 ZEGOTA saved 50000 Jews from Holocaust 3/3
from YouTube :: Tag // second life
June 18, 2008
ZEGOTA-Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland(1939-1945). ZEGOTA (in Polish:ŻEGOTA) was the cryptonym for the clandestine underground organization in German-Nazi- occupied Poland(1939-1945) that provide assistance to the Jewish people. World War2- 1939-1945. Would you risk your own life and your family's to save another human being? Zbigniew Brzezinski writes "ZEGOTA is the story of extraordinary heroism...tantamount to 'Schindler's List' multiplied a hundred-fold." ZEGOTA was the only such organization in German-occupied EUROPE during the Holocaust. More than 500 towns and villages were burned, over 16 thousand persons, mostly Polish Christians, were killed in 714 mass executions of which 60% were carried out by the Wehrmacht (German army) and 40% by the SS and Gestapo. In Bydgoszcz the first victims were boy scouts from 12 to 16 years old, shot in the marketplace. All this happened in the first eight weeks of the war. See Richard C. Lucas, The Forgotten Holocaust; The Poles under German Occupation. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky [c1986]. Waclaw Bielawski, from the Main Commission for Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation, issued a list of 1,181 names of Poles who had been killed for helping Jews during World War II. In Western Europe the automatic death sentence for help rendered to Jews did not exist and applying it to a whole family or neighbors was unthinkable. The reign of terror that organized in German-occupied Poland(1939-1945) was completely isolated, and unimaginable in the West. Germans selected Poland as the only country where aiding a Jew, be it only to give him a slice of bread, was immediately punished by death. Failure to inform on a neighbor hiding Jews meant deportation to a GERMAN NAZI Concentration and Extermination Camp(1939-1945) AUSCHWITZ, BUCHENWALD, DACHAU, BERGEN BELSEN, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, MAUTHAUSEN, Neuengamme, GROSS-ROSEN, SZUCHA, PAWIAK, PALMIRY. As early as 1941, a representative of the Polish government-in-exile in London suggested to the British authorities that they bomb Auschwitz. The British rejected such a solution. As a courier for the Polish Underground State, Jan Karski (Kozielecki) reached the West with accounts of the situation in German-occupied territory. During his second mission in the autumn of 1942, he delivered a report on the situation of the Jews in German-occupied Poland and the way they were being murdered, along with a plea for help, to representatives of the Polish government-in-exile and then to British and American politicians (including the US president). Karski had obtained his information from representatives of underground Jewish organizations. He entered the Warsaw ghetto himself on two occasions, and managed to reach a German camp in Izbica Lubelska, where he witnessed Jews being transported to their deaths at the German extermination camp in Bełżec. Similarly, international Jewish organizations asked the Allies in 1944 to destroy the Auschwitz-Birkenau death apparatus, to no avail. American and British strategists regarded defeating the Third Reich and bombing industrial targets in Germany as higher priorities. The Americans also referred to the inadmissibility of using military force for non-military purposes. A special section of ŻEGOTA was organized to get Jewish children out of the German Warsaw Ghetto after locating homes for them. The Jewish children also required false documents and stories to match. If they were old enough, they had to memorize new identities. ŻEGOTA rescued about 2,500 Jewish children in the city of Warsaw. IRENA SENDLEROWA (de domo: IRENA KRZYŻANOWSKA) (also IRENA SENDLER) played a leading role in the rescue and hiding of Jewish children. LIFE IN A JAR. ZEGOTA (ŻEGOTA) distributed about 50,000 sets of false identification documents that were provided by secret forgery units of the underground. The Polish Army never surrendered to the Germans and no Armistice was ever signed. The Poles continued to fight during World War II, as insurgents or illegal combatants in the Polish Home Army and major battles and campaigns in which Polish regular forces took part: Invasion of Poland (1939), Battle of Mokra, Battle of the Bzura River, Battle of Tomaszów Lubelski, Battle of Kock (1939), Battle of Warsaw (1939), British campaign in Norway (Battle of Narvik), French Campaign, Battle of Britain, Battle of the Atlantic, Battle of Tobruk, Operation Jubilee (Battle of Dieppe), Battle of Lenino, Battle of Normandy (D-Day), Battle of Monte Cassino, Battle of Falaise, Operation Market Garden (Battle of Arnhem: "A Bridge Too Far"), Battle of Ancona, Battle of Bologna, Battle of Berlin- 1945, Prague Offensive. Polish underground actions: Operation Tempest (Burza), Operation Ostra Brama, Lwów Uprising, Warsaw Uprising- 1944. Righteous Among the Nations: POLAND-6066-more than from any other German Nazi-occupied country. Total Persons- 22,211 Author: pulaskikosciuszko Keywords: zegota Żegota holocaust sendler kossak zygota karski slawik poland catholic church eli wallach churchil roosvelt rescuer Added: June 18, 2008
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