Wartime Envoy Defends Poland’s Record on Anti-semitism

Count Edward Raczynski, the wartime Polish Ambassador to Britain, has taken sharp issue with an author who claimed in a recently published book that “Polish anti-Semitism was almost as virulent as was the German brand.” The book. “The Vatican in the Age of the Dictators,” by Anthony-Rhodes, deals mainly with Pope Pius XII. In a letter published in The Times today, Count Raczynski-claimed that Rhodes told half truths with regard to Poland’s attitude toward the Jews.

“It is a fact that thanks to the tolerance my country has shown since the middle ages, Poland became a place of refuge for the Jews persecuted in Western Europe, England included, and as a result, Poland’s Jewish citizens in the year preceding the outbreak of the last war numbered over three million and formed about ten percent of the country’s total population,” the former envoy wrote:

He conceded that “Poland had anti-Semitic elements but this was by no means universal and the Jews exerted a considerable influence not only in business but also in parliament and in the press.” Count Raczynski claimed that “news about massacres of Jews in Nazi extermination camps on Polish soil reached London not thanks to the indiscretion of the German Wehrmacht but through Polish emissaries and it was the Polish government in London which gave it the maximum publicity.” He added, “I myself spoke on many occasions on public platforms about these crimes. In Nazi-occupied Poland, massacres of our own kith and kin matched the massacres of Jews. But although the sheltering of Jews was punished by death, such acts of courage and generosity were common all over the country.” Count Raczynski said that thanks to these acts and others by the Polish underground, about 80,000 Jews were able to survive in Poland.