The forgotten Holocaust; the Poles under German occupation, 1939-1944.

The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles under German Occupation, 1939-1944

by Richard C. Lukas (Kentucky, 300 pp., $24)

A DOLF HITLER'S demonic hatred of Jews, and his Final Solution intended to expunge them from the face of his future Aryanized Europe, have been well documented in numerous scholarly and popular histories. But, unfortunately, horrified fascination with that overriding holocaust has tended to cloud subsequent historiography of the Nazi era to the point where Hitler's equally obsessive hatred of all Eastern European peoples has been nearly forgotten.

The Nazis' first major military conquest was the Polish Republic, which fell to them after fearsome bombardment in September 1939, and then was cut in two by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Line after the invasion of eastern Poland by Soviet Russia. Immediately, some 22 million Poles came under Nazi rule.

The historian Richard Lukas has written an absorbing, meticulously documented study of how the Polish people fought, suffered, and died during the next five years, culminating in the tragic Warsaw uprising of August 1944. The portrait he paints of their resistance to the occupiers of their land, their concern for the plight of the three and a half million Polish Jews, and their doomed attempts to ensure the birth of a democratic postwar Poland ought finally to dispel among historians the often maliciously contrived impression of the wartime Poles as collaborators who were insensitive to the Jewish holocaust, and who were snatched from Nazi tyranny entirely through the efforts of Soviet liberators.

Lukas notes that from 1939 to 1941 ethnic Poles suffered far more grievously than did Polish Jews. The Jews, who were largely unassimilated into Polish culture (few of them even spoke Polish), had been herded into ghettos, but the Final Solution did not begin until 1942, by which time hundreds of thousands of Poles had already died in the invasion, hundreds of thousands more had been forcibly transported to Germany as slave labor, and thousands were being executed all across the country in reprisal for insurgent attacks on German soldiers and settlers.

The Nazi policy toward the Poles can be clarified with a few illustrative quotes. In Heinrich Himmler's view, "The great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles.' Any Pole with a high-school education was a likely candidate for public execution or sentencing to a death camp, because the educated would be able to keep alive a sense of Polish nationhood. Consequently, the viceroy of the General Government of Occupied Poland, Hans Frank, transmitted his Fuhrer's message: What we have now recognized in Poland to be the elite must be liquidated; we must watch out for the seeds that begin to sprout again, so as to stamp them out again in good time.'

The Polish resistance was directed from England by the government-inexile, initially headed by General Wladyslaw Sikorski; the armed resistance on Polish soil, the Polish Home Army (AK), was led by General Stefan Grot-Rowecki. The grand strategy they conceived after the invasion of Russia in June 1941 was to build up the AK so that it could successfully attack just when the German army was ready to collapse. Sikorski believed that a strategic alliance could be made with Stalin (provided the U.S. and England held him to it) to secure Poland's independence, Grot-Rowecki thought the Poles, once the Germans were defeated, might have to fight the Soviets, but he too held to the illusion that the Western powers would aid them. But the final fate of the Polish nation was presaged in 1943 by the discovery of the Katyn Forest mass grave of thousands of Polish officers massacred by the Russians. After that revelation, the underground leaders needed little convincing to spur efforts to liberate their country before the Russians arrived.

Although weakened by their own piecemeal liquidation, the Poles, beginning in 1942, provided assistance to the Jews that assumed truly heroic proportions. Estimates of the number of Poles involved in hiding Polish Jews (whose distinctively Semitic features made them much more vulnerable than their Western European co-religionists) run from one million upward, despite the certainty of death if they were caught. Somewhere around 100,000 Jews were ultimately saved by these efforts. Although some Poles were anti-Semites, and some were collaborators, the number of these was relatively small. Indeed, amidst the welter of Eastern European antagonisms, in which Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians fought one another with great ferocity, it is all the more remarkable that these Poles extended a humanitarian hand toward a people many of them felt had betrayed them by welcoming the Soviets in eastern Poland.

Lukas brings to light many hitherto uncited cases of that heroism, as well as highlighting the assistance the AK (which itself included a number of Jewish soldiers) provided the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto during their heroic but suicidal uprising in April 1943. The AK and the government-in-exile also alerted the Allies to the horrors of the concentration camps, and made repeated, futile attempts to convince them to destroy the railway lines leading to Auschwitz.

Unfortunately for the Polish cause, critics in England and America, citing the (relatively mild) anti-Semitism of the pre-war Pilsudski era, harped on its alleged presence in the beleaguered resistance, although the charge was utterly untrue, particularly of Sikorski. Simultaneously, the Soviet regime was being presented as the natural ally of the Western powers, who were convinced that Poland belonged in Stalin's sphere of influence.

By June 1944, Soviet radio broadcasts were calling for an uprising in Poland, now that the Red Army was near Warsaw. The AK leaders set August 1 for their revolt so that they might meet the Red Army with a fait accompli. An inadequately armed force of 25,000 prepared to assault a heavily fortified German garrison. Initially the Poles took the advantage, but two SS brigades, one headed by a Russian opportunist and the other by a former child molester, went on a rampage that appalled even the regular German army. Tens of thousands of civilians were mowed down indiscriminately before a seasoned German general took over military operations. The Poles called London for air support, but the Allies could not help them because Stalin refused to let them use air bases in Russian-occupied territory until it was too late. Polish units outside Warsaw that attempted to relieve the besieged units in the city were intercepted by the Soviets. The Red Army busied itself attacking a German-held suburb of Warsaw, but did virtually nothing to aid the Poles in their desperate defense. Consequently, the AK surrendered to the Germans on September 29, 1944. Warsaw counted 200,000 dead during the uprising.

At war's end, Poland had lost six million people, more than 20 per cent of its population. Half of them were Jews, half of them Christians. And the country's future, which it had naively thought the Western powers would guarantee, was as bleak as ever. One alien occupier had been exchanged for another, and the Soviets were to prove much more resistant to expulsion than the Nazis.