed with slogans that mindlessly defame rival football teams. But before the second world war it was the “Manchester Poland.”

The princess of Lodtz, industrialists like Izrael Poznanski, were Jews. Future prominent Israelis grew up beside Mr. Karski. But when papers and memorabilia associated with Mr. Karski were returned to his home town last year, to be displayed in the city museum, the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe was just about the only remaining sing that Lodz once housed a large Jewish population.

The eyes, ears and voice of the Polish underground Mr. Karski served as a Polish diplomat in Bucharest, Berlin, Geneva and London until, on the outbreak of war, he joined the Polish army as lieutenant. He was wise enough to pass as a private when he was captured by the Red Army and so escaped the Katyn massacre of Polish officers that took place on Stalin’s orders.

On his release by the Russians, Mr. Karski joined the Polish resistance. His photographic memory and fluency in several languages persuade its leaders to entrust him with two courier missions to Paris. On his return from the second of these, he was captured by the Germans. The Gestapo tortured him so mercilessly that he was set on committing suicide before he was sprung by a resistance cell of the Polish Socialist Party. As a devout Catholic and a fervent anti-communist, Mr. Karkski was ever afterwards to savor the irony that his life had been saved by Jozef Cyrankiewicz, a future communist prime minister of Poland.

After his recuperation in Warsaw, Mr. Karski was given the mission that made him famous: to find out all he could about the extermination of the Jews. He crawled into the Warsaw ghetto through a tunnel and witnessed summary executions, naked corpses choking the streets and other gruesome sights. Disguised as a Ukranian guard, he then smuggled himself into the extermination camp at Izbica Lubelska in eastern Poland and gathered facts on its mass executions.

Yet few were ready to believe him when he escaped from occupied Poland to inform influential people in the West about what he had seen and heard. They remembered how during the first world war Britain had accused the Germans of making soap from the dead, and suspected the Polish resistance of similarly crude propaganda.

Even Felis Frankfurter was skeptical. Mr. Karsky recalled that at a meeting he had with Frankfurter in 1943, the American Supreme Court Justice, who was a Jew, said: “A man like me, talking to man like you, must be totally frank. So I say, I am unable to believe what you told me.”

With his alleged Holocaust fantasies finally confirmed as facts, Mr. Karski got a far better hearing after the war as a professor of diplomacy at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. His courses in comparative government and theory of communism were always over-subscribed. He continue to have a grudging respect for some Polish communists, including his liberator Cyrankiewicz, but he was flattered rather than abashed when his accounts of the evils of Soviet communism persuaded his students to dub him “McCarthyski.”

As an academic, Mr. Karski wrote a lot on the treatment of Poland during and after the war. His bitterness over the policies of the western allied powers was only partly assuaged by the liberation of Poland from Soviet rule a decade ago.

Free Poland heaped awards on him. Lech Walesa presented him with the Order of the White Eagle, the country’s highest honour. He returned home for the last time this spring to celebrate the publication, at last, of a Polish edition of his 1944 American bestseller, “Story of a Secret State”, about the Polish underground.

He was even prouder to be created in 1994 an honorary citizen of the state of Israel and to be nominated in 1998 for the Nobel peace prize by the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. The anti-Semitism of so many Poles made him feel ashamed and he liked to describe himself as a Catholic-Jew. The comparisons drawn between Jan Karski and Oscar Schindler are not faciful. Mr. Karski died on July 13th, aged 86.

THE ALLIES WERE SLOW IN RESPONDING TO THE JEW’S PLEAS.

Unfortunately, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism exist even today. Certainly there was anti-Semitism at that time all around the world, but it was not mainly from Catholics and much less from the Catholic Church. Germany was not alone; there was plenty of anti-Semitism in the highest spheres of the Allied governments.

Jewish historian Richard Breitman has written five books, one on the Holocaust and another on Nazism. He is, up to this day, the only person authorized to study the OSS secret documents of U.S. espionage during WWII. The Italian newspaper “Corriere della Sera.” interviewed him on June 29, 2000. In the article, Breitman not only confirms the role played by Pius XII in defending and safeguarding the persecuted during the Nazi regime but he also found “the Allied silence on the Holocaust surprising. Their first testimonies are from the end of 1942…” He also remarked that the documents denoted how the Nazis considered that the Vatican was in the side of the Allies. (10)

The reaction of the US, French and British governments at that time, and even later, when knowledge of the concentration camps existed, were certainly not in solidarity for the persecuted Jews. In the middle of the genocide, Britain closed the doors of Palestine to the Jews. The U.S. government accepted a total of 10,000-15,000 Jewish refugees throughout the war – a truly scandalous statistic.

Jewish leaders ask Allies to bomb railway lines to concentration camps

The posturing with strong public declarations followed by the empty deeds of the allied leaders did not save any Jewish lives. On June 6, 1944, Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the well known Zionist leader, later president of Israel, proposed to the British Minister, Anthony Eden, that the railway line to Auschwitz should be bombed. The British, after consultation, denied the request alleging the “great technical difficulties involved.” As the Jews died by the thousands daily, why was there not a rescue plan on the Allied side to counter the Nazi machinery of extermination? The Allies had already dropped tens of thousands of bombs on German cities. Why was that simple request which would have saved hundreds of thousands Jews and Christians refused? Later on, J.F. Martin, chief private secretary of Winston Churchill, explained “the great technical difficulties.” In a letter to Dr. Weizmann he wrote that they had discussed the matter with the Soviets and that the Soviets vetoed it.

When the evacuation of over 60,000 Jews from Bulgaria was suggested, Eden replied that the whole problem with the Jews was very difficult. “If we do that (said Eden) then the Jews of the world will be wanting us to make similar offers in Poland and Germany.” (11)

In 1943, there was a memorandum from British embassy sent to the U.S. State Department expressing their fear that the Germans may “change over from a policy of extermination to one of extrusion, and aim, as they did before the war, at embarrassing other countries by flooding them with refugees.” The State Department blocked, with Roosevelt’s connivance, efforts in Congress to help the Jewish refugees on their way to Palestine. (12)

The Jews depended on the success of The Catholic Church’s lone efforts -they had no other friends on the side of the Allies.

Franco offers refuge in Spain to persecuted Jews.

The reaction of the Western democracies was in stark contrast with that of “Fascist” Spain. General Franco’s regime, even though his country was devastated and impoverished after a bloody civil war, recognized all the Sephardic Jews living in the Nazi occupied territories as Spanish citizens. That measure allowed them to return to Spain- the beloved Sepharad, land of their ancestors where they lived a golden age more than five centuries ago. Franco’s government also collaborated with the Holy See and several South American countries in providing false passports for Jews trying to flee the Nazi scourge. More than 50,000 Jews were saved thanks to the Spanish government actions. When the Nazis discovered the covert operation, some of the Latin American countries retracted from accepting the validity of the faked passports. The Vatican, on January 24, 1944, interceded with the Latin American governments asking them to recognize the passports “no matter how illegally obtained”, and the humanitarian operation proceeded. Brazil gave 3,000 enter visas. Paraguay, Chile and others South American countries were also very receptive to the Pope’s pleas in favor of the Jews.

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