Washington Jewish Week

Online Edition, December 2002

Polish rescuer-turned-diplomat honored
by Paula Amann

News Editor

A 60th anniversary observance this week at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum turned into a reunion of sorts. On Tuesday, the Washington, D.C., museum marked six decades since the founding of Zegota, a Polish underground group that rescued some 4,000 Polish Jews, including 2,500 children.

Museum council chair Fred Zeidman paid special tribute to Zegota co-founder Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, now a spry and impassioned 80, who twice served as Poland's foreign minister.

With him on the program was another Warsaw native. Retired Hebrew University professor Israel Gutman, like the Catholic Bartoszewski, joined Zegota, although the pair wouldn't meet until after the German defeat.

"We've been friends for years," the former minister said of his Jewish comrade. "We're the same age and from the same city."

Museum chair emeritus Miles Lerman, meanwhile, who also took part in Tuesday's program, spent the war years as an anti-Nazi partisan in his native southern Poland.

In an interview Monday at the Polish embassy, Bartoszewski recounted, through an interpreter, the events that led to the high-risk rescue work that made him one of the first Poles to receive the Righteous Among Nations award from Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum.

As a young man of 18, he was nabbed by the Gestapo and sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then a prison for Polish intellectuals. Spared a likely death when he was released after seven months through efforts of the International Red Cross, he came home to witness the persecution of his country's Jews.

"I was a believing Catholic and I happened to have a priest who was my spiritual adviser, and he told me something that many rabbis would say: God wanted you to come out of that concentration camp so you could help others," said Bartoszewski, who had grown up with many Jewish family friends.

Polish resistance leader Jan Karski, who taught at Georgetown University until his death at 86 two years ago, tapped the young man for a new rescue group then forming, the Council to Aid Jews.

Code-named Zegota, said Bartoszewski, the network brought together Catholics and Jews, liberals and socialists in the common task of housing, feeding and providing false papers for Jews in hiding.

"We were united in complete trust, regardless of our ancestry," he recalled. "It didn't matter that I was a goy and my friends were Jewish, because if we were apprehended by Germans, we would just go to death together."

While capital punishment loomed for any rescuer caught, he stressed, the most wrenching thing was keeping people safely hidden for months, only to see them caught and killed by the Nazis.

"Our only reward was that we always managed to save somebody," Bartoszewski said. "The bottom line was that it was a great development that Poles and Jews were able to work together so effectively."

In addition to his own rescue work, Bartoszewski took part in the Warsaw Uprising as a lieutenant in the Polish Home Army.

After the war, Bartoszewski studied at Warsaw University and wrote for the Polish Peasant Party newspaper. But his troubles with the authorities were far from over.

As the communist regime supplanted the Nazis, the young activist was jailed twice during the late '40s and early '50s for a total of seven years, first for his articles, then for trumped-up charges of spying, of which he was later cleared.

"Dictators didn't like me, and the feeling was completely mutual," Bartoszewski said.

From 1960 to 1981, he served as a secret source for Radio Free Europe, while teaching history at Lublin's Catholic University.

"It carried a penalty of life imprisonment, yet I did it because I felt that this way I was helping Poles get information that would help them achieve democracy," Bartoszewski recalled.

During the last three years of that period, he also belonged to the clandestine Polish Alliance for Independence. In late 1980, Bartoszewski co-founded the Committee in Defense of the Politically Persecuted, in league with the Solidarity Trade Union.

"My entire activity was devoted to giving hardship to the communist system because I believed it was false and it had to fall," he declared. "It had to collapse, although I didn't know if I would live to see it."

His activities led to another imprisonment the next year.

At the Jaworze Internment Camp, he was in high-class company. Two fellow inmates, Taddeus Mazoweicki and Geremak Bronislaw, later became, respectively, the first premier and first foreign minister of a democratic Poland.

Following his release, Bartoszewski spent 1983 through 1990 teaching political science at German universities in Munich and elsewhere. With the implosion of communism in Poland, he returned home and served five years as his country's ambassador to Austria. In 1995 and again in 2000, he was named foreign minister. A prolific scholar of history, he has penned some 40 books and 1,000 articles.

His solidarity with the Jewish people remains. As chair of the Council for the Protection of the Memory of Combat and Martyrdom, he oversees such sites as Auschwitz and the shtetl of Belz. He also serves on the board of an institution in the making: the Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Last April, Bartoszewski was among the signers of a letter to Gazeta Wyborcza, a major Polish newspaper, opposing an academic boycott of Israel sweeping Europe. The letter also voiced support for the Jewish state's right of self-defense in the face of attacks on civilians by the Palestinians.

Some in Poland deride him as a Shabbos goy, but many more share his pro-Jewish views, says Bartoszewski.

"Nobody can intimidate or threaten me anymore because I'm an old man," says the veteran dissenter, who says he's close in age to both former Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush. "Because of my age, I am independent."