Content area
Full Text
WHEN GERMANY INVADED POLAND ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1939, Poland's population, extrapolated from the last pre-War census of 1931, was approximately 33,000,000. The census distinguished the "nationalities" of those who were counted-identifying Ukrainians, Germans, Byelorussians, and Jews in addition to the majority Poles. On this count, about 3,300,000 or 10% of the populace overall were noted as Jewish. This represented a higher percentage of a national population than existed anywhere at the time except for the special case of Mandate Palestine; the raw number by itself represented the largest Jewish community in the world other than that found in the United States.
By sharp contrast: Less than six years later, when Germany surrendered to the Allied forces in May, 1945, 50,000 Jews remained in Poland. By 1946, that number had risen to about 250,000, mainly through the return of Polish Jewish survivors from other countries. Allowing also for other survivors who did not return to Poland, the number of Polish Jews killed in the "Final Solution" as the Nazis applied it in Poland still amounts on most estimates to about 3,000,000, that is, to about 90% of the pre-War Polish Jewish community-and fully half of the figure commonly accepted of 6,000,000 Jewish dead at the hands of the Nazis. In order to accomplish this, the Nazi regime began in Fall, 1941, to construct and set in operation-together with other concentration and "labor" camps-six "death camps" within Poland's boundaries; these were meant to serve as killing factories, with the victims murdered in a process closely resembling an assembly line, mainly by gassing. In addition to the substantial percentage of the Polish Jews killed in these centers, moreover, more than a million non-Polish Jews were killed in them, "resettled" there by the Nazis from other countries they had occupied in Western and Eastern Europe, thus bringing the total number of Jewish victims on Polish soil to more than 4,000,000.
Beyond the record of individual murder so radically multiplied in this process, two other and more general consequences are notable. One of these is that, with this destruction, the centuries-old and vibrant Jewish presence in Poland effectively vanished: a thrivingcommunity disappeared. And secondly, the death camps in Poland and their names (Germanized or not)-Auschwitz (Oswiecim), Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor,...