With so much hostility on offer, it’s good to remember those who stood up for the Jews, even at risk to themselves, in much darker times. I was thus happy to come across Georgia Gilholy’s review of Roger Moorhouse’s The Forgers, which tells the story of a massive operation to rescue Jews from the Shoah:
The Polish ambassador Aleksander Ładoś, working from his picturesque Swiss embassy, spearheaded a network of “pious dishonesty” that forged identity papers for Latin American countries and then smuggled them into Nazi-occupied Europe. We do not know how many souls escaped the Third Reich’s death machine by using the more than 10,000 passports forged by Ładoś’s Polish network—Moorhouse concedes that many who obtained one did not survive—but some estimates put the number between two and three thousand.
Against this apocalyptic backdrop, unlikely heroes emerged. Zofia Kossak-Szczucka, a right-wing Catholic novelist who had long complained that Jews were a socioeconomic scourge Poles must encourage to emigrate, became one of their fiercest defenders, co-founding two underground organizations that helped Jews flee the Nazi genocide. For this she was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1943. “The world looks upon this murder, more horrible than anything else history has ever seen, and stays silent,” she lamented. “Whoever is silent witnessing murder becomes a partner to it.” There is no doubt, writes Moorhouse, that this otherwise unpleasant woman had risked her life in the name of “Christian civilization and culture, love of fellow man and humanity.”
Indeed, Kossak was one of pre-World War II Poland’s most prominent anti-Semites. She herself admitted that the Final Solution, in her view, served Poland’s national goals—but that ultimately her religious and moral commitments had to trump national loyalty. Perhaps some other people will likewise surprise us in the days and weeks to come.
Read more on First Things: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2023/10/polands-pious-forgers