Posted on 07/23/2010 8:53:29 AM PDT by Argentine-Firecracker
Roughly 50 men and women in the Warsaw Ghetto chose a special form of resistance. In a secret archive, they documented their path to doom for future generations, chronicling the Nazis' crimes as they were being perpetrated.
David Graber was 19 when he hurriedly scribbled his farewell letter. "I would be overjoyed to experience the moment when this great treasure is unearthed and the world is confronted with the truth," he wrote.
While German soldiers combed the streets outside, Graber and his friend Nahum Grzywacz buried 10 metal boxes in the basement of an elementary school on Nowolipki Street in Warsaw's Jewish ghetto. It was Aug. 2, 1942.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
It certainly wasn’t a picnic for Gentile Poles, either.
Yeah, but apparently there’s an unwritten law that says only Jewish suffering is really to be discussed. Everybody else had it coming, deserved it, I guess?
Ping.
Tough,chilling read.
It's that damned Jew propaganda machine, at it again.
I don’t think so. Poles (including Polish Jews) suffered tremendously under the German occupation of WW2. Russians (and others) did too.
By all means, talk about the suffering of the others. After all, 10% of Polish gentiles died at Nazi hands. Of course, 90% of the Jews did.
You wrote:
“It’s that damned Jew propaganda machine, at it again.”
Liberals, not Jews.
You wrote:
“Poles (including Polish Jews) suffered tremendously under the German occupation of WW2. Russians (and others) did too.”
I know.
And many more died from Bolshevik hands.
“By all means, talk about the suffering of the others. After all, 10% of Polish gentiles died at Nazi hands. Of course, 90% of the Jews did.”
That is a very interesting statistic - do you have a link?
bump 4 l8r
Just another point, there were Jews from all over Europe that were shipped into Warsaw Ghetto, it wasn’t just Polish Jews.
Assisted by some two dozen other Zegota members, Sendler saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto, providing them with false documents, and sheltering them in individual and group children's homes outside the Ghetto.
On 14 March 2007 Sendler was honored by Poland's Senate. At age 97, she was unable to leave her nursing home to receive the honor, but she sent a statement through Elbieta Ficowska, whom Sendler had saved as an infant. Polish President Lech Kaczyski stated she "can justly be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize" (though nominations are supposed to be kept secret). On 11 April 2007, she received the Order of the Smile as the oldest recipient of the award.
In May 2009, Irena Sendler was posthumously granted the Audrey Hepburn Humanitarian Award. The award, named in honor of the late actress and UNICEF ambassador, is presented to persons and organizations recognised for helping children. In its citation, the Audrey Hepburn Foundation recalled Irena Sendler’s heroic efforts that saved two thousand five hundred Jewish children during the German occupation of Poland in World War Two.
Sendler was the last survivor of the Children's Section of the Zegota Council to Assist Jews, which she had headed from January 1943 until the end of the war.
In 2007 considerable publicity accompanied Sendler's nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize. While failed nominations for the award have not been officially announced by the Nobel organization for 50 years, the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo, reported in 2007 that Irena Sendler's nominator had made the nomination public. Regardless of its legitimacy, talk of the nomination focused a spotlight on Sendler and her wartime achievements. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former Vice President of the United States Al Gore.
And just this week, Sendler's grave was defaced with graffitti by someone who painted "Jews out!" over it. Things haven't changed much, unfortunately.
Irena Sendler in 2005
It is interesting how you frame it:
“After all, 10% of Polish gentiles died at Nazi hands. Of course, 90% of the Jews did.”
Gentiles and Jews. Even the way we sometimes discuss it shows we are really just talking about Jewish suffering. Why not say Polish Christians?
I posted the article because, despite the horror of it, I thought it was quite unique that the author referred to the Germans as perpetrators, and not the historically convenient catch-all description of “Nazis”.
Another factoid about Pani Sendler.
Her life in Communist Poland was not a happy one. In 1949, she was brutally interrogated by the then Communist security service (UB) for allegedly hiding members of Polish underground organization (AK, Home Army). She lost her baby after that. Before, she managed to hand over her “jar archive” with 2,500 names of the Jewish children her team had saved through Adolf Bermann, the chairman of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland. Under German occupation, “Zegota” included Jewish organizations, represented by Adolf Bermann and Leon Feiner. The Council for Aid to Jews “Zegota” was the only underground organization that was run jointly by Jews and Polish gentiles, representing a variety of political movements. They helped at least 4,000 Polish Jews, mainly in Warsaw, and both the Polish and the Jewish underground was able to reach with aid to some 8,500 of the 28,000 Jews hiding in Warsaw, and to about 1,000 trying to survive elsewhere in Poland.
After the war, Irena Sendler continued her work as social welfare official and director of vocational schools, but she and her family couldn’t avoid harassment from the then Communist authorities. She never spoke in public about her wartime heroic deeds, having chosen a private life, dedicated to her family and friends. The memories of the past haunted her. As Mrs. Sendler recalled later, she and her co-workers visiting the Warsaw ghetto saw starving children, abandoned corpses and Nazi SS officers using skulls for target practice – “I saw all this and a million other things that a human eye should never have to see” she later said, “and it has stayed with me for every second of every day that God granted me to live.”
The Polish Communist authorities were not interested to reward her for the help rendered to Jewish children during the war. But the Jews did not forget. In 1965, Irena Sendler became one of the first “Righteous Gentiles” honored by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem for wartime heroics. Polish authorities did not allow her to go to Israel to be praised there. Only in 1983, she could collect the award (a medal “Righteous among the Nations”), confirmed by the Knesset. In 1991, she became an honorary citizen of Israel.
Earlier, in 1968, when the Communist authorities cracked down on Polish Jews, calling them “Zionists” and expelling some 20,000 from Poland, Mrs. Sendler announced she was ready to hide Jews again. For her statement, the authorities expelled her children from the Warsaw University.
Why do Austrians get a pass? Their leader was Austrian, and many of the most anti-semitic and sadistic elements of the SS were from Austria. Even before the Anschluss the German SS regularly had to tell the Austrian SS to tone it down a bit.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.