Poland under German occupation 1939-1945
Germans selected
Poland as the only country where aiding a Jew, be it only to give him a slice of bread, was immediately punished by death.
Failure to inform on a neighbor hiding
Jews meant deportation to a GERMAN
NAZI Concentration and
Extermination Camp(1939-1945) AUSCHWITZ, BUCHENWALD, DACHAU, BERGEN BELSEN,
Ravensbrück,
Sachsenhausen, MAUTHAUSEN, Neuengamme, GROSS-ROSEN, SZUCHA, PAWIAK, PALMIRY.
Waclaw Bielawski, from the
Main Commission for
Investigation of
Crimes Against the
Polish Nation, issued a list of 1,
181 names of
Poles who had been killed for helping Jews during
World War II. In
Western Europe the automatic death sentence for help rendered to Jews did not exist and applying it to a whole family or neighbors was unthinkable. The reign of terror that organized in
German-occupied Poland(1939-1945) was completely isolated, and unimaginable in the
West Europe and all the world.
ZEGOTA-Council for Aid to Jews in
Occupied Poland(1939-1945).
Zegota(in
Polish:Żegota) was the cryptonym for the clandestine underground organization in German-Nazi- occupied Poland(1939-1945) that provide assistance to the
Jewish people. ZEGOTA was the only such organization in German-occupied
EUROPE during the
Holocaust.
IRENA SENDLEROWA (de domo: IRENA KRZYŻANOWSKA) (also IRENA SENDLER) played a leading role in the rescue and hiding of
Jewish children. IRENA SENDLEROWA with Żegota saved
2500 Jewish
Children during the
German terror in Holocaust.
LIFE IN A
JAR.
Righteous Among the Nations in
Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum:
POLAND - 6066 - more than from any other German Nazi-occupied country
Total Persons - 22,211
POLAND'S HOLOCAUST: 6 MILLION
CITIZENS DEAD
(3 MILLION CHRISTIANS and 3 MILLION
JEWS)
Poland lost six million citizens or about one-fifth of its population: three million of the dead were Polish Christians, predominantly
Catholic, and the other three million were
Polish Jews.
Sheltering or helping Jews in German-occupied Poland posed a serious danger to anyone doing it. Poland was the only country where the German-Nazis ordered a death penalty not only for the persons directly aiding them but even for the neighbors living nearby.
Poland had been conquered by
Nazi Germany during
1939 Defensive War, and its government went into exile in
London; no Polish puppet state collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.
Auschwitz German Camp- 1940-1945 became the main concentration camp for Poles after the arrival there on June 14,
1940, of 728 men transported from an overcrowded prison at
Tarnow. By
March 1941, 10,900 prisoners were registered at the camp, most of them Poles.
In September 1941,
200 ill prisoners, most of them Poles, along with 650
Soviet prisoners of war, were killed in the first gassing experiments at Auschwitz.
Beginning in
1942, Auschwitz's prisoner population became much more diverse, as Jews and other "enemies of the state" from all over
German-occupied Europe were deported to the camp.
The Polish scholar
Franciszek Piper, the chief historian of Auschwitz, estimates that
140,
000 to
150,000 Poles were brought to that camp between 1940 and
1945, and that 70,000 to 75,000 died there as victims of executions, of cruel medical experiments, and of starvation and disease. Some
100,000 Poles were deported to
Majdanek, and tens of thousands of them died there. An estimated 20,000 Poles died at Sachsenhausen, 20,000 at Gross-Rosen, 30,000 at Mauthausen, 17,000 at Neuengamme, 10,000 at
Dachau, and 17,000 at
Ravensbrueck. In addition, victims in the tens of thousands were executed or died in the thousands of other camps--including special children's camps such as
Lodz and its subcamp, Dzierzazn--and in prisons and other places of detention within and outside German-occupied Poland 1939-1945.