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Polish Jews were the primary victims of the German Nazi-organized Holocaust. Throughout the German occupation of Poland, many Poles risked their own lives – and the lives of their families – to rescue Jews from the Nazis. Grouped by nationality, Poles represent the biggest number of people who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.〔〔 To date, Christian Poles have been awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel – more than those of any other nation.〔 The Armia Krajowa (Polish resistance) alerted the world to the Holocaust, notably with the reports of Witold Pilecki and Jan Karski. The Polish government in exile and the Polish Secret State asked for American and British help to stop the Holocaust, to no avail. Some estimates put the number of Poles involved in rescue at up to 3 million, and credit Poles with saving up to around 450,000 Jews from certain death.〔 The rescue efforts were aided by one of the largest anti-Nazi resistance movements in Europe, the Polish Underground State and its military arm, the Armia Krajowa. Supported by the Polish government in exile, these organizations operated special units dedicated to helping Jews; of those, the most notable was Żegota Council based in Warsaw with branches in Kraków, Wilno and Lwów.〔 Polish citizens were hampered by the most extreme conditions in all of German-occupied Europe. Occupied Poland was the only territory where the Germans decreed that any kind of help for Jews was punishable by death for the helper and their entire family. Of the estimated 3 million non-Jewish Poles killed in World War II, up to 50,000 were executed by Nazi Germany solely as penalty for saving Jews.〔 After the War most of this information was suppressed by the Soviet-installed satellite regime in an attempt to discredit Polish prewar society and its wartime government as reactionary.〔 ==Background== (詳細はJewish people lived in Poland – ten percent of the general population of some 33 million. Poland was the center of the European Jewish world.〔 The Second World War began with the Nazi German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939; and, on September 17, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, the Soviet Union attacked Poland from the east. By October 1939, the Second Polish Republic was divided between the two totalitarian powers, with Nazi Germany occupying western and central Poland. The Germans regarded Poles as "sub-human" and Polish Jews somewhere beneath that category, treating both groups with extreme and brutal harshness. One aspect of German policy in conquered Poland was to prevent its ethnically diverse population from uniting against Germany.〔〔 The Nazi plan for Polish Jews was one of concentration, isolation, and eventually total annihilation in what is now known as the Holocaust or ''Shoa''. Nazi plans for the Polish Catholic majority focused on the murder or suppression of political, religious, and intellectual leaders as well as the Germanization of the annexed lands which included a program to resettle Germans from the Baltic and other regions onto farms, ventures and homes formerly owned by Poles and Jews. The response of the Polish majority to the Jewish Holocaust covered an extremely wide spectrum, often ranging from acts of altruism at the risk of endangering their own and their families’ lives, through compassion, to passivity, indifference, and outright collaboration.〔 Polish rescuers also faced threats from unsympathetic neighbours, the Volksdeutsche,〔 and the ethnic Ukrainian pro-Nazis,〔 as well as blackmailers called szmalcowniks and (as in Warsaw) from Jewish collaborators such as Żagiew or Group 13. There were cases of denunciation or even participation in massacres of Jewish inhabitants. The guidelines for such massacres were formulated by Reinhard Heydrich,〔 who ordered his chiefs to induce anti-Jewish pogroms on territories newly occupied by the German forces.〔〔 Statistics of the Israeli War Crimes Commission indicate that less than a tenth of 1 per cent of Poles collaborated with the Nazis.〔 Non–Jewish Poles provided assistance to Jews in organized fashion as well as through varying degrees of individual efforts. Many Poles offered food to Polish Jews and left food in places Jews would pass on their way to forced labour. Others directed Jewswho managed to escape from the ghettosto people who could help them. Some sheltered Jews for only one or a few nights, others assumed full responsibility for the Jews' survival, well aware that the Nazis punished those who helped Jews by summary killings. A special role fell to the Polish medical doctors who alone saved thousands of Jews through their subversive practise. For example, Dr. Eugeniusz Łazowski, known as Polish 'Schindler', saved 8,000 Polish Jews from deportation to death camps, by faking an epidemic of typhus in the town of Rozwadów.〔〔 Free medicine was given out in the Kraków Ghetto by Tadeusz Pankiewicz saving unspecified number of Jews.〔 Rudolf Weigl employed and protected Jews in his Institute in Lwów. His vaccines were smuggled into the local ghetto as well as the ghetto in Warsaw saving countless lives.〔 It is mostly those who took full responsibility who qualify for the title of the Righteous Among the Nations.〔 To date, a total of 6,066 Poles have been officially recognized by Israel as the Polish Righteous among the Nations for their efforts in rescuing Polish Jews during the Holocaust, making Poland the country with the highest number of Righteous in the world.〔〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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