During World War II, my grandfather tried to save the lives of two Polish Jews but failed.
The death of Reich (we don’t know his first name) and his 10-year-old son Abraham — and my grandfather’s failed attempt to protect them — bears on what’s happening in Warsaw this week, as the Polish parliament finishes work on a new law that makes it a criminal offense to tie the “Polish nation” or “the Polish state” to the wartime crimes of Nazi Germany.
The bill, which has to be signed into law by President Andrzej Duda, has turned into a public relations problem for the nationalist Law and Justice party government.
Israel, a close ally, is furious and is withdrawing its ambassador from Warsaw. The Knesset is mulling its own law making it a crime to deny or minimize the actions of Germany’s wartime collaborators. The United States, another friend of Poland, has expressed discomfort at the bill.
Many of Frysztak’s Jews were taken to trenches dug in a forest near the town. They were led out of the trucks and shot.
The narrow aim of the law is to end the practice of some media outlets using the shorthand of “Polish death camps” to describe the concentration camps built by Nazi Germany on occupied Polish territory. But many outside the country see the legislation as an effort to whitewash Poland’s complicated — and sometimes unsavory — wartime history.
That complexity is shown by the history of my own family.
In August 1942, when Poland was under German occupation, my grandfather Stanisław was administering a small estate in Gogołów, in the southeast of the country.
He needed a workman to fix the drain pipes on a building, and the local Gestapo commander sent him a tinsmith, Reich, from the ghetto in the nearby town of Frysztak. My grandfather had to sign a chit promising to return Reich to the ghetto once he was done. The penalty for failing to do that was death.
The author’s grandfather Stanisław Cienski, left | Photo provided by the Cienski family
My grandfather took Reich and his 10-year-old son Abraham to Gogołów by horse-drawn wagon, and they spent several days there working.
On August 15, my grandparents were riding through Frysztak and were halted in the central square. There they saw the Germans emptying the ghetto and gathering hundreds of Jews in the center of the town. Drunken soldiers were beating them and shoving them onto open trucks. My grandparents saw Reich’s wife frantically gesturing to them to warn her husband before she too was bundled onto a truck.
Many of Frysztak’s Jews were taken to trenches dug in a forest near the town. They were led out of the trucks and shot.
When my grandparents got home they found Reich distraught and weeping. He had heard what happened in town. My grandparents suggested he flee south through the forested Carpathian Mountains to Hungary, where Jews were still relatively safe. But he demurred. He spoke Polish with a heavy Yiddish accent and would easily be spotted and turned in to the Germans.
Instead, my grandfather hid Reich and his son in a barn. That evening, two Gestapo officers showed up to demand the tinsmith’s return. My grandfather told them he’d sent him back to Frysztak. The Germans accepted the explanation, but left warning that any attempt to hide Reich would bring a death sentence on my grandfather and his family.
After a few days of keeping Reich and his son hidden in the barn, my grandparents led them to the forest, where they dug themselves a shelter. For months, my grandparents took them food every day, and were rewarded by chestnuts gathered by Abraham. When it got cold in the autumn, they took bedding to the forest.
Six Jewish men under arrest in Nazi-occupied Poland, circa 1941 | Hulton Archive/Getty Images
When the cold became too much, Reich and Abraham moved to an abandoned cabin deep in the woods.
“One day they carelessly lit a fire during the day,” my grandfather wrote in his memoirs. “The rising smoke betrayed their hiding place. Some inhuman peasants, hungry for reward money, told the Germans what they had seen. They came to the forest, dragged them out and shot them both. So the help we had given them didn’t save those poor people, but only extended their lives for a few months.”
Later, my grandparents realized the bedding they had taken to the forest was embroidered with their family monograms — if the Germans had found it they would have known who was hiding the Reichs.
It’s a story that doesn’t fit well with the mindset of the parliamentarians voting through the Polish Holocaust law.
Stanisław Cienski in his cavalry uniform in 1939 | Photo from the Cienski family
Before the war there were about 3 million Jews living in Poland, about 10 percent of the population. Only a few thousand survived the Holocaust, and most of those left Poland after the war.
During the German occupation, Poland didn’t have a collaborationist government. Unlike the Baltic countries and Ukraine, where armed formations allied with the Germans massacred Jews, and Vichy France, which used the machinery of government to deport Jews to their deaths, the Polish state had no involvement in wartime crimes.
Thousands of people like my grandfather risked their lives to help their Jewish neighbors. Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Remembrance Center recognizes 6,706 Poles for saving Jews — the largest of any nationality.
But again, it’s complicated. Fewer than 7,000 people is not many when considering the sheer size of Poland’s prewar Jewish minority. The Netherlands has 5,595 people recognized for saving Jews, and there were only 140,000 Jews living in Holland before the war; then again, the Dutch didn’t face an almost sure death sentence for helping Jews.
Some Poles helped Jews; others betrayed them to the Germans, or killed them themselves.
The vast majority of the population did nothing, partly out of fear at German reprisals and partly because they didn’t like Jews all that much.
That’s not something that fits easily into a simple national narrative — or into legislation, no matter how well intentioned.
Jan Cienski, senior policy editor at POLITICO, is author of “Start-Up Poland,” published by the University of Chicago Press on February 2, 2018.