Zegota (60" x 36")
Docent Guide
Code name of Rada Pomocy Zydom (Council for Aid to Jews), was an underground organization in occupied Poland. Zegota was in operation from December 1942, until the liberation of Poland in January 1945. It was preceded by the Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy Zydom (Provisional Committee for Aid to Jews), founded on September 27, 1942, on the initiative of Zofia Kossak - Szczucka, who also became its chairperson. Made up of democratic Catholic activists, the Provisional Committee had 180 persons under its care. On December 4, 1942, it became Zegota. Zegota had on its board representatives of five Polish and two Jewish political movements.
Concealing Jews was punishable in Poland by death for all the persons living in the house where they were discovered. A difficult problem therefore was to find hiding places for persons who looked Jewish. Zegota was on a constant lookout for suitable accommodations. No estimate can be given of the magnitude of this form of aid by Zegota, but it appears to have been great. Children were put in the care of foster families, into public orphanages or similar institutions maintained by convents. The foster families were told that the children were relatives, distant or close, and they were paid by Zegota for the children's maintenance. In Warsaw, Zegota had twenty - five hundred children registered whom it looked after in this way. Medical attention for the Jews in hiding was also made available. Zegota had ties with many ghettos and camps. It also made numerous efforts to induce the Polish government - in - exile and the Delegatura to appeal to the Polish population to help the persecuted Jews.
During the war, Zegota was the only rescue organization that was run jointly by Jews and non -Jews from a wide range of political movements, and the only one that, despite the arrests of some of its members, was able to operate for a considerable length of time and to extend help to Jews in so many different ways.
Source: Museum of Tolerance Online
Members of Zegota were memorialized in Israel on October 28, 1963 with a planting of a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad VaShem. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski was at the event. He was a founder of the Polish resistance who organized an underground organization, comprised mostly of Catholics, to save Jews. He worked to provide false documents to Jews living outside the Warsaw ghetto. In the fall of 1942, he helped found an organization (Council for Aid to Jews) which successfully saved many Jews from the gas chambers.
In the painting, Hirschberger depicts Zegota as a saintly woman, protecting Jews within her cloak from the destruction that surrounds her and them.
The issue of Polish indifference or occasional participation in atrocities against the Jews continues. In early 2001, historian Jan Gross published the book Neighbors (New York University Press) that documented the case of Jebwadne, a Polish town where 1500 Jews were allegedly killed by their Polish neighbors, not the Nazi invaders or the SS. In 2006, Jan Gross's second book, Fear, dealt with the motives of the post-war pogroms that served to drive most of the remaining Polish Jews out of the country.