The Council to Aid Jews “Żegota” is founded

On 4 December 1942 in occupied Warsaw the Council to Aid Jews was founded under the Government Delegation for Poland, known by its conspiratorial codename “Żegota”. It replaced the Provisional Committee to Aid Jews, active since the autumn and founded by a Catholic writer and social activist. The Council brought together representatives of the Polish underground parties and of two Jewish political organisations, and it received its money mainly from the Polish government in exile. It was an institution of the Polish Underground State, not a private undertaking. Władysław Bartoszewski, one of its members, called it years later the only state institution in occupied Europe that rescued Jews from extermination.

The Council was founded at a time when the mass murder of Jews in the extermination camps was under way on Polish soil. It helped those who had managed to get out of the ghettos and were hiding on the “Aryan side”, in cities where each of them, and everyone who helped them, risked their life.

After the great deportation

From 15 October 1941, under a decree of Hans Frank, Jews in the General Government faced the death penalty for leaving the ghetto without permission. The same penalty threatened Poles who hid them or gave them help. In the summer of 1942 the Germans began liquidating the largest ghetto in occupied Europe. During the great deportation action, from 22 July to 21 September, they deported about 250,000–300,000 people from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka and murdered them there. News of the gas chambers reached Warsaw quickly, and the Polish underground passed it on to London.

On 11 August 1942, while the deportations were still under way, the Catholic Front for the Rebirth of Poland (PL) issued the leaflet “Protest!”, written by the organisation’s co-founder Zofia Kossak. The author condemned the murder of Jews and the silence of the world, and called on Poles not to become accomplices in the crime through indifference. The text was at the same time a testimony of its age. Before the war Kossak had written about Jews in a hostile spirit, and even in the leaflet she did not hide that she regarded them as adversaries of Poland. She held, however, that in the face of murder it was a Catholic’s duty to protest and to help. On its way to London the text was censored precisely because of its antisemitic wording.

The Committee and the Council

On 27 September 1942, on the initiative of Zofia Kossak-Szczucka and of Wanda Krahelska-Filipowiczowa (PL), who was linked to the PPS, the Provisional Committee to Aid Jews was founded. The conspiratorial name “Konrad Żegota” was devised by Kossak; according to the accepted explanation it alluded to the names of the conspirators in Part III of Mickiewicz’s Dziady (PL). The Committee began to pay out relief and look for lodgings, but it soon turned out that the needs exceeded the capacity of a group of volunteers.

On 4 December 1942 the Committee was transformed into the Council to Aid Jews under the Government Delegation for Poland. The change was of fundamental importance: help became a task of the underground state, with access to its money, communications and structures. The Council was joined by representatives of the PPS-WRN, the RPPS, the People’s Party, the Democratic Party, the Front for the Rebirth of Poland, the Union of Polish Syndicalists and the Polish Democratic Organisation, as well as of two Jewish organisations: the socialist Bund and the Jewish National Committee (PL). The chairman was the socialist Julian Grobelny (PL) “Trojan” of the PPS-WRN (according to his biography he took up the post in January 1943), and his deputies were Tadeusz Rek (PL) of the People’s Party and Leon Feiner of the Bund. The secretary was Adolf Berman of the JNC, and the treasurer Marek Ferdynand Arczyński (PL) of the Democratic Party. Among those taking part in the work of the presidium were Emilia Hiżowa (PL) of the Democratic Party and Władysław Bartoszewski of the Front for the Rebirth of Poland. Bartoszewski, arrested on 19 September 1940 in a round-up in Żoliborz – the same one in which Witold Pilecki let himself be caught – was a prisoner in Auschwitz until April 1941.

Kossak herself did not join the Council. She thought that help for Jews should be organised by Poles, and valued spontaneous help above organisational frameworks. She nevertheless remained in the circle of “Żegota” people and went on working for those in hiding.

On 29 December 1942 the Council, in a letter to the Government Delegate, set out its tasks: rescuing Jews from death as victims of the occupier’s extermination campaign, help with “legalisation”, that is obtaining false documents, finding housing and work, granting relief and managing funds. In the same letter it asked for a public condemnation of szmalcownictwo (blackmailing of Jews). The liaison between the Council and the Delegation was Witold Bieńkowski (PL), an activist of the Front for the Rebirth of Poland. At the beginning of 1943 he became head of the Delegation’s Jewish department, with Bartoszewski as his deputy. As early as 27 December 1942 Bieńkowski had asked the government in London to set up a centre abroad that would collect money to help Jews in Poland.

Money, papers, lodgings

The Council worked through housing, medical, regional and children’s departments, and through a network of liaison women and guardians scattered around the city. Money was the most important thing. According to some studies about 90 per cent of the funds came from the Delegation’s treasury, that is from the Polish government, with the rest provided by the Bund and the JNC; part of the government funds, in turn, came from grants by foreign Jewish organisations. Cash was dropped into the country by parachute and collected by Home Army units. Some drops were lost or fell into German hands, so the Council constantly struggled with a shortage of money.

With money from the Council’s treasury, those in hiding paid for lodgings, food and medicine, and often also ransom for blackmailers. The second foundation of survival was “Aryan” documents: identity cards, birth certificates, work certificates. The Council and the cells cooperating with it produced, by estimate, about 50,000 of them. The medical department organised medical care for people who could not go to an ordinary doctor or a hospital.

A special task was saving children. From the autumn of 1943 the children’s department was headed by Irena Sendler, an employee of the municipal welfare service who, thanks to a sanitary-column pass, had been entering the ghetto since 1940. She came into contact with “Żegota” in November 1942 and brought her group into it. Children were led out of the ghetto through the courthouse on Leszno Street, through the tram depot in Muranów, through sewers and cellars, and then placed with Polish families, in convents and in orphanages as Polish orphans, with false birth certificates. According to post-war accounts, “Żegota” and the people cooperating with it took under their care about 2,500 Jewish children; not all survived, and Sendler herself never claimed to have saved them personally. She buried the children’s index, in code, in bottles in a garden on Lekarska Street.

The Council planned to create similar centres in the provinces, but independent councils arose only in Kraków, under Stanisław Dobrowolski (PL) of the PPS-WRN, and in Lwów, where the work was led by Władysława Chomsowa (PL) of the Democratic Party.

Against blackmailers

The greatest danger to those in hiding came not only from the Germans and the police but also from szmalcowniks – people who extorted money from Jews under threat of handing them over to the occupier – and from informers. From the start “Żegota” demanded a decisive response from the underground authorities. On 18 March 1943 the Directorate of Civil Resistance (PL) announced that Poles who blackmailed or betrayed Jews were committing a grave crime against the laws of the Republic and would be punished. The underground press printed warnings, and the Council itself issued leaflets signed “Polish Independence Organisations”. From the spring of 1943 underground courts sentenced blackmailers to death, and the sentences were carried out by Home Army units. The number executed was nevertheless small – in Warsaw before the Uprising a dozen or so people, according to historians’ estimates – and szmalcowniks were hard to catch in the act.

How many people were saved

The exact number of people “Żegota” helped cannot be established. The records were kept in code, some were lost, and many of those in hiding drew on several sources of help at once. The number of people regularly receiving money from the Council grew from 200–300 at the beginning of 1943 to 3,000–4,000 in the first half of 1944 in Warsaw and its surroundings alone. The figure most often cited is about 4,000 people receiving regular material assistance. Broader estimates, which include one-off help, documents or lodgings, speak of several tens of thousands of people. Set against millions murdered, these were small numbers, and the Council’s members were aware of it. Bartoszewski said years later that the help reached thousands, not millions.

What came next

Work in the Council was dangerous. On 25 September 1943 Zofia Kossak was detained by chance by a street patrol. She was taken to Pawiak and then to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the underground got her out only in July 1944. In October 1943 the Gestapo arrested Irena Sendler. She was tortured at Gestapo headquarters on Szucha Avenue but betrayed no one, and in November “Żegota” bought her out of prison. Julian Grobelny fell into German hands at the turn of February and March 1944. They did not know who he was, so he survived, and the underground got him out of hospital. The Council’s subsequent chairmen were Roman Jabłonowski and Leon Feiner. Among those who received the Council’s help were people hidden in the “Krysia” bunker, where Emanuel Ringelblum, creator of the ghetto’s underground archive, had taken shelter.

In April 1943, when the uprising broke out in the ghetto, the Delegation’s Jewish department described the fighting in its reports, and the Council in its statements demanded arms for the Jewish population. The Council operated until the beginning of 1945. In 1963 a tree was planted in the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in honour of “Żegota”, and many of its members, including Sendler, Kossak, Bartoszewski and Grobelny, were honoured with the title of Righteous Among the Nations.

“Żegota” did not change the scale of the Holocaust, but it proved something else. In a country where helping Jews meant death for an entire family, the underground state was able to make the rescue of Jews its official task, with a budget, an index and departments, carried out jointly by Poles and Jews.