Jewish Polish history during the 1900s: Encyclopedia II - Jewish Polish history during the 1900s - WWII and the destruction of Polish Jewry 1939-1945

Jewish Polish history during the 1900s - WWII and the destruction of Polish Jewry 1939-1945

Main articles: The Holocaust and History of Poland (1939-1945)

Jewish Polish history during the 1900s - The Polish September campaign

During the Polish September Campaign of 1939, some 120,000 Jewish Polish citizens took part in battles with the Germans as member of the Polish Armed Forces. It is estimated that as many as 32,216 Jewish soldiers and officers died and 61,000 were taken prisoner by the Germans, the majority did not survive. The soldiers and non-commissioned officer who were released ultimately found themselves in the ghettos and labor camps and suffered the same fate as other Jewish civilians.

Jewish Polish history during the 1900s - Soviet-Occupied Poland

In newly partitioned Poland, according to Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, (according to 1931 census) 61.2% of Polish Jews found themselves under German occupation while 38.8% were in Soviet-occupied territory. Based on population migration from West to East during and after the Polish September Campaign the percentage of Jews in the Soviet-occupied areas was probably higher than that of 1931 census. Among Polish officers killed by the NKVD in 1941in the Katyn Massacre there were 500-600 Jews. Between 1939-1941 between 100,000-300,000 Polish Jews were deported from Soviet-occupied Polish territory into the Soviet Union. Some of them, especially Polish Communists (e.g. Jakub Berman) moved voluntarily, however, most of them were forcibly deported to Gulags. Small numbers of Polish Jews (about 6,000) were able to leave the Soviet Union in 1942 with the Wladyslaw Anders army, among them the future Prime Minister of Israel Menachem Begin. During the Polish army's II Corps' stay in the British Mandate of Palestine, 67% (2,972) of the Jewish soldiers deserted, many to join the Irgun.

Jewish Polish history during the 1900s - The Holocaust: German-occupied Poland

The Polish Jewish community suffered the most in the massacres of the Holocaust. About 3 million Jews (all but about 300,000-500,000 of the Jewish population) died of starvation in ghettos and labor camps or were killed at the Nazi extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, Sobibór, Chelmno. Many Jews in what was then eastern Poland also fell victim to Nazi death squads called Einsatzgruppen which massacred Jews, especially in 1941.

Some of these German-inspired massacres were carried out with help from, or even active participation by, Poles themselves. For example, the massacre in Jedwabne, in which between 300 (Institute of National Remembrance's Final Findings [1]) and 1,600 (Jan T. Gross [2]) Jews were tortured and beaten to death by part of Jedwabne's citizens. The full extent of Polish participation in the massacres of the Polish Jewish community remains a controversial subject, but the Polish Institute for National Remembrance identified 22 other towns that had pogroms similar to Jedwabne. [3]. The reasons for these massacres are still debated, but they included anti-Semitism, resentment over alleged cooperation with the Soviet invaders in Polish-Soviet War and during 39' invasion of Kresy regions, and simple greed for the possessions of the Jews.

The Germans also established a number of ghettos in which Jews were confined, and eventually killed. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people and Łódź, the second largest, holding about 160,000. Other Polish cities with large Jewish ghettos included Białystok, Częstochowa, Kielce, Kraków, Lublin, Lwów, and Radom. The Warsaw Ghetto was established by the German Governor-General Hans Frank on October 16, 1940. At this time, the population of the ghetto was estimated to be about 380,000 people, about 30% of the population of Warsaw. However, the size of the Ghetto was about 2.4% of the size of Warsaw. The Germans then closed off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world on November 16th of that year, building a wall around it. During the next year and a half, Jews from smaller cities and villages were brought into the Warsaw Ghetto, while diseases (especially typhoid) and starvation (rations for Jews were officially limited to just 333 kcal per day (average rations 1940-1941), as opposed to 1,800 for Poles and 2,400 for Germans in Warsaw) kept the inhabitants at about the same number. On July 22, 1942, the mass expulsion of the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants began; in the next 52 days (till September 12, 1942) about 300,000 people were transported by train to the Treblinka extermination camp. The deportations were carried out by 50 German SS-men, 200 Latvian, 200 Ukrainian Police, and 2,500 Jewish Ghetto Police. Employees of the Judenrat, including the Ghetto Police, along with their families and relatives, were given immunity from deportations in return for their cooperation. Additionally, in August of 1942, Jewish Ghetto policemen, under the threat of deportation themselves, were ordered to personally "deliver" five ghetto inhabitants to the Umschlagplatz train station. On January 18, 1943, some Ghetto inhabitants, including members of ZOB, resisted, often with arms, German attempts for additional deportations to Treblinka. The final destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto came four months later during and after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Some of the survivors ot this uprising still held in camps at or near Warsaw were freed a year later during the larger Warsaw Uprising led by Polish resistance movement Armia Krajowa.

Poland was the only occupied country during World War II where the Nazis formally imposed the death penalty for anybody found sheltering and helping Jews. Despite these draconian measures by the Nazi Germans, Poland has the highest amount of Righteous Among The Nations awards at the Yad Vashem Museum.

The Polish Government in Exile was also the first (in November 1942) [4] to reveal the existence of Nazi-run concentration camps and the systematic extermination of the Jews by the Nazis, through its courier Jan Karski and through the activities of Witold Pilecki, member of Armia Krajowa and the only person who volunteered for imprisoning in Auschwitz and organised a resistance movement inside the camp itself. The Polish government in exile was also the only government to set up an organization Zegota specifically aimed at helping the Jews in Poland [5].

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "WWII and the destruction of Polish Jewry 1939-1945", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki