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N0KFQ > TODAY 04.12.16 14:17l 56 Lines 2606 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
BID : 15017_N0KFQ
Read: GUEST
Subj: Today in History - Dec 4
Path: IW8PGT<IR2UBX<SR1BSZ<LU4ECL<CX2SA<N0KFQ
Sent: 161204/1310Z 15017@N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA BPQ6.0.13
1942
Polish Christians come to the aid of Polish Jews
On this day in Warsaw, a group of Polish Christians put their own
lives at risk when they set up the Council for the Assistance of
the Jews. The group was led by two women, Zofia Kossak and Wanda
Filipowicz.
Since the German invasion of Poland in 1939, the Jewish
population had been either thrust into ghettos, transported to
concentration and labor camps, or murdered. Jewish homes and
shops were confiscated and synagogues were burned to the ground.
Word about the Jews' fate finally leaked out in June of 1942,
when a Warsaw underground newspaper, the Liberty Brigade, made
public the news that tens of thousands of Jews were being gassed
at Chelmno, a death camp in Poland_almost seven months after the
extermination of prisoners began.
Despite the growing public knowledge of the "Final Solution," the
mass extermination of European Jewry and the growing network of
extermination camps in Poland, little was done to stop it.
Outside Poland, there were only angry speeches from politicians
and promises of postwar reprisals. Within Poland, non-Jewish
Poles were themselves often the objects of persecution and forced
labor at the hands of their Nazi occupiers; being Slavs, they too
were considered "inferior" to the Aryan Germans.
But this did not stop Zofia Kossak and Wanda Filipowicz, two
Polish Christians who were determined to do what they could to
protect their Jewish neighbors. The fates of Kossak and
Filipowicz are unclear so it is uncertain whether their mission
was successful, but the very fact that they established the
Council is evidence that some brave souls were willing to risk
everything to help persecuted Jews. Kossak and Filipowicz were
not alone in their struggle to help; in fact, only two days after
the Council was established, the SS, Hitler's "political" terror
police force, rounded up 23 men, women, and children, and locked
some in a cottage and some in a barn_then burned them alive.
Their crime: suspicion of harboring Jews.
Despite the bravery of some Polish Christians, and Jewish
resistance fighters within the Warsaw ghetto, who rebelled in
1943 (some of whom found refuge among their Christian neighbors
as they attempted to elude the SS), the Nazi death machine proved
overwhelming. Poland became the killing ground for not only
Poland's Jewish citizens, but much of Europe's: Approximately 4.5
million Jews were killed in Poland's death and labor camps by
war's end.
73 - K.O., n0kfq
N0KFQ @ N0KFQ.#SWMO.MO.USA.NA
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