Polish Witnesses to the Shoah - Tapa blanda

The Warsaw weekly Polityka issued the following appeal to its readers on the 50th anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: "We are asking those of you who still remember the circumstances of the Time of Humiliation to summon up scenes and images from memory. We are appealing to Poles who helped rescue Jews, to Polish witnesses of the persecution of the Jews and of the Holocaust...The aim is to recount events, including those whose narrators would rather forget about them, or never return to them." The people who were born before or during the war, and who found themselves on one side or the other of the ghetto wall, are the last participants in, and eyewitnesses to, the history of the Jews there. Polityka's appeal for recollections of scenes that 'cannot be forgotten' generated 225 submissions, 82 of which are collected in this volume. More than half a century later - and now available in paperback - the dilemmas, emotions, and doubts about their attitudes, and the behavior of their loved ones, are finally revealed. Various themes are examined in this book, including: the guilt felt by those who were unable to help, the cruelty of some Germans and Polish people, the suffering of the children, the apparent lack of resistance put up by the Jewish victims, and the courage shown by a few. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes uplifting, these stories give an insight into the people behind the faceless numbers.

Marian Turski is Chairman of the Jewish Historical Institute Association in Warsaw, and a member of the International Auschwitz Council, the Association Board that oversees the Wannsee Conference Center, and the Council of the Museum of the History of the Polish Jews.