The only countries in which
autorities cooperated in Holocaust were Vichy France, Ustashi Croatia, Hungarry under Arrowcrosses party rules and Salo Italy they were all axis; But mayority of Europeen countries were alies which were conquered and ocupied by Nazi Germany; they were colaborators there but many more resitance fighters; For example in ocupied Poland germans punished by death people who were willing to help Jews; 100 000
people was executed for this. This draconian law was unique in all Europe; and peple turning out the jews and people protecting them for money to germans were shot by resitance. Polish people are largest group among the righteous among the nations:
Poland 6,004
Netherlands*** 4,767
France 2,740
Ukraine 2,185
Belgium 1,443
Hungary 685
Lithuania 693
Belarus 576
Slovakia 465
Germany 443
Italy 417
Greece 271
Yugoslavia (Serbia) 124
Russia 124
Czech Republic 118
Croatia 106
Latvia 103
Austria 85
Moldova 73
Albania 63
http://www1.yadvashem.org/righteous/index_righteous.html Shoud we rescue more? Yes but critique from Americans who didn't even bombed Aushwitz or railways leading to Treblinka or Belzec is unfair:
Jan Karski 1914 - 2000 Jan Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust
By: Michael T. Kaufman July 14, 2000
Jan Karski, a liaison officer of the Polish underground who infiltrated both the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp and then carried the first eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust to a mostly disbelieving West, died Thursday in the Washington, D.C., area. He was 86 and was a retired professor of history at Georgetown University.
In the late summer of 1942, Mr. Karski, who was then a 33-year-old clandestine diplomat of the Polish government-in-exile in London, was preparing for a secret mission to carry information from Nazi-occupied Poland to London and Washington. Before leaving, he was visited by two leaders of the Jewish underground who had managed to briefly leave the Warsaw Ghetto. They told him about what they called "Hitler's war against the Polish Jews."
They said that by their calculations, more than 1.8 million Jews had already been killed by the Germans and that 300,000 of the 500,000 Jews jammed into the Warsaw Ghetto had been deported to an obscure village about 60 miles from Warsaw, where the Germans had set up a death camp.
They asked him if he could carry their information to Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. They also asked if he would be willing to enter the Ghetto and see for himself what was happening.
Mr. Karski, who was blessed with a photographic memory, agreed.
By that time he had already endured a horrible war. Karski was his nom de guerre; he had been born Jan Kozielewski, the youngest of eight children of a patriotic, Roman Catholic family, in Lodz, Poland's second-largest city, on April 24, 1914. He had been a prize student and had been recruited into the Polish diplomatic service, where was quickly given coveted assignments to London and Paris.
He enlisted in the army and was serving as a cavalry officer in 1939 when German soldiers, followed less than two weeks later by Russian troops, invaded Poland and divided the country. Mr. Karski was captured by the Soviets and placed in a detention camp. He escaped and joined the Polish underground. Most of the Polish officers imprisoned with him were later executed by Soviet troops.
Mr. Karski became a skilled courier for the underground, crossing enemy lines to serve as a liaison between the Polish fighters and the West. He was captured by the Gestapo while on a mission in Slovakia in 1940 and tortured. Fearful that he might reveal secrets to the Germans, he slashed his wrists. His suicide attempt failed and he was put into a hospital. An underground commando team helped him to escape and he resumed his work as a clandestine liaison officer. In October,1939, the Germans enclosed the main Jewish areas in Warsaw with barbed wire. In less than a year the Ghetto was closed with about half a million Jews confined within its walls. Food rations were cut and thousands of Jews began to die of hunger and disease. By July 1942 the first mass deportations of Jews from the Ghetto commenced. That summer as many as 10,000 Jews were taken each day to the Umschlagplatz, a square in the Ghetto, where they were forced to board trains for the journey to the extermination camps.
It was in the third week of August of 1942 that Mr. Karski entered the cellar of an apartment house on the so-called Aryan side of the Ghetto wall and met with a youth from the Jewish Combat Organization, then secretly being formed in the Ghetto. The youth gave him some ragged clothes and an arm band with a blue Star of David and led him through a recently dug tunnel. As they emerged, Mr. Karski saw the Ghetto streets and tenements crowded with haggard, hungry and dying Jews.
Decades later, when asked to describe what he had seen, Mr. Karski, a fastidious man who hated violence even in films or on television, would usually simply say, "I saw terrible things." But on some occasions, such as in his appearance in "Shoah," Claude Lanzmann's documentary film about the Holocaust, he would tell of seeing many naked dead bodies lying in the streets and describe emaciated and starving people, listless infants and older children with expressionless eyes. He remembered watching from an apartment while two pudgy teen-aged boys in the uniforms of the Hitler Youth hunted Jews for sport, cheering and laughing when one of their rifle shots struck its target and brought screams of agony.
One of the Jews who had prompted Mr. Karski to enter the Ghetto and escorted him around was a lawyer named Leon Feiner. Mr. Karski recalled that Mr. Feiner kept murmuring, "Remember this, remember this." There was also another man, whose name Mr. Karski never learned. They both urged Mr. Karski to tell what he was witnessing to as many people in the West as he could. They knew the information would be hard to believe, but they wanted the West to know that the Germans were systematically taking thousands of Jews each day to extermination camps.
At the time of Mr. Karski's visit, the forced relocations from Warsaw had temporarily subsided, but they were to intensify in September. Mr. Feiner was to be among the hundreds of thousands who died. There were five points that the two men in the Ghetto asked Mr. Karski to pass on to the Allied leaders:
The prevention of the physical extermination of the Jews should be declared an official war aim of the coalition fighting Hitler.
Allied propaganda should be used to inform the German nation of the war crimes taking place and to publicize the names of German officials taking part in the genocide.
The Allies should appeal to the German people to bring pressure on Hitler's regime to stop the slaughter.
The Allies should declare that if the genocide continued and the German masses did not rise to stop it, the German people would be considered collectively responsible.
Finally, if nothing else worked, the Allies should carry out reprisals in the form of bombing German cultural sites and executing Germans in Allied hands who after learning of the crimes still professed loyalty to Hitler.
Mr. Karski later said the Jews' proposals were "bitter and unrealistic," as if they knew that their proposals could not and would not be carried out.
Referring to his postings in London before the war, he told them their five points went beyond international law and that he was sure the English would dismiss them.
For the rest of his life he remembered the response of the man accompanying Mr. Feiner. "Say it!" he said. "We don't know what is realistic, or not realistic. We are dying here. Say it!"Mr. Feiner added: "Let not a single leader of the United Nations be able to say that they did not know we were being murdered ... and could not be helped except from the outside."
Mr. Karski asked what he should say to Jewish leaders abroad. Unhesitatingly his hosts told him they should consider hunger strikes, fasting until death if necessary, in a effort to shake the conscience of the world.
Mr. Feiner then asked if Mr. Karski was still ready to carry out another fact-finding mission. Would he be willing to see for himself what was happening at one of the camps to which the trainloads of Jews were being sent? Mr. Karski consented and a few days later he and a member of the Jewish resistance went by train from Warsaw to Izbica, a small town near Warsaw.
There, his Jewish guide turned him over to the owner of a hardware store who was a member of the Polish underground. Mr. Karski was given the uniform of a Ukrainian militiaman working under the German command who had been bribed to take the day off. Another Ukrainian guard who had also been bribed then led him to a large area encircled by barbed wire.
Mr. Karski heard keening cries of men and women and thought he smelled burning flesh. Soon he witnessed the arrival of several thousand starving and frightened Jews who had been brought to the camp from Czechoslovakia. He watched as their bags were taken away from them. Then he saw Jews being beaten and stabbed.
Ranks of uniformed men pressed the crowd onto waiting box cars that had been coated with quicklime. Those who fell or fainted or who could not move were thrown into the cars. When no more bodies could fit inside, the doors were shut. Mr. Karski was told that the trains were heading for a camp not far away where their human cargo would be led into gas chambers. But he was also told that sometimes the trains were just left on sidings until those inside starved or suffocated.
After the war, scholars were able to pinpoint the place described by Mr. Karski as a transit depot in Izbica Lubelska where Jews where robbed of their possessions before being sent on to an extermination camp at Belzec 40 miles away.
Mr. Karski returned to Warsaw to prepare himself for his dangerous journey to London. He was given a key whose soldered shaft contained microfilm of hundreds of documents. He went to a dentist and had several teeth pulled so that the resultant swelling could provide him with a reason for not speaking if he was stopped by Germans; he was certain his Polish-accented German would give him away. He also kept his hands out of sight, hiding the wrists that were scarred when he had tried to kill himself.
Using local trains, he went to Berlin, the capital of the Reich, then through Vichy France to Spain, where after a prearranged rendezvous, he was taken to Gibraltar and then to London.
He turned over the key containing the microfilm, described resistance activity, and assessed as bleak the prospects of cooperation between the anti-Communist Polish underground and the partisans sponsored by the same Soviets who in 1939 had joined Hitler in invading and dividing Poland. He spoke of the Jews, saying that their fate was far more desperate and perilous than that of non-Jewish Poles. For many of his Polish superiors, the plight of the Jews, remained an issue that was marginal to Poland's struggle to regain it's conquered land. Some even feared that any emphasis on the victimization of the Jews might detract attention from Poland's tragedy and diminish their own appeals for help.
And when Mr. Karski carried his information about the destruction of the Jews to higher authorities in London, he was met by even greater reluctance to act. "In February 1943, I reported to Anthony Eden," he would later write about his secret meeting with the British Foreign Secretary. "He said that Great Britain had already done enough by accepting 100,000 refugees."
In London, Mr. Karski told his story to Szmuel Zygelboym, who represented the Jewish Socialist Bund in the National Council of the Polish Government-in-Exile. Mr. Zygelboym listened in pain then said, "It's impossible, utterly impossible." If he went on a hunger strike, he said, the authorities would send the police and drag him away to an institution. But, he said, "I'll do everything I can do to help them. I'll do everything they ask."
A few months later, on May 12, 1943, just after the Germans defeated the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Mr. Zygelboym sent a letter to the president and prime minister of Poland in exile and took his own life.
He wrote: "By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the annihilation of the Jewish people."
In July 1943, Mr. Karski arrived in the United States. Two months earlier, attempts by the Germans to liquidate those Jews still remaining in the Warsaw Ghetto was met with armed resistance. In a desperate, uneven struggle over three weeks known to history as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, more than 10,000 Jews were killed in the fighting or in fires set by the Germans to destroy the Ghetto, and 56,000 Jews remaining were taken to the Treblinka death camp.
"Almost every individual was sympathetic to my reports concerning the Jews," Mr. Karski said. "But when I reported to the leaders of governments they discarded their conscience, their personal feeling.
They provided a rationale which seemed valid. What was the situation? The Jews were totally helpless. The war strategy was the military defeat of Germany and the defeat of Germany's war potential for all eternity. Nothing could interfere with the military crushing of the Third Reich. The Jews had no country, no government. They were fighting but they had no identity."He kept telling what he knew, honoring the promise he had given to the two men in the Ghetto. A secret meeting was arranged between Mr. Karski and President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was awed by the president and kept his report concise.
He told Roosevelt about Auschwitz and said that 1.8. million Jews had already been killed in Poland. He said that commanders of the underground Home Army were estimating that if there were no Allied intervention in the next year and a half, the Jews of Poland would "cease to exist." He did not tell the President of his own experiences or observations.
Mr. Karski believed that he failed to move Roosevelt to any real action but John Pehle, who became the head of the War Refugee Board, a Federal agency that helped settle surviving Jews, said that Roosevelt decided to establish the board as a consequence of his talks with his Polish visitor. The Karski mission, said Mr. Pehle, "changed U.S. policy overnight from indifference to affirmative action."
Mr. Karski did mention his personal experiences to Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court, a former presidential adviser and a Jew. Justice Frankfurter replied, "Mr. Karski, I am unable to believe you." A Polish diplomat who was present interjected and asked whether Mr. Frankfurter was calling Mr. Karski a liar. Justice Frankfurter answered, "I did not say this young man is lying. I said I am unable to believe him. There is a difference."
Mr. Karski was planning to return to Warsaw and resume his clandestine work, but his superiors told him that his identity had become known to the Germans and ordered him to remain in the United States. His mission then was to promote the cause of a Poland, which, once freed of German occupation, would have to contend with Stalin's designs. He gave newspaper and radio interviews, wrote magazine articles and drew on his own experiences to write a book, "Story of a Secret State," which was published at the end of 1944 by Houghton Mifflin and which became a Book of the Month Club selection.
Within a year the war came to an end and so did the government in exile that Mr. Karski had served. The Yalta agreement had consigned postwar Poland to the Soviet sphere and Mr. Karski, who knew and scorned Communism, did not return to his native land. Instead, at the age of 39 he enrolled at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown. He received his doctorate in two and a half years, and stayed on, teaching at Georgetown until his retirement in 1984. He became a naturalized citizen in 1954.
He continued to write and speak out against Communism and on behalf of a free and independent Poland, traveling and lecturing widely. He spent more than a decade on a historical work, "The Great Powers and Poland: 1919-1945," published in 1985 by University Press of America. During much of his teaching life, many of his students never knew of his role in the Polish underground or of the terrible message he had carried to the West. He would not speak of it publicly until he agreed to be interviewed for "Shoah." The film gave him a renewed celebrity on the campus and beyond it.
In 1965 he married Pola Nirenska, a dancer and choreographer, who had been born Pola Nirensztajn in Poland, the daughter of an observant Jewish father. All her many relatives had been killed in the Holocaust, but she had survived the war in London and had become a major force in dance in Washington, teaching, choreographing her own work, and leading her own company, when they met.
They were a very devoted couple. In 1981, a year before the Israeli government recognized him as one of "the righteous among nations," Mr. Karski attended a conference organized by Elie Wiesel in Washington, where he reflected on the links between his life and his marriage. He said:
"The Lord assigned me a role to speak and write during the war when -- as it seemed to me -- it might help. It did not ... . Then I became a Jew. Like the family of my wife -- all of them perished in the ghettos, in the concentration camps, in the gas chambers -- so all murdered Jews became my family. But I am a Christian Jew. I am a practicing Catholic. Although I am not a heretic, still my faith tells me the second Original Sin has been committed by humanity: through commission, or omission, or self-imposed ignorance, or insensitivity, or self-interest, or hypocrisy, or heartless rationalization.
"This sin will haunt humanity to the end of time. "It does haunt me. And I want it to be so." http://www.holocaustforgotten.com/karski.html
Topic: German politicians call for a "supra-national European army" (Read 6432 times)