“The heroism with which Poles rallied round the Jewish victims of Nazi persecution” during World War II at the risk of their own lives was hailed in an article published in the official Warsaw English-language magazine Polish Perspectives, copies of which were just received here. The article, based on a series of spring newspaper interviews with Poles who had “tried to help the doomed Jews,” quoted Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, an historian and former underground organizer, who said that the entire Polish underground “with the exception of a few small groups of Fascists and riff-raff helped the Jews.” However, according to Mr. Bartoszewski, “there was no hope of saving from extermination the mass of Jews confined in the ghettoes and camps, just as it was impossible to rescue the hundreds of thousands of Poles imprisoned and done to death on Polish soil.”
The article stressed that “Poland was the only country where any assistance to Jews…was punished by death.” In spite of this, it said, the Jewish resistance organization received military assistance from the Polish underground “in the shape of arms, ammunition and training.” The article quoted Zbigniew Lewandowski, a lecturer at the Warsaw Polytechnic, who said that in the fall of 1942 his unit of the Home Army arranged special courses for the Jewish ghetto fighters “to equip them for the armed revolt they had planned.” The article stated that aid to Jews “involved delivering money and forged papers, escorting fugitives, often women and children or making regular deliveries of food to Jewish hideouts.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
