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| Unsung Hero | |
| 2004-01-28 | |
| The exact number of Jews saved by Henryk Sławik is hard to specify today: certainly in the thousands. Two books concerning the memory of a man whose name remained on the communist index for half a century were published in Poland in January. "If he had better PR, the world would admire Sławik and not Schindler," said a foreign diplomat during the Warsaw promotion of the new book by Elżbieta Isakiewicz entitled Red Pencil. About a Pole Who Saved Thousands of Jews. An evening promoting the book written by former ambassador of Poland to Hungary, Grzegorz Łubczyk, was organized on the previous day. The two books published nearly simultaneously break 60 years of silence about Sławik. Incidental meeting Sławik found himself in Hungary in late autumn of 1939 as one of over 100,000 Poles who, following the appeal of Marshall Rydz-Śmigły, crossed the border to hide from the Nazis in Hungary. Hungarian authorities promised the Polish command to respect international law concerning refugees, both civil and military. Hungary was meant to be only a stop on their way to France where Polish troops were being regrouped anew. Who knows what the future of many of those Poles would have been were it not for an incidental meeting between Sławik and Jozsef Antall during one of the first inspections the latter was carrying out in Polish refugee camps, representing the Hungarian ministry of foreign affairs. Through the end of the war, Hungary, formally allied with the Third Reich, strove to implement an independent policy unofficially supporting Poles. Antall (whose son became the prime minister of Hungary in the late 1990s) suggested that Sławik become the leader of the Polish-Hungarian Civic Committee for Relief to Refugees. It was then that their close cooperation began. Sławik quickly obtained plenipotentiary full powers from the Polish Government in Exile (based first in France and later in London), thus becoming one of the official representatives of the Polish state in Budapest. The number of Polish citizens within the territory of Hungary during World War II changed from over 100,000 in the period directly following the September 1939 campaign, to tens of thousands towards the end of the war. At least one in every ten refugees was a Polish Jew. As Isakiewicz writes in her book, after the war Antall admitted that his office in the ministry of foreign affairs had registered about 14,000 false Catholic documents for Jewish refugees. "Even if we assume that this number also incorporates Jews from other occupied countries, it undoubtedly refers to Jews from Poland to the greatest extent. All those Nazi documents were first confirmed in Sławik's Civic Committee." Conspiracy of silence This is how Isakiewicz, author of the feature elements incorporating Red Pencil and journalist of Gazeta Polska weekly, describes the beginnings of her work on the book in its introduction: "It was late autumn of 2002 when Joanna Brańska, head of the Society for Polish-Israeli Friendship, invited me to a meeting devoted to a Pole who was saving Polish Jews in Budapest during the war. I had no idea who Henryk Sławik was." She decided to do some research. It turned out that he was not known outside of a small group of experts. Then she decided to describe Sławik's story herself. "Leaving Cafe Ejlat I felt ashamed. I thought, how is that possible that as a Pole I haven't heard about him?" Isakiewicz told the Voice. A pre-war independence activist and member of the anti-communist faction of the Polish Socialist Party, who during World War II took care of Polish refugees in Hungary implementing the policy of the legal Polish government in exile, could not be a hero in a Soviet-dominated state. The new authorities, brought to Poland on tanks bearing red stars, had their revenge not only on the living leaders of the Polish Underground (the model "Trial of the 16" in Moscow), but also on memory of non-communist heroes who died before the end of the war. Promoting a Pole who saved thousands of Jews from dying in German concentration camps was also very inconvenient for Stalin in the first years after the war. He had very specific reasons for spreading the image of Poland as a country filled with anti-Semitism across the world. For example, he wanted to discredit the motion for the Katyń massacre-the slaughter of Polish officers committed by the NKVD in 1940-to be judged by the Tribunal in Nuremberg. No exception, The first person responsible for saving Sławik from oblivion is one of the Jews saved by him and his close cooperative from the Committee. Henryk Zvi Zimmermann, pretending to be a Pole in Budapest, was the person who put Sławik in contact with Jewish refugees, having obtained wide powers from the Committee's head. He recalls: "Since then [Zimmermann began his cooperation with Sławik's Committee having arrived in Hungary in late 1943] I was myself receiving all refugees from Poland who reached Budapest. They came, filled in forms, and I confirmed them with a stamp. In practice, Sławik relied on me totally by not signing the documents personally. Every Jew without exception would become 'a Catholic' then." Born in 1913 in Skała on Zbrucz River, a graduate of the law department at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, after the war Zimmermann became one of the dignitaries of the Israeli state (mayor of Haifa in the late 1940s, for many years a Kneset deputy and its deputy chairman, at the turn of the 1970s ambassador of Israel to New Zealand). Having finished his political and diplomatic career, Zimmermann decided to visit Poland in order to pay back the debt he once incurred. He could not believe when in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs he was told that they had never heard of Sławik. "But he represented the Polish authorities in Budapest," he wondered, forgetting that the communists re-wrote history in their own way. He was more successful in Budapest. He managed to find Antall's daughter. She told him that Sławik did not survive to see the end of the war-he was arrested and executed by the Germans when they entered Hungary in 1944 (Sławik's wife Jadwiga was arrested and sent to the largest concentration camp for women, in Ravensbrück; she managed to survive). Antall was arrested as well. He survived only because Sławik denied his participation in the conspiracy. The trail was lost there again. It was not resumed until 1988 when the Cracow Przekrój weekly published the following announcement: "Henryk Zimmermann from Israel is searching for Mr. Sławik, former Polish consul in Budapest in the years 1943-44 who helped to save numerous Poles and Jews. Please send all information to..." In this way Zimmermann managed to find Sławik's surviving family in Katowice. Some time later Sławik's daughter, Krystyna Sławik-Kutermak, represented her father at the ceremony to award him posthumously with the Righteous Among the Nations title. According to her, the ceremony in the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem took place in a wonderful setting and with a solemn atmosphere. The people saved, remembering clearly what Sławik had done for them, received her in Israel as a queen. There were so many of them that after a few days she was too exhausted to take part in any more dinners honoring her and her father. Israel has already honored the hero. It is now high time for his memory to spread throughout the world. Zimmermann's dream is for one of the great world movie studios to make a movie based on Sławik's story. | |
| (The Warsaw Voice) | |
