The Righteous! How Poles Rescued Jews from the Holocaust
(For high school students, teachers, and adults). In response to anti-Polish bias in Holocaust scholarship, education, and popular culture, Polish journalist Grzegorz Gorny, together with well-known photographer Janusz Rosikon, published this book to explain what it really meant to save Jews in German-occupied Poland.
The Righteous! tells the story of Poles rescuing Jews during the German occupation of Poland, many of whom paid the highest price for their actions, like the families of the Ulmas, Kowalskis, and Barankowie. The phenomenon of saving Jews under penalty of death is presented in a broader historical perspective as well as through individual histories. Based on material from the archives, the book is a rich collection of facts, textual and documentary, describing the situation of the Polish and Jewish populations under German occupation, and their mutual relations.
The volume is a tribute and does justice to the heroes of a difficult age. It presents a historical truth even as it deals with false stereotypes common in some circles abroad that portray Poles during World War II as a nation of antisemites, blackmailers, and looters. It also presents the attitude toward the Holocaust of the Polish Underground State, the Roman Catholic Church, and different social groups. It reports on the actions to save Jews, both individual and institutional, such as the Żegota organization and the Polish Catholic Church. Famous witnesses to history who appear in the pages of this book include, among others, Władysław Bartoszewski, Marek Edelman, Irena Sendler, and Szewach Weiss.
Norman Davies, renown scholar of Polish history, wrote the book’s Forward and the following is compelling excerpt: “No history of the Second World War can be complete without an explanation of the Zegota organization, of individuals like Irena Sendler or of the Catholic nuns, who took in Jewish children. Elementary justice demands that they are duly honored and remembered, not because they were Poles, but simply because they did their duty as Christians and compassionate human beings. Nor should we make the mistake of thinking that the names recorded at Yad Vashem provide the final reckoning. The Israeli authorities can only honor the names which have been reported to them and which have passed a stringent test of verification. Many others must have played a part about which we know nothing: people who sheltered a Jewish family for only two or three days, even though the danger was at its height: people who were killed in retribution by the Nazis together with their Jewish guests, leaving no trace: and people, who did their duty during the war and then kept their silence. So here is another distinction. There are ‘righteous Poles’, who are known to Yad Vashem, and others whose names are known only to God.”
The book’s cover shows the Kowalski family with their four children in front of their house in the village of Ciepielow. The face of a Jewish girl can also be seen in the window behind them. In Ciepielow and nearby Rekowka, on December 6, 1943, German gendarmes burned alive 31 members of the Kowalski, Obuchiewicz, Skoczylas, and Kosior families. They had been hiding Jews and the Jews burned with them in the flames.
