“Courier from Warsaw” Dies
Speaking at Auschwitz, Vice President Cheney said, “Where there is no conscience, there is no tolerance… no defense against evil … and no limit to the crimes that follow… evil is real, and must be called by its name, and must be confronted. We are reminded that anti-Semitism may begin with words, but rarely stops with words … and the message of intolerance and hatred must be opposed before it turns into acts of horror.”
A man of true conscience has died and it is fitting to remember his life and his warning.
Speaking at Auschwitz, Vice President Cheney said, “Where there is no conscience, there is no tolerance… no defense against evil … and no limit to the crimes that follow… evil is real, and must be called by its name, and must be confronted. We are reminded that anti-Semitism may begin with words, but rarely stops with words … and the message of intolerance and hatred must be opposed before it turns into acts of horror.”
A man of true conscience has died and it is fitting to remember his life and his warning.
Jan Nowak-Jezioranski was the “Courier from Warsaw.” In what obituaries call his “most famous achievement,” he made dangerous trips to London during World War II to bring news of the Polish resistance to the allies and the Polish government in exile. That may have been his most famous exploit, but his most moral one undoubtedly was his participation in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. After the war, he repeatedly called on the Polish government to apologize for the 1941 massacre of Jews of Jedwabne – in which the victims were herded into the town synagogue and the building set on fire. Armed townspeople kept the Jews from fleeing the blaze.
As ardently anti-communist as anti-Nazi, after the war Nowak-Jezioranski worked for the BBC and Radio Free Europe. Moving to the U.S. in 1976, he became director of the Polish American Congress, supporting the Solidarity movement and the liberation of Poland from Soviet tyranny. When Poland joined NATO, Nowak-Jezioranski said, “For the first time in its history, my old country was not only free but also secure.” Awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, he returned to Poland in 2002, and died last week at 91, revered by people of conscience everywhere.
Ours is an age in which 62 percent of Germans polled said they were “tired of the Holocaust”; in which anti-Semitism flourishes, fanned by ignorance and resentment; in which most of the Arab world absented itself from the UN commemoration and routinely uses the words “Nazi” and “genocide” to advance their own racist agenda. The head of the Muslim Council of Britain wrote, “We have expressed our unwillingness to attend the (British Holocaust memorial) ceremony because it excludes ongoing genocide and human rights abuses around the world and in the occupied territories of Palestine.” As if there is some comparison to be made.
In this difficult age Jan Nowak-Jezioranski must be an example of the world’s obligation to speak out against anti-Semitism. Marcello Pera, president of the Italian Senate, took up the challenge at the UN. “We have an obligation to admit that anti-Semitism is still with us. Today, it also feeds on such subtle and insidious distinctions as are often made between Israel and the Jewish state, Israel and its governments, Zionism and Semitism. Or, it crops up when the struggle for life led by the Israelis is labeled ‘state terrorism.'”
President Bush has said of the Holocaust, “There will come a time when the eyewitnesses are gone. That is why we are bound by conscience to remember what happened, and to whom it happened.” Jan Nowak-Jezioranski was a witness.