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Please notice that:
UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM
will host
PROFESSOR WLADYSLAW BARTOSZEWSKI
Former Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland
who will lecture on Polish-Jewish Relations
November 21 at 7 pm.
The title of his lecture is
CONTEMPORARY TRENDS IN POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS
The lecture and the panel response will be held in either
Rubinstein or Mayerhoff theater.
For further information call: (202) 488-0427 or (202) 488-0400
***
In Israel Gutman's "Encyclopedia of the Holocaust" we read:
BARTOSZEWSKI, WLADYSLAW (b. 1922) Polish anti-Nazi who
aided Jews during the Holocaust. Bartoszewski was
imprisoned in AUSCHWITZ from September 1940 to April
1941, and from 1942 to 1945 was a member of the ARMIA
KRAJOWA (the Polish Home Army). He also belonged to
the underground organization of young Catholics, the
Front Odrodzenia Polski (Front of the rebirth of
Poland), and in September 1942 helped to set up a
provisional committee that later became the ZEGOTA
welfare organization. When the latter's permanent
council was set up, on December 4, 1942, Bartoszewski
became one of the two DELEGATURA representatives who
regularly attended Zegota's board meetings. He was
active in the underground and helped transmit to the
POLISH GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE reports on the Nazi terror
against the Poles and on the situation of the Jews. in
1963 YAD VASHEM designated him a "RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE
NATIONS."
A prolific writer and historian, Bartoszewski has
published a number of books, dealing mostly with the
history of Warsaw during the war, the Polish Jews, and
the rescue of Jews by Polish gentiles. They include
"Warsaw Death Ring, 1939-1944 (1968) and "Righteous
among Nations: How Poles Helped the Jews. 1939-1945
(1969). Bartoszewski is the president of the PEN Club
in Poland, serves as professor on the faculty of the
Catholic University of Lublin, and frequently lectures
in many countries.
Elisheva Shaul
***
Mr. Bartoszewski also took part in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Recently he
has been given an Israeli (honorary?) citizenship.
"Zegota" was an organization devoted exclusively to the helping and rescue
of Jews. It has its own carob tree in the Avenue of the Just, and its
own Yad Vashem medal.
Mordecai Paldiel, Director of the Department for the Righteous among the
Nations at Yad Vashem, writes of it:
... the Zegota organization, created by
representatives of the Polish underground to help
Jewish children flee the doomed ghettos and arrange
their reception by adoptive families. One of the
principal heroines in that endeavor was Irena Sendler
who helped smuggle out some two hundred children from
the Warsaw ghetto. She was betrayed, arrested and
condemned to death.
She was literally bought back from the Germans by the combined, frantic
efforts of the Jewish and the Polish underground, as she was the only one
who knew the names and addresses of the families sheltering the Jewish
children, who needed continued financial assistance, papers, and other help
from Zegota. (This lovely, courageous woman deserves a special, longer
mention. She was still alive only a couple of years ago. I could write more
about her if anybody was interested.)
Members of Zegota in other regions of Poland also
helped Jews flee the ghettos or cross the Slovakian
border.
Tadeusz K. Gierymski
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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