194 ZYDZIby SS guards who surrounded all the Nazi-built ghettoes. Segregation precluded
large-scale assistance. It is not impossible to find people, like Professor Jerzy
Zubrzycki of Canberra, whose lives were saved by Jews. But stories of individ-
ual gallantry, though real enough, vastly exaggerated the opportunities for
chivalry which actually existed. In a world where immediate death awaited any-
one who contravened Nazi regulations, the Nazis could always exact a measure
of co-operation from the terrified populace. The Polish slave doctor in
Auschwitz, the Polish partisan in the woods, the Polish peasant fearful of
reprisals, cannot be judged by the morality of free men in normal times, any
more than one can judge the Jewish informers who sought to ransom their lives
by denouncing their fellows, or the Jewish prostitutes who worked in S S guard-
rooms. Both Poles and Jews were victims to the Terror, and were conditioned
by it. It is perfectly true, of course, that some of the partisan bands murdered
fugitive Jews out of hand. It is also true that the Home Army failed to oppose
the construction of the Ghettos in 1939-40 or the mass deportations of 1941—3.
Yet to turn such facts into evidence of wilful neglect would seem to perpetrate a
libel as vicious as any which has been levelled against the Jews themselves. In the
nature of things, the Underground was notoriously suspicious about all
refugees, outsiders, and strangers, not only about Jews, and protected just as
many as they turned away. The Polish Underground failed to oppose not only
the actions against the Jews, but equally, until 1943, all the executions and mass
deportations of Polish civilians. In the earlier years of the war, it was simply too
weak and too disorganized to attempt anything other than local diversions.
With the one exception of the Ghetto in Lodz, which survived till August 1944,
the Final Solution was all but complete by the time the Underground was strong
enough to take action. In the meantime, the Council of Help for the Jews (RPZ),
organized by the Government-in-Exile's Delegate, arranged for tens of thou-
sands of Jews to be hidden and cared for. The survivors were all too few, but in
the circumstances, it is hard to see how it could have been otherwise.^23 (See
Chapter 20.)
The effects of the Final Solution need no elaboration. Of the 3.35 million Jews
in Poland in 1939, an estimated 369,000, or 11 per cent survived. The largest
group of survivors were those who fled or were incorporated into the USSR in
- Over 40 per cent of Polish citizens reporting to the reopened Polish
Consulate in Russia, at Kuibyshev in 1941, were Jews. Some of these, including
Menahim Begin, born at Brzesc in 1913, reached Palestine in the ranks of
General Anders's Polish army. The rest survived in Poland by hiding in bams,
cellars, and rafters, by assuming false identities or by the protection of peasants.
In 1945-6 some 200,000 Polish Jews crossed into People's Poland from the
USSR; but most of them passed through on their way to Israel and to destina-
tions further afield. A significant number were recruited into the PPR, or were
employed by the communist Security Force - thereby reviving the old spectre of
the Zydokomuna. For three years, 1945—8, an experiment was organized to cre-
ate an Autonomous Jewish District in Lower Silesia centred on the town of