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Zofia Kossak-Szczucka

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Zofia Kossak-Szczucka (1890 - 1968), Polish author and resistance fighter, is best known for her wartime efforts to help the Polish Jews. She was a founder of the wartime Polish organization Żegota, set up to assist Polish Jews in escaping the Holocaust. In 1943 she was arrested by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz, but survived the war.

Writer and activist

Zofia Kossak was a granddaughter of the Polish painter Juliusz Kossak. She married twice, and kept the name Szczucka from her first marriage. She was associated with the Czartak literary group, and wrote mainly for the Catholic press. Her best-known work from that period is Conflagration, a memoir of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In 1936 she received the Gold Laurel (Złoty Wawrzyn) of the Polish Academy of Literature.

During the German occupation of Poland, Kossak-Szczucka worked in the underground press: from 1939 to 1941 she co-edited the underground newspaper, Polska żyje (Poland Lives) and in 1941 co-founded the Catholic organization, Front for the Rebirth of Poland and edited its newspaper, Prawda (The Truth). In the underground, she used the code-name Weronika (Veronica).

Despite already being the target of an intensive Gestapo search, she exposed herself to the added danger of helping the Jews. Her motivation was moral, humanitarian and patriotic. She regarded the Germans' actions, she said, as an offense against man and God, and their policies as an affront to the ideals that she espoused for an independent Poland.

The Protest

In the summer of 1942, when the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto began, Kossak-Szczucka published a leaflet entitled "Protest," which was printed in 5,000 copies. In the leaflet she described in graphic terms the conditions in the Ghetto, and the horrific circumstances of the deportations then taking place. "All will perish," she wrote. "Poor and rich, old, women, men, youngsters, infants, Catholics dying with the name of Jesus and Mary together with Jews. Their only guilt is that they were born in to the Jewish nation condemned to extermination by Hitler."

The world, Kossak-Szczucka wrote, was silent in the face of this atrocity. "England is silent, so is America, even the influential international Jewry, so sensitive in its reaction to any transgression against its people, is silent. Poland is silent... Dying Jews are surrounded only by a host of Pilates washing their hands in innocence." Those who are silent in the face of murder, she wrote, become accomplices the crime.

Kossak-Szczucka saw this largely as an issue of religious ethics. "Our feelings toward Jews have not changed," she wrote. "We do not stop thinking of them as political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland." But, she wrote, this did not doesn't relieve Polish Catholics of their duty to oppose the crimes being committed in their country.

"We are required by God to protest," she wrote. "God who forbids us to kill. We are required by our Christian consciousness. Every human being has the right to be loved by his fellow men. The blood of the defenceless cries to heaven for revange. Those who oppose our protest, are not Catholics."

Kossak-Szczucka also saw the issue as one of national honour. "We do not believe that Poland can benefit from German cruelties," she wrote. "On the contrary... We know how poisoned is the fruit of the crime... Those who do not understand this, and believe that a proud and free future for Poland can be combined with acceptance of the grief of their fellow men, are neither Catholics nor Poles."

Later career

While Kossak-Szczucka is generally credited with galvanising a united front in the struggle to help Jews, she and others were already involved in this work, either as party activists or as individuals. The aim after 1942 was to unite all these forces and link them with the resources of the Home Army (AK) and to get funds from the government-in-exile in London and other sources.

In 1943 Kossak-Szczucka was arrested, but the Germans did not realise who she was. She was sent first to the infamous Pawiak prison and then to Auschwitz. There she was held in the work-camp not the adjacent extermination camp where Jews were sent. She was released through the efforts of the Polish underground and returned to Warsaw. In late 1944 she participated in the Warsaw Uprising. She survived that too. After the war she emigrated to Britain rather than live under the postwar Polish Communist regime.

Kossak-Szczucka is regarded as one of Poland's best historical novelists, alongside Henryk Sienkiewicz and Józef Ignacy Kraszewski. Her historical novels include Beatum scelus (1924), Złota wolność (Golden Liberty, 1928), Legnickie pole (The Field of Legnica, 1930), Trembowla (1939), Suknia Dejaniry (Dejanira's Gown, 1939), Głośni Krzyżowcy (Loud Crusaders, 1935), Król trędowaty (The Leper King, 1936), Bez oręża (Unarmed, 1937), dealing with the crusades, and Z miłości (From Love, 1926) and Szaleńcy boży (God's Madmen, 1929), on religious themes.

After the war Kossak-Szczucka published Z otchłani Wspomnienia z łagru (From Abyss: Memories from the Camp) 1946, describing her experiences in Auschwitz. Dziedzictwo 1956-67 is about the Kossak family, and Przymierze (Alliance) 1952 has biblical themes. Kossak-Szczucka also wrote also books for children and teenagers, including Bursztyn 1936 and Gród nad jeziorem (Castle at the Lake) 1938.

Debate on Zofia Kossak-Szczucka

Since World War II writers have been puzzled about what they see as Kossak-Szczucka's contradictory views. On the one hand she is described as a Polish Catholic nationalist and an anti-Semite, something she did not in fact deny. On the other other hand, she made a genuine, if largely symbolic, appeal to the Polish national conscience to come to the aid of the Jews, and risked her life by becoming involved in practical work to save at least of a fraction of Polish Jews from the Germans.

In 1995 this exchange of letters was published in the New York Review of Books.

To the Editors:

In his absorbing essay "Adders and Other Reptiles" [NYR, 11 May] Czeslaw Milosz gravely misrepresents the nature of one of Poland's leading prewar writers and co-founder of the wartime Council to Aid the Jews (Zegota), Zofia Kossak-Szczucka. Kossak-Szczucka was not just a "nationalist and a Catholic"; she was also a virulent anti-Semite. Yet her loathing for Jews clashed with her religious faith, which dictated mercy and compassion even for apostates. In September 1942, she authored a passionate appeal calling upon the Poles to help save Jews. "Whoever remains silent in the face of murder," she wrote, "becomes an accomplice to that murder." At the same time, she became active in the efforts to hide and help Jews who escaped from the ghettos and villages of Poland.

Many Polish books, including Righteous Among Nations, co-authored by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski (himself a member of Zegota and now Foreign Minister of Poland) and Zofia Lewin, have published the text of this leaflet, omitting, however, one crucial passage:

Our feeling towards the Jews has not changed. We continue to regard them as political, economic, and ideological enemies of Poland. Moreover, we realize they hate us more than they hate the Germans and that they make us responsible for their misfortune. Why, and on what basis, remains a mystery of the Jewish soul. Nevertheless, this is a fact. Awareness of this fact, however, does not release us from the duty of condemning the murder. [1]

The book by Professor Jan Blonski, which Milosz refers to, is one of the few Polish works on the Holocaust that reprints the whole text of Kossak's appeal, including the offensive passage. Most of them, such as Ludzie z dzielnicy zamknietej (People from the Closed-off District), by Ruta Sadowska (Warsaw, 1994), leave out those lines. That the lines were not meant as a stratagem for reaching her over-whelmingly Catholic cum anti-Semitic readers can be ascertained from Kossak's writings before the war. Here is a passage from an article by Kossak published in Warsaw in 1936, redolent of pathological racism:

Jews are so terribly alien to us, alien and unpleasant, that they are a race apart. They irritate us and all their traits grate against our sensibilities. Their oriental impetuosity, argumentativeness, specific mode of thought, the set of their eyes, the shape of their ears, the winking of their eyelids, the line of their lips, everything. In families of mixed blood we detect the traces of these features to the third or fourth generation and beyond. [2]

How Kossak-Szczucka reconciled her benign Catholic beliefs with malevolent Jew-hatred (and not, as Milosz would have it, simply with her "nationalist loyalties") and how a woman of patently racist views could devote herself to rescuing the victims of racism are questions that do not lend themselves to easy explanations. What a pity that Czeslaw Milosz, with his unique sensitivity to the complexities of Eastern Europe, did not confront the troubling complexity of Zofia Kossak-Szczucka.

Abraham Brumberg
Chevy Chase, Maryland

Czeslaw Milosz replies

Mr Brumberg seems to reproach me for having limited myself, in my review, to saying: "National loyalties bound her to her ideological brethren who maintained that the Jews are enemies of Poland," instead of stressing her personal anti-Semitic convictions. Personally I prefer to believe that an odious doctrine, including that of the nationalist, anti-Semitic right, does not always have power over deeper human motivations.

Professor Jan Blonski devotes an entire chapter of his book to Zofia Kossak-Szczucka's anti-Semitism and her actions as a rescuer. He says: "I feel bound to state that Zofia Kossak-Szczucka did commit herself vigorously to helping her 'enemies' and that several dozen Jews—if not more—directly owed or owe their lives to her. Such courage and self-sacrifice make any kind of ad personam criticism improper." Therefore Professor Blonski tries to explain, on a larger than purely personal level, the paradox by which anti-Semitism is combined with a willingness to risk one's life to save Jews. He puts forward some historical explanations that are connected with the long history of cohabitation of Poles and Jews; but basically he is faced with an enigma. So am I, and Mr. Brumberg should not expect from me more than I can offer, since we are concerned here with a secret of the human conscience.

Notes

[1] For the full text, see The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1944, by Israel Gutman (Indiana University Press, 1985).

[2] "Nie istnieja sytuacje bez wyjscia," (There are no insoluable situations) Kultura, Warsaw, 27 September, cited by Anna Landau-Czajka, "Image of the Jew in the Catholic Press," in Jews in Independent Poland 1918-1939, edited by Antony Polonsky et al., 1995, pp. 165-166.

(New York Review of Books, Vol 42, No 11, 22 June 1995)

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