The Home Army's assistance to the Jewish Combat Organization on the eve of the uprising was minimal. This modest scale stemmed not only from the limited military capabilities of the Polish underground, but also from the prejudices of its leadership and conflicting goals. As a result, after the war, veterans of the Jewish underground repeatedly accused the Home Army of indifference and anti-Semitism. This led to confrontations between the two sides, and not just in the newspapers.
On July 6, 1961, the spacious interior of Turin's Palazzo Madama, former seat of the Senate of the Kingdom of Italy, was swarming with guests. That day marked the beginning of the Fourth International Conference of the Resistance Movement. The event was organized by the Commission for Communications and Coordination of the Resistance Movement, which brought together associations of veterans of the anti-German World War II underground from Western Europe and Israel. Exceptionally, at the initiative of the association's Italian members, a delegation from the Home Army, including its former Commander-in-Chief, General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski , and his deputy, General Tadeusz Pełczyński , was also invited to the Piedmontese capital.
The next day, after the ceremonial inauguration, the veterans' meeting moved to a conference room in the basement of the Palazzo del Lavaro, a brand-new glass and concrete building, the jewel of the ongoing Expo 61 exhibition. The schedule of presentations and panels, which included "Nazi hunter" Szymon Wisenthal, was disrupted early on by an angry speech from a representative of the Israeli delegation. Stefan Grajek , one of the founders of the Jewish Combat Organization in the Warsaw Ghetto, stated from the podium that he was "painfully astonished" upon seeing the Home Army representatives. He then hurled further accusations at the Polish underground. He said, among other things, that the Home Army had refused to supply weapons to Jewish insurgents, leaving many of them fighting for an honorable death empty-handed. He thundered that Polish partisan groups organized "hunts" in the forests for Jewish fighters and escapees from the ghettos, evidence of which can be found "in hundreds of accounts and diaries."
General Bór-Komorowski immediately responded to Grajek's argument. He began by emphasizing that "the Home Army (AK) helped Jews." "Before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Home Army (AK) supplied Jewish insurgents with weapons and taught them how to make grenades. When the insurgents from the Warsaw Ghetto asked the Warsaw Home Army commander for help, he sent three units to attack enemy rear lines. Furthermore, the Home Army (AK) members led 400 escapees from the ghetto to the forests near Warsaw and cared for them there. It is also a fact, as Bór-Komorowski (editor) said, that many soldiers of the underground army died defending Jews," retorted the former Home Army Commander, quoted by the monthly "Résistance" in a report from Turin.
The article went on to say that "the dispute will be resolved when both sides agree to a special commission examining the facts in light of the evidence presented by the Israeli side and General Bór-Komorowski." Ultimately, however, this idea was abandoned.
Grajek's speech was intensely emotional. It was filled with a painful disappointment that the passing years had not lessened in the slightest. To understand the implications, we must go back to the autumn of 1942, when the ŻOB and the Home Army established contact.
"Jurek's" Mission
The armed underground in the Warsaw Ghetto began to organize itself in earnest only after the "great action" of expulsion, when a total of nearly 60 Jews remained in the district, about one-seventh of its peak population. In October 1942, thanks to the efforts of Dror leader Yitzhak "Antek" Cukierman , all the major political groups operating within the wall, except for the revisionists from Betar, were brought under the banner of the Jewish Combat Organization. Among these, groups with a Zionist or socialist profile clearly dominated (Hashomer Hatzair, Poale Zion Left, "Akiba," Dror, Bund), but activists of the communist and pro-Soviet Polish Workers' Party also joined the initiative. Its commander was 24-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz , codename "Malachi" ("Little Angel").
The ŻOB's primary goal was to fight the Germans if the "liquidation" operation in the ghetto were resumed and deportations began again. Unsure when this might occur, they sought to obtain weapons and external support as quickly as possible. Therefore, they attempted to establish cooperation with the Home Army, the most powerful underground military organization on the other side of the wall.
Selected for this mission was 25-year-old Arie "Jurek" Wilner , a Hashomer Hatzair activist who had arrived in Warsaw from Vilnius in early 1942. In October of that same year, he found himself on the "Aryan" side. Using his connections in Polish scouting circles – Aleksander Kamiński, editor-in-chief of the "Information Bulletin," Tadeusz Kwaśniewski, and Irena Adamowicz – he managed to contact Henryk Woliński, nom de guerre "Wacław," head of the Jewish Department of the Home Army Headquarters' Office of Information and Propaganda.
The latter, a 41-year-old lawyer, proved to be a devoted ŻOB spokesman within the Home Army leadership. As early as November 3rd, he informed his superiors that the ghetto conspirators were ready to submit to the Underground State and fight both within the ghettos and in partisan units. He argued that accepting this proposal would clearly demonstrate "the Polish stance on the German extermination campaign against Jews as citizens of the Polish State." He pointed out that this could be "a fact of significant political significance" as the post-war order was being shaped. He also assured them that the subordination of Jewish forces would allow the Home Army to free them from the orbit of the pro-Soviet Polish Workers' Party (PPR).
Initially, the Jews might have thought the alliance had a bright future ahead of it. In a letter to the ghetto conspirators dated November 11, the Commander-in-Chief of the Home Army, General Stefan "Grot" Rowecki , praised their readiness to fight and recommended that they organize into combat Fridays. However, these favorable declarations were initially met with only symbolic support.
Prejudices and conflicting interests
In his report from the turn of 1944 and 1945, "Wacław" wrote that only "after persistent requests" did Rowecki agree to issue weapons to the ŻOB members. In early December 1942, a batch of 10 pistols with a small amount of ammunition was delivered. As Woliński and Cukierman agreed, they were in poor technical condition – some were completely unusable.
"Grot" immediately reported the whole matter to London. "I gave them some pistols as a test, but I'm not sure they'll even use them. I won't give them any more weapons because, as you know, we don't have any ourselves, we're waiting for them to be sent," he cabled, clearly irritated by the Jewish conspirators' requests.
In fact, the Warsaw District arsenal in November 1942 consisted of a mere 39 heavy machine guns, 54 light machine guns, and 1069 rifles. A desperately small number for an organization preparing for a general uprising. However, as Dr. Dariusz Libionka emphasizes in his now classic article "ZWZ-AK i Delegatura Rządu RP wobec exterminacji Żydów Polskich," this was not the main reason for "transferring a symbolic number of weapons to the ŻOB."
According to the researcher, the Underground State leadership's distance and distrust of their Jewish fellow citizens stemmed from deeply ingrained prejudices. They were believed to lack identification with the Polish Republic and to have an even "anti-Polish attitude." They were accused of a complete lack of military aptitude and indifference to military service (this was supported by facts, as they were among the minorities most frequently punished for evading military service). In the eyes of the Home Army, this stereotype was somewhat confirmed by the behavior of the Jewish population during Operation Reinhardt, when ghetto residents "went like sheep to the slaughter," offering no resistance whatsoever to the occupiers. No questions were asked as to why this happened. Were Jews, confined in ghettos for months, starved, and operating on the brink of subsistence, even capable of greater, organized resistance en masse ? With the lives of defenseless children, women, and the elderly at stake, did they see armed resistance as a possible strategy?
Moreover, the living myth of Jewish communism cast a shadow over the accounts of the two underground organizations. A significant portion of the Home Army leadership believed that Jews were "natural" allies of the communists and supported the Soviets. They were partially right, as in the publications of the parties that later formed the ŻOB, Libionka wrote, "enthusiasm for the USSR often coexisted with indifference to the fate of Poland." Moreover, their beliefs were also confirmed by reports from the field, which reported the formation of Jewish armed partisan groups leaning toward the communists, as well as reports, now difficult to verify, of the activity of an NKVD agent in the Warsaw Ghetto. However, the most important perspective on the whole matter is Rowecki's own. In early 1942, he reported directly to London that the closed district was "a center of communist activity and a haven for Soviet emissaries."
Finally, a fundamental conflict of military objectives stood in the way of expanding Polish-Jewish cooperation. The ŻOB wanted to fight the ghetto at all costs, a fight that was doomed from the start. Meanwhile, the Home Army (AK) did not intend to confront the occupiers in Warsaw at all – not even during the planned general uprising (the possibility of "pushing out" the German rearguard retreating from the city was considered). Not to mention that it lacked the necessary forces and resources.
Breakthrough without breakthrough
A turning point in ŻOB's relationship with the Home Army was the so-called "January Self-Defense." From January 18th to 21st, 1943, Jewish fighters faced the Germans, who were launching another round of deportations from the ghetto. For the ŻOB members, this marked a psychological turning point – they managed to halt the occupiers' operation, seize their weapons, and inflict casualties. The Home Army, in turn, saw that the claims of the conspirators behind the wall were not without foundation.
As a result, at the end of January – most likely through the wall from the side of Okopowa Street – the Home Army handed over 50 pistols with ammunition to the militants, as well as 80 kg of materials for making "Molotov cocktails" and an unknown number of defensive grenades.
This was likely both the first and last large consignment of weapons transferred by the Home Army to the ghetto. It is the only one mentioned in credible Polish and Jewish accounts.
It is no wonder then that a certain "Kalacki" (identified as ŻOB commander Mordechai Anielewicz) wrote a letter on March 13, 1943, to the decision-makers of the Polish underground with a dramatic appeal for weapons supplies:
"In the coming days, you will most likely witness the end of the history of Warsaw Jews. Are we ready (to fight – ed.)? (...) We only have no more than 10 rounds for each gun. This is a catastrophic situation. Please convey to the authorities on our behalf that if large-scale aid does not arrive quickly, we will consider them indifferent to the fate of Warsaw Jews. Handing over weapons without the necessary ammunition is a cynical mockery of our fate and confirms our suspicions that the poison of anti-Semitism permeates the Polish elites, despite the tragic and cruel experiences of the last three years."
If this letter is authentic, and some researchers doubt it, it is uncertain whether it reached its intended recipients. What is known is that by the time it was likely written, the sole liaison between the ŻOB and the Home Army, Wilner, was already in the hands of the Gestapo. He was arrested on March 6th while attempting to obtain another shipment of weapons. As a result, contact between the two organizations was effectively severed for over a month. Only in early April was he replaced on the "Aryan" side of the wall by "Antek" Cukierman. Time has shown that these communication breakdowns occurred at the climax of the uprising. Moreover, they could not have influenced its course in any way.
Painful misunderstanding and prejudice
When fighting broke out in the ghetto, the Home Army limited itself to conducting a few small operations within its walls, which ended in complete failure. Furthermore, when the fighters attempted to evacuate the fighting area through the sewers in early May, they did not receive the expected support from the Underground State – primarily aided by Władysław Gaik, a member of the People's Guard, codename "Krzaczek ." Finally, the Home Army did not provide promised aid to approximately 50 ŻOB fighters who escaped the ghetto's massacre and took refuge near Łomianki. Therefore, most of them were temporarily incorporated into communist partisans operating in the Wyszków forests.
On the one hand, the Home Army's attitude is partially understandable – they didn't see the ŻOB members as trustworthy partners, and what's more, they had conflicting goals. However, Grajek's Turin charge is hardly surprising. He didn't have the full picture. But if the symbolic weapons deliveries before the uprising couldn't have been higher, at least after the uprising's collapse, the Polish underground should have extended a helping hand to them – helping them escape the burning district, providing shelter in the forests. Bór-Komorowski's figure of "400 ghetto escapees" for whom the Home Army supposedly provided care was, it seems, merely a desperate attempt to defend the good name of the Polish underground on an international forum.
Although over 60 years have passed since the confrontation in Turin, the chapter of Polish-Jewish relations discussed above remains an arena of misunderstandings, unfortunately invariably exploited by politicians on both sides.
Bibliography
A. Cukierman – "Excess of Memory. Those Seven Years. Memories 1939-46", Warsaw 2020
D. Libionka – "ZWZ-AK and the Government Delegation of the Republic of Poland towards the extermination of Polish Jews" in: Poles and Jews under German occupation 1939–1945. Studies and materials, Warsaw 2006
“Resistance”, no. 41-42, July-August 1961, Brussels
ŻOB appeal to the Polish underground for: "Documents on the Holocaust, Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and Austria, Poland and the Soviet Union", Jerusalem 1981
Statement by Stefan Grajek from Turin in: Study of the Polish Underground State, Col. Tadeusz Bora-Komorowski, file 42
I. Gutman – “The Jews of Warsaw, 1939-1943: Ghetto, Underground, Revolt”, Bloomington, 1982
M. Rodak – "Myth and reality. Criminality of persons of Jewish nationality in the Second Polish Republic. The case of the Lublin Voivodeship", Warsaw 2012
Account by Colonel Janusz Bokszczanin in: Adam Komorowski Collection, KARTA Centre Archives
