Zofia Kossak-Szczucka - "Protest"

"Protest"

In the summer of 1942, when the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto began, Kossak-Szczucka published a leaflet entitled "Protest," which was printed in 5,000 copies. In the leaflet she described in graphic terms the conditions in the Ghetto, and the horrific circumstances of the deportations then taking place. "All will perish," she wrote. "Poor and rich, old, women, men, youngsters, infants, Catholics dying with the name of Jesus and Mary together with Jews. Their only guilt is that they were born in to the Jewish nation condemned to extermination by Hitler."

The world, Kossak-Szczucka wrote, was silent in the face of this atrocity. "England is silent, so is America, even the influential international Jewry, so sensitive in its reaction to any transgression against its people, is silent. Poland is silent... Dying Jews are surrounded only by a host of Pilates washing their hands in innocence." Those who are silent in the face of murder, she wrote, become accomplices to the crime.

Kossak-Szczucka saw this largely as an issue of religious ethics. "Our feelings toward Jews have not changed," she wrote. "We do not stop thinking of them as political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland." But, she wrote, this does not relieve Polish Catholics of their duty to oppose the crimes being committed in their country.

"We are required by God to protest," she wrote. "God who forbids us to kill. We are required by our Christian consciousness. Every human being has the right to be loved by his fellow men. The blood of the defenceless cries to heaven for revenge. Those who oppose our protest, are not Catholics."

Kossak-Szczucka also saw the issue as one of national honour. "We do not believe that Poland can benefit from German cruelties," she wrote. "On the contrary... We know how poisoned is the fruit of the crime... Those who do not understand this, and believe that a proud and free future for Poland can be combined with acceptance of the grief of their fellow men, are neither Catholics nor Poles."

Since World War II writers have been puzzled about what they see as Kossak-Szczucka's contradictory views. On the one hand she is described as a nationalist and an anti-Semite, something she did not in fact deny. On the other hand, she made a genuine appeal to the Polish national conscience to come to the aid of the Jews as well as risked her life by becoming involved in practical work to save at least a fraction of Polish Jews from the Germans. She co-founded Provisional Committee to Aid Jews (Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy Żydom), which later turned into Council to Aid Jews (Rada Pomocy Żydom), codename Zegota, an underground organization whose sole purpose was to save Jews in Poland from Nazi extermination. In 1985 she was posthumously awarded Righteous Among the Nations title.

About the 1942 "Protest" by Kossak-Szczucka, Robert D. Cherry and Annamaria Orla-Bukowska wrote in the introduction to Rethinking Poles and Jews: "Without at all whitewashing her antisemitism in the document, she vehemently called for active intercession on behalf of the Jews—precisely in the name of Polish Roman Catholicism and Polish patriotism. The deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto precipitated her cofounding of Zegota that same year—an Armia Krajowa (AK, Home Army) unit whose sole purpose was to save Jews."