Remembering Raczyński’s Note

Portrait of Edward Bernard Raczyński. Public Domain

Commentary

To anyone who is careful with words and meticulous about historical accuracy, “Polish death camp” is an inexcusable insult.

President Barack Obama learned this the hard way in May 2012 when his use of the phrase provoked an international backlash. In a statement honoring Jan Karski of the wartime Polish resistance, Obama stated:

“Fluent in four languages, possessed of a photographic memory, Jan served as a courier for the Polish resistance during the darkest days of World War II. Before one trip across enemy lines, resistance fighters told him that Jews were being murdered on a massive scale, and smuggled him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself. Jan took that information to President Franklin Roosevelt, giving one of the first accounts of the Holocaust and imploring the world to take action.”

The Polish Foreign Minister quickly rebuked the President. He pointed out that though some Holocaust-era death camps, such as Auschwitz, were located in Poland, they were not Polish. They were built and run by foreigners: the Nazis who had invaded and occupied the country in 1939. To suggest otherwise was “an outrageous error” that sprung from “ignorance and incompetence.”

Poles understandably bristle at being associated with Nazi crimes. They know that death camps were imposed on them. They were not Polish policy. Millions of Jewish citizens of Poland were murdered in those hellholes, along with untold numbers of other officially disfavored minorities and resistance fighters. And today is a good time to remind the world of this because it marks the anniversary of a famous document known as Raczyński’s Note.

Hitler’s Germany attacked Poland from the west on September 1, 1939, and by secret agreement, Stalin’s Soviet Union invaded from the east sixteen days later. Overwhelmed, the country collapsed before the month was out, and a Polish Government-in-Exile assembled first in France and then, in June 1940, in the UK. One of that government’s first Foreign Ministers was Count Edward Bernard Maria Raczyński, born in 1891 and who, prior to the outbreak of the war, served Poland as its ambassador to the Court of St. James in London.

Informed by secret evidence provided by Jan Karski and the Polish resistance, Raczyński sent a note on Dec. 10, 1942, to the governments of the nations allied against Germany. It identified several death camps by name and informed the Allies that unspeakable crimes against humanity were underway.

The Note was nothing less than the world’s first official report of the unfolding Holocaust, history’s largest and most violent ”ethnic cleansing.” “The new methods of mass slaughter applied during the last few months,” wrote Raczyński, “confirm the fact that the German authorities aim with systematic deliberation at the total extermination of the Jewish population of Poland and of the many thousands of Jews whom the German authorities have deported to Poland from Western and Central European countries and from the German Reich itself.”

Raczyński went on to reveal in terrifying detail what the Nazis were doing—the creation of ghettoes, the forced labor, the gas chambers, the starvation, the torture, the mass executions. Its 21 pages are painful reading, but the world needed to know and still needs to know.

In London, the reaction was swift. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden read a declaration on behalf of the Allies:

“From all the occupied countries Jews are being transported, in conditions of appalling horror and brutality, to Eastern Europe .... None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labour camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions.”

This was the first international acknowledgment of Nazi atrocities. The House of Commons held a moment of silence for the victims.

Any lingering doubts about the accuracy of Raczyński’s Note were erased when Witold’s Report provided the world with the first comprehensive eyewitness account of the horrors of Auschwitz, where two million people were killed. That document was compiled by Witold Pilecki, the courageous Polish patriot who volunteered to get arrested by the Nazis so he might get inside the notorious death camp to find out what was going on.

Sadly, of course, the Holocaust did not abate until Germany was defeated in May 1945. But at the very least, the information Edward Raczyński (and Witold Pilecki) revealed to the world redoubled the efforts to bring it all to an end. That knowledge underscored the ongoing moral duty of good people to never let it happen again.

The Polish Government-in-Exile did not disappear with the war’s conclusion. The brief light of victory against the Nazis was extinguished by a further 44 years of darkness when the Soviets imposed a communist regime on the nation. During that time, the Government-in-Exile continued to function and refused to recognize the Polish communist state. It did not dissolve itself until December 1990, after courageous Poles had led the way to the dissolution of the “Evil Empire” in Eastern Europe.

Edward Raczyński lived a long life, too. He died in 1993 at almost 102 years of age, after serving in his nineties (from 1979 to 1986) as the President of the Polish Government-in-Exile. He witnessed the selection of history’s first Polish Pope (John Paul II) in 1978, the rise of Solidarity (the pro-freedom worker movement which he supported) in 1980, and the resistance to Soviet tyranny that would topple communism a few years later in both Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union.

I suspect that he saw it all coming, and like 35 million Poles, was delighted at the prospects.

From the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.