June 25


GERMANY:

The other victims of WWII


Nearly 2 million Polish Christians were killed by the Nazis -- new books
and stories from survivors reveal that time of terror


Anna Alicja Porebska, 17, was forced into the metal-lined gas chamber at
Auschwitz expecting to die.

Then a guard whispered something she never forgot: ``You are not going to
be killed because we have no gas available.''

Instead, Porebska, now 77 and living in Miami, was sent to another
concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, and to a German farm as a slave laborer
-- one of the few Polish Christian prisoners who lived to be liberated by
the Allies at the end of World War II.

Now, some 60 years after the war's end, several books are documenting the
extent of the Christian Polish persecution. The books are based on new
information obtained from Soviet records, long suppressed until Poland
freed itself from Communist rule in 1989. Many Poles, too, are beginning
to talk openly about atrocities that both the Germans and Soviets
committed during the war on the Polish people.

Six million Poles were killed during World War II -- nearly 3 million
Jews, 3 million Christians, says Richard C. Lukas in Forgotten Survivors:
Polish Christians Remember the Nazi Occupation ($29.95, University Press
of Kansas).

Nearly 90 percent of Poland's prewar Jewish population was killed during
the Holocaust. Roughly 10 percent of the Christian population perished.

Of the 3 million Polish Christians who died, 1.8 million to 1.9 million
were murdered by the Nazis, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum estimates.
The remaining were killed either by the Soviets -- who were originally on
Germany's side -- or they were Polish troops who died in battle, Lukas
says.

The British historian Norman Davies recently wrote about the 63-day Warsaw
Uprising in 1944. During the siege, more than 200,000 Polish Christians
died and hundreds of thousands were taken to labor or concentration camps.

It is ''one of the great tragedies of the 20th century. It is a story that
has never been properly told,'' Davies writes in his book, Rising '44: The
Battle for Warsaw (Viking, $32.95), published within the last year.

Davies himself has been controversial. Some Holocaust scholars say he has
minimized anti-Semitism in Poland and downplayed the Jews' suffering.

Michael Berenbaum, professor at the University of Judaism in Los Angeles
and former director of research at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum,
says that Polish Christians certainly suffered during World War II. The
distinction is that the Nazis deliberately planned to murder all Jews;
they viewed Polish Christians as slave laborers, he says.

The Germans did end up killing many Polish Christians during the war,
however, says Berenbaum, who a decade ago wrote a book, A Mosaic of
Victims: Non-Jews Persecuted and Murdered by the Nazis.

''Every single [Polish] family has stories of tragedy,'' says Beata Paszyc
of the Miami-based American Institute of Polish Culture. Her great-uncle
survived Auschwitz.

HITLER'S GOALS

Poland -- and its people -- were doomed from the start. Hitler wanted more
land for Germans. He considered Poles untermenschen or subhuman Slavs. He
planned for the Poles who weren't executed to become slave laborers,
according to German war-planning documents recovered after the war.

Even before the war, Nazi party thugs sang, ''If Polish blood spurts from
the knife, then so much the better,'' Alexander B. Rossino writes in his
book, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology and Atrocity.

The Nazis, Lukas says, were especially determined to kill Poland's
educated, killing nearly half the country's doctors and professors, 57
percent of attorneys and a quarter of the Catholic clergy.

''The Germans killed their Polish victims in a variety of ways --
shooting, gassing, hanging, torture, hard labor, lethal injections,
beatings and starvation,'' writes Lukas, who taught at the University of
South Florida.

Polish Christians had a better chance of surviving than Polish Jews.
Hitler ordered all Jews exterminated -- no exceptions. In fact, nearly all
of Poland's approximately 3.5 million Jews were killed during the war.

Some Polish Christians were anti-Semitic and turned Jewish neighbors over
to the Nazis, says Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, vice president of the New
York-based CLAL, the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

''They were victims of the Holocaust -- and victimizers,'' he says of the
Polish Christians.

Polish resistance fighters liberated Jews at the Gesiwka concentration
camp in 1944 and two-thirds of Catholic nuns' communities in Poland hid
Jewish children and adults.

''No other sector was so ready to help those persecuted by the Germans . .
. . This attitude, unanimous and general, deserves special recognition and
respect,'' Jewish historian Szymon Datner says in Forgotten Survivors.

The late Rev. Jan Januszewski, a popular priest at St. Justin the Martyr
in Key Largo, spent time in the Dachau concentration camp. He says he
shoveled snow into the cart of a half-starved Jewish man so the worker
wouldn't be put to death for failing to do his job.

''I was arrested and sent to Dachau because I was a Polish priest,'' he
told Lukas before he died in 1987. ''The Germans didn't even accuse me of
anything. I was just lined up with other priests, arrested and sent
away,'' Januszewski said.

Porebska, 77, the Pole who escaped death because of a gas shortage and now
lives near the Miami River, recalls other near misses with her family --
the time a German officer ``put a gun to my head.''

Her brother, Jan Porembski, 71, who lives in Hollywood and spells his name
differently, tells of getting grazed in the chest twice by bullets while
running from a street battle in Warsaw. He also recalls sleeping in a
straw-filled bathtub and being awakened for a farewell kiss on the top of
his head from his father, who was to be taken away by the Gestapo, never
to be seen again.

Porebska, the sister, remembers the rough treatment at Bergen-Belsen.
Their mother, forced to dig graves, got an infected toe. ''A doctor opened
the toe with a razor blade. She screamed with pain, he slapped her face,''
Porebska says.

But the threesome got lucky. There were rumors the British were going to
liberate the camp, and as relatively healthy laborers, the three were to
be sent elsewhere to work. That's when Porebska impressed a German
bureaucrat with her fluent German.

''I'm not sending you to Hamburg where there is a lot of [Allied]
bombings,'' Porebska remembers the woman telling her. Instead they were
sent to a farm in north Germany.

After their liberation, Porebska and her mother and brother lived in a
displaced persons' camp until emigrating to England in 1949, then moving
to the United States in 1958.

In 1976, their mother decided to live the last years of her life in
Poland. Porembski remembers seeing her off:

''When my father kissed me for the last time, I thought I would see him
again,'' he told Lukas. ``This time when my mother and I said good-bye, we
both knew it would very likely be the last time we would see each other.''

(source: Miami Herald)