Forgotten Survivors: Polish Christians Remember The Nazi Occupation (Modern War Studies) (Hardcover)

~ Richard C. Lukas (Editor) "As I recollect the school year 1938-1939, the gimnazjum and liceum of Henryk Sienkiewicz in Czestochowa mirrored the mood of the country..." (more)
Key Phrases: concentration camp life, annexed lands, Home Army, United States, World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Lukas pays special attention to the sufferings of Poland's Catholic majority, presenting stories from the resistance and the risings, from Auschwitz and Mauthausen, and from the death marches and forced labor camps. . . . A wonderful testament to the survival of the human spirit in adversity."

Product Description

Wanda Lorenc watched horrified as the first Wehrmacht soldiers stormed into Warsaw. Jan Porembski witnessed the mass executions of Polish civilians. Barbara Makuch became a courier for the Polish underground until she was caught and tortured. Jan Komski was thrown into the very first transport to Auschwitz and observed its rapid expansion firsthand. But, unlike the nearly three million other Polish Christians (and three million Polish Jews) who died during World War II, they survived.

Richard Lukas presents the compelling eyewitness accounts of these and other Polish Christians who suffered at the hands of the Germans. They bear witness to unspeakable horrors endured by those who were tortured, forced into slavery, shipped off to concentration camps, and even subjected to medical experiments. Their stories provide a somber reminder that non-Jewish Poles were just as likely as Jews to suffer at the hands of the Nazis, who viewed them with nearly equal contempt. Zbigniew Haszlakiewicz remembers being brutally whipped and tortured-hung by his arms and legs, hands tied behind, and repeatedly stabbed: "I prayed to lose consciousness, but it was impossible. The Gestapo soon tired and started to drink beer and smoke cigarettes as they sat at that big desk. And I hung like a hammock."

Lorenc tells of encountering starving Jews: "I broke an end off one loaf [of bread] and threw it to a woman in the group. An SS guard saw what I had done, rushed over to me and began to beat me with her stick. When I fell, she beat me with her boots. Two of my teeth dislodged and my mouth filled with blood. When I returned to the barracks, no one recognized me."

But Dr. Jan Moor-Jankowski also recalls: "One night they took a prisoner and hanged him. He died in front of our eyes. I remember seeing a tiny twig of a tree from the window. As time passed, I saw a bud on the twig and soon leaves came out. It was something that gave me hope."

Through the survivors' voices we also learn about the Polish underground, the Council for Aid to Jews (Zegota), the Jewish Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Home Army's heroic battle during the Warsaw Uprising in late 1944. Lukas places the narratives in their historical context and Jan Komski's drawings capture the horror of concentration camp life.

This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Kansas (November 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0700613501
• ISBN-13: 978-0700613502
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,072,157 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seldom-Mentioned Facts About the Holocaust (sensu Universal), August 2, 2006

By	Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

Owing to obvious misunderstandings, the very title of this book needs clarification. The concept of "forgotten", not elaborated by Lukas, goes far beyond which side has done a better job of presenting its sufferings to the American public. It goes right to the heart of (1). Which side has the power and influence to get its message out, (2). Which side is in a position to control the very language of the debate, and (3). Which side has the political clout to have its sufferings enshrined in American educational law. As for (1), American Jew Novick pointed out in his book, THE HOLOCAUST IN AMERICAN LIFE, that Poles "never had the political, cultural, or financial resources to press their case." As for (2), George Orwell noted that those who control the language control the debate. Note contemporary Newspeak, in which there is no generally-recognized term for prejudices against Poles, only Jews (anti-Semitism), no special term for a massacre of Poles, only Jews (the pogrom), and no special term in existence for the German genocide of Poles, only Jews (the Holocaust). In this review, I use the term Holocaust (sensu Universal) to include ALL victims of Germany, including Poles. As for (3), are we supposed to believe that it is by accident that American children are required, in many US states, to learn about the murder of 5-6 million Jews in appreciable detail, as if it were something higher than the sufferings of others in WWII? Finally, the fact that Jewish spokesman have forcefully opposed the teaching about the 2-3 million murdered Poles alongside that of the 5-6 million murdered Jews (except perhaps as a footnote in order to deflect the argument) should serve as crowning proof that "forgotten" is FAR more than simply a matter of which side has done a better job of communicating its sufferings to the general public.

Lukas has done a great deal of commendable work to counter the foregoing trends. This book is an anthology of Polish survivors of German Nazi persecution, a persecution that cost the lives of 2-3 million Poles, including over half of Poland's prewar intelligentsia. WARNING: The descriptions of German methods throughout this book are often graphic, and may upset the sensitive reader. The content focuses on the September 1939 German conquest and five-plus years of occupation, the unrelenting German terror, the mass executions, Gestapo methods, the hellish German concentration camps, Jan Komski's paintings of Auschwitz (pp. 58-on), the atrocious treatment of Polish forced laborers (2 million of them), Zegota, the betrayed Warsaw Uprising, and the "liberation" of Poland by a new occupant (the USSR).

The 5-year survival rate for Poles at Mauthausen Concentration Camp was only 8 out of 200 (Antoni Palmowski, p. 109), and the several-month survival rate for Poles incarcerated at Auschwitz, following the foredoomed Warsaw Uprising, was still a small 300 out of 3,000 (Stanley J. Sagan, p. 163). Such was the starvation in the work camps of Flossenburg concentration camp that Polish inmates killed and ate a German shepherd guard dog that belonged to one of the SS men (Paul Zenon Wos, p. 217).

Some seldom-discussed German barbarities are mentioned throughout this anthology, including the bleeding of Polish children for blood transfusions to wounded German soldiers (Bozenna Urbanowicz-Gilbride, p. 198), and the sterilization of Polish forced laborers (Katherine Graczyk, p. 34; Bozenna Urbanowicz-Gilbride, p. 197). No one mentions the KL Warschau extermination camp, where some 200,000 gentile Poles were gassed and cremated Auschwitz-Birkenau-style.

Various incidental details, while not intended for this purpose, help rebut common Polonophobic mischaracterizations. For example, the well-worn tale of Polish cavalry charging German tanks, originating from wartime German propaganda, is once again refuted (Notes, p. 212). And, contrary to accusations, Polish Jews were actually walled off into ghettos by the conquering Germans (Barbara Makuch, p. 85), not by the prewar Poles. The shortage of food in the countryside (Jan Porembski, p. 134), caused by German confiscations, enables the reader to understand why some Poles did not help fugitive Jews, and even betrayed or killed Jews who stole food from them. Against the claim that the German-appointed Polish police were collaborationists as such, it turns out that 90% of them were involved in the Polish Underground (Paul Zenon Wos, p. 214). The Jews of Torczyn (near Warsaw) were initially trusting of the German conquerors (Halina Martin, p. 91, 99), adding rebuttal to the argument that Polish Jews immediately feared Germans, and that this (imagined) fear is what drove the widespread Jewish-Soviet collaboration in eastern Poland that occurred in the first stages of WWII. The actions of incarcerated Poles against incarcerated Jews, simplistically blamed on anti-Semitism, must be balanced by the actions of incarcerated Jews against incarcerated Poles (Dr. Stanley Garstka, p. 26).

Finally, consider the "All Jews Were Victims of the Nazis" argument, a common rationalization for the primacy of Jewish sufferings in American social studies classes. Antoni Palmowski (p. 113) describes the fate of Jews brought to Mauthausen Concentration Camp: "Early in 1945, new transports, mostly from Auschwitz, arrived...What was unusual was that the Jews were clean, blue and gray striped prisoner uniforms....The Germans began to treat Jewish prisoners much better than before. They even increased their rations. We joked that the Germans `smelled' the end of the war, which they realized by now they could not win." It is obvious that not all known Jews were slated for extermination, even among already-apprehended Jews, and the killing of every last possible Jew was clearly NOT a priority of the dying Third Reich.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you never knew about the Holocaust, July 24, 2005

By	R. Sawyer - See all my reviews

This book is a collection of gripping accounts of what real people experienced during this horrific chapter in history. There's the story of Jan Komski, who tried to escape from a concentration camp with a friend dressed in an SS uniform but failed. . .the story of Lilka Trzcinska-Croydon, who describes in detail what it was like to be transported in a cattle car and then transformed into a camp prisoner with a number branded on her arm. . .stories of families separated, children plucked out of their daily lives and sent off into a world of terror where they were confronted with endless harsh realities, where survival was the only goal. This book brings the Holocaust to life with sometimes moving, sometimes chilling, realism and honesty. The author takes great care to let each individual voice be heard. And each story is filled with such suspense, made even greater because each story is true. Though I'd always heard about the atrocities people endured during the Holocaust, this book gives a voice to some of those people who managed to survive against incredible odds. I highly recommend it.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Through the Eyes of Those Who Lived...., November 26, 2004

By	John M. Grondelski (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

One of the most neglected aspects of Nazi Germany's barbarous murder of civilians during World War II is the fate of Polish Christians. The paradox, of course, is that Auschwitz was first set up as a concentration camp for Christian Poles. This book is a collection of reminiscences of Poles who passed through the Inferno of Nazi occupation and lived to talk about it. Many of these people eventually immigrated to the United States: I had the privilege of knowing several of them. Their stories are gripping, their accounts almost unbelievable reminders of what man can do to his fellow man. Highly recommended.