The great survivor

WHEN Hitler’s forces marched into Warsaw in September 1939, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski’s parents told him not to panic. They had experienced German occupation during the last war. There would be inconvenience, disorder and even looting. He should be careful. But it would not be too bad—the Germans were, after all, west Europeans—and by next year, the British and French would arrive.

The Bartoszewskis could hardly have given their teenage son worse advice. The Western allies never came; instead the Soviets joined in the Nazi attack. Hitler not only wiped Poland off the map, but aimed to obliterate its language, culture and people. Wladyslaw, caught in a random round-up, was sent to Auschwitz.

He would have died there, but exceptionally his employer, the Polish Red Cross, managed to get him out by 1941. Freed, he wrote down the first account of the place. When a little girl on the train home offered him some bread and cheese, it was the first touch of humanity since his arrest.

He showed that kindness to Poland’s Jews. Through Zegota, a part of the Polish underground state set up for the purpose, he helped provide them with food, shelter, medical care and, during the doomed Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, arms. All this was punished by death, but Mr Bartoszewski—Zegota’s last survivor—scoffed at the idea that it was romantic or heroic. Those involved would have thought such talk “crazy”. He, and they, simply believed that Hitler should not dictate what was right or wrong. His lifelong motto was “Be decent”. It didn’t always pay, but it was always worth it; whereas bad behaviour often paid off, but wasn’t worth it.

Many years later he would become “Righteous among Nations” at the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel. But like many valiant Poles, his post-war fate was persecution. Prison under the new communist authorities was no better than Auschwitz, he recalled grimly.

Post-Stalinist Poland was mostly boring and tiresome rather than horrible. A born optimist, he refused to be cast down. Like many intellectuals, he spent decades in a grey zone of half-tolerated writing and lecturing. He was allowed to travel (his son went to Oxford), and was published widely abroad, though he was jailed again under martial law in 1981, when he relished giving survival tips to his less hardened cell-mates. The war truly ended only in 1989, he said, when Poland regained its freedom and his life began anew.

His excellent German made him a natural choice to be the new government’s ambassador to Austria, and he served twice as foreign minister. He walked faster than his bodyguards, and talked faster than anyone; his machinegun delivery earned him the not wholly affectionate nickname of “Uzi”. But his moral stature, matched only by his physical height, helped him pioneer two great reconciliations. One was with Israel, where Polish pre-war anti-Semitism was often, unfairly, seen as part and parcel of the incomparably greater crime of German mass murder of Jews on the occupied country’s soil. Ever alert to crass national stereotyping, he also firmly rebutted the Polish association of Jews with communist torment: most Jews opposed Soviet rule and suffered under it, he insisted.

The other reconciliation was with Germany, seen by many Poles as the country’s ultimate enemy. He never conflated the Germans, whose language and culture he loved, and the Hitlerites. When Nazi goons searched his home he teasingly quoted Heine—a German-Jewish poet whose popular “Die Loreley” was allowed by the Nazis under the pretext that it was an anonymous folk song. In occupied, despoiled Warsaw, the opening lines were apt.

I know not if there is a reason
Why I am so sad at heart.
A legend of bygone ages
Haunts me and will not depart.

Post-war Germans, unlike Russians, were in general sorry for what they had done, he insisted. As a Catholic it was his duty to forgive. Those he saw as unrepentant were another matter. His great ire was against Erika Steinbach, a combative leader of Germans cruelly deported from Poland after the war. But she was an exception. “We Poles should not be so bold as to think that we know the Germans’ thinking better than they do,” he said. Far more worrying was the revanchism of Vladimir Putin—a much cleverer man than many Western politicians thought, he said.

A prophet honoured

His popularity was greatest abroad. He was contemptuous of the neuroses and conspiracy theories of post-1989 Poland: that the country was still run by communist-era spooks (with the implication that people like him were their puppets); or that a plot caused the calamitous crash of the presidential plane in Russia in 2010. Though he belonged to no party, he was an adviser to many centrist politicians—providing counsel with unstoppable volubility well into old age.

The war, stints in jail and persecution meant he had no formal higher education. Though he was a sought-after lecturer on history, and author of dozens of books, in status-conscious Poland some begrudged him the self-awarded title of “Professor”. But most thought he had earned it, and a lot more besides.