Kossak, Zofia (1890–1968)

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Kossak, Zofia (1890–1968)

Polish Roman Catholic writer of historical novels, which were popular both in Poland and the English-speaking world, who created the underground organization Zegota to save Jewish lives in German-occupied Poland during the Holocaust and survived imprisonment in Auschwitz. Name variations: Zofia Kossak-Szczucka; Zofia Kossak-Szatkowska; Zofia Kossak-Szczucka-Szatkowska; Zofdja de Szatkowska. Born in Kosmin, Volhynia, Polish Ukraine (then part of Russia), on August 8, 1890; died in Górki Wielkie on April 9, 1968; daughter of Tadeusz Kossak; married Stefan Szczucki; married Zygmunt Szatkowski; children: two sons.

Zofia Kossak was born in 1890 on a landed estate in Volhynia on the eastern border of the Polish Ukraine (then part of tsarist Russia). Hers was a talented, cultured, and socially prominent family. Zofia's father was an officer in the Austrian Army who in later years became a major in the cavalry corps of independent Poland, but many of her other relatives were acclaimed artists and intellectuals. These included her paternal grandfather Juliusz Kossak, one of Poland's greatest painters, as well as his brother Wojciech Kossak, also a distinguished painter. Zofia's cousin Maria Pawlikowska was a prolific poet, while Magdalena Samozwaniec (Wojciech Kossak's daughter) also gained considerable fame as a writer.

With such talents apparently in her blood, Zofia at first chose to study art in Warsaw and Geneva and to prepare for a professional career as an artist. By 1913, however, she appeared to have chosen literature over art when she made her literary debut with the story "Bulli zaginal" (Bulli Disappeared), which was published in the journal Wies Polska (Polish Village). After her marriage to Stefan Szczucki, Kossak and her husband moved to Wolyn, Volhynia, where they were living when a bloody sequence of revolutionary upheavals and civil wars began in Russia in 1917.

In her first novel, Pozoga (The Conflagration, 1922, English translation, 1927), Kossak depicted the terrors and suffering that became part of her daily life during the violent years of 1917 through 1919. Although a narrative of events in Volhynia, the book also revealed her strongly pro-Polish and conservative beliefs; the work is permeated by an idealized view of life on the vast semi-feudal estates that dominated the lives of Volhynia's impoverished peasantry until the revolution. With her writing career successfully underway, she published a number of historical novels over the next years, including Beatum scelus (1924, subsequent editions entitled Blessed Guilt), which was set in Renaissance Poland; Golden Freedom (1928), a story of pre-partition Poland; The Great and the Small (1928), tales on Silesian themes; and God's Madmen (1929), a collection of biographies of saints.

In 1925, Kossak married a second time to Zygmunt Szatkowski. She moved to Górki

Wielkie in Beskid Slaski, Polish Silesia, and her literary productivity continued unabated. Successful historical novels followed, including The Battlefield of Legnica (1930), about the conflict between the Christian West and the Mongols, as well as The Unknown Country (1932) and From the History of Silesia (1933), both of which dealt with the struggles of Poles to retain their national identity. She also wrote several other books in the 1930s. The most important work Kossak produced during that decade was her monumental epic The Crusaders. Published in four volumes in Poznan in 1935, The Crusaders is in the tradition of the great historical novels of the 19th century. Filled with action, drama, battles, and adventure, the story starts in 1095 at the commencement of the First Crusade. Polish Silesian knights, called Strzegonie, set off on a pilgrimage to Provence, then join the Crusade. In the Holy Land, in addition to bloody battles and sieges, the knights experience famine, disease and the merciless forces of nature in the desert. The volumes conclude with an epilogue that takes the reader back to Silesia with the surviving knights' return home. The complex plot mixes a realistic depiction of events with fantasy and legend. Kossak's strongly traditional Catholic faith presents miraculous events as reality and vice versa. The vivid imagery and panoramic quality of this and her other historical novels suggests that Kossak's training in the visual arts sharpened her literary eye for spotting and recreating richness of detail and color.

Although not all critics praised her books—some saw her characters as being two-dimensional and her plots too sensationalistic—the Polish reading public loved Kossak's works, which they bought and read despite the poor economic conditions of the 1930s. Perhaps somewhat grudgingly, the literary establishment recognized her achievements in 1936 when she was crowned with the "golden laurel" of the Polish Academy of Literature.

The 1930s were good years for Kossak, but normalcy in her nation was soon to end. On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, defeating and subjugating a militarily unprepared nation within a month's time. Nazi rule in Poland was brutal and inhumane from the start. The Polish state was liquidated; deprived even of its name, it was simply called the Generalgouvernement as an occupied territory to be exploited by the German master race (Herrenvolk). Poland's cultural and moral leadership strata, the intelligentsia and clergy, were targeted almost immediately for humiliation and liquidation. Universities were shut down and intellectual life went underground, a long-established Polish tradition remembered from the oppressive decades of the 19th century. From the first days of the German occupation, Zofia Kossak was active in the underground, writing, teaching, and acting as a liaison.

By the end of 1940, it was clear that Poland's Jews were being targeted for particularly brutal treatment. Ghettos were created in the large cities in the first months of German rule, with the Warsaw Ghetto, by far the largest, established in October–November 1940. Conditions in all of the Polish ghettos were inhumane, resulting in hundreds of deaths a day from starvation, disease and lack of medical care. By early 1942, Nazi Germany had decided to effect its "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"—total annihilation of the Jewish people under their rule. Jews were to be killed on an industrial basis in a number of death camps established on occupied Polish territory. For Poland, this would result in the murder of about 90% of its prewar Jewish population—three million men, women, and children. Although the Third Reich envisaged "only" a future of enslavement and exploitation for Poland's Roman Catholics, who as Slavs were deemed to be Untermenschen (subhumans), as many as three million lost their lives during the more than five years of the brutal German occupation.

In Poland's history, powerful attitudes of anti-Semitism run through all aspects of public and private life. By the late 19th century, many Polish intellectuals had concluded that Jews could never be Poles and were in fact an inassimilable threat to the nation's moral and cultural integrity. Both conservative Roman Catholics and Right-wing nationalists like the National Democrats (Endeks) were convinced that "the Jews" were a hostile foreign body, a malignant tumor that was eating away at and destroying not only the national economy but the very essence of the Polish spirit (Polskosc). As a conservative Roman Catholic, Kossak shared many of these prejudices, which were common currency in the intellectual circles in which she moved.

From the earliest days of the German occupation, Zofia Kossak was the much-respected head of the Roman Catholic underground organization Front Odrozenia Polski (Polish Resistance Front), whose most important work was in organizing social and educational activities. With the onset of the Nazi assault on Poland's Jewish population, however, Kossak expanded her responsibilities to render assistance to this gravely endangered segment of the nation. In the summer of 1942, she wrote an illegal pamphlet, entitled Protest! ("The Protest"), which received wide circulation in underground circles. Although its stated aim was to protest the bloody crimes of the Nazis against Poland's Jews, it is an unusual and in some ways disturbing mixture of outrage against the German atrocities, indignation against the indifference of the world in light of these crimes against humanity, and a reiteration of traditional anti-Jewish sentiments found so commonly in prewar Poland. Kossak condemns:

[a] world [that] looks upon this murder, more horrible than anything that history has ever seen, and stays silent.… The perishing Jews are surrounded by Pilates who deny all guilt. This silence can no longer be tolerated. Whatever the reason for it, it is vile. In the face of murder it is wrong to remain passive. Whoever is silent witnessing murder becomes a partner to the murder. Whoever does not condemn, consents. Therefore we—Catholics, Poles—raise our voices.

Yet as the author continues she also notes emphatically:

Our feeling toward the Jews has not changed. We continue to deem them political, economic, and ideological enemies of Poland. Moreover, we realize that they hate us more than they hate the Germans, and they make us responsible for their misfortune. Why, and on what basis, remains a mystery of the Jewish soul. Nevertheless, this is a decided fact. Awareness of this fact, however, does not release us from the duty of the damnation of murder.

Kossak, who had stated in Protest! that "we cannot help, nor can we rescue anybody," changed her mind dramatically between the summer and late September of 1942. Now believing that something could and must be done to save at least some of her country's Jews, on September 27, 1942, she officially founded the Tymczasowy Komitet Pomocy Zydom (Temporary Committee for Aid to the Jews). On December 4 of that year, after the Temporary Committee had provided evidence of its viability by bringing 180 threatened Jews under its care, Kossak expanded its responsibilities and made the organization a permanent part of the Polish underground landscape. Renamed Rada Pomocy Zydom (Council for Aid to Jews), the organization was generally known as Zegota.

Kossak's efforts to render assistance to Jews through the Zegota organization were supported both by a broad political spectrum of the under-ground movement and by the Delegatura, the representative of the Polish government-in-exile in Poland, which gave its official approval to Zegota's bold humanitarian agenda. Although Kossak's allegiance was Roman Catholic and conservative nationalist, the most active role in Zegota was assumed by the Socialists, who were split into a Right- and Left-wing party. Except for the extreme Right, which remained bitterly anti-Semitic even as the Holocaust progressed, and the excluded Communists, virtually all of Poland's prewar political groups, including several Jewish ones, were represented in Zegota's leadership. Those included the Bund, an important Jewish labor movement, the Jewish National Committee, the Peasant Party, and the Democratic Party. On the Zegota board sat representatives of five Polish and two Jewish political movements. Headquartered in Warsaw, the organization also had centers in Cracow, Lublin, and Lvov.

Zegota did not establish a regional clandestine network of its own, relying instead on the existing organizations of its member movements or of other groups with which it was in contact, including the headquarters group of the Armia Krajowa (Polish Home Army) and the Zwiazek Syndikalistów Polskich (League of Polish Syndicalists). Realizing that its work would be greatly enhanced with the help of more members of the Polish population, Zegota urged the Polish government-in-exile and the Delegatura to issue appeals for assistance and to impose severe sanctions on those Poles (szmalcownicy or extortionists) who made a living either by blackmailing or by turning Jews over to the Germans in return for money. Zegota published three leaflets on the fate Poland's Jews were facing and lodged protests against the anti-Semitic attitudes and actions of certain extremist factions in the Polish underground.

Always concerned about financing the work of Zegota, Kossak made impressive efforts in this area. The council received allocations in 1943 from the Delegatura that ranged from 150,000 to 750,000 zlotys a month ($4,000 to $8,000), and in 1944 from 1 million to 2 million zlotys a month ($7,000 to $8,000), for a total of 28.75 million zlotys ($215,000) during the entire period. Between July 1943 and June 1944, Zegota also received subsidies from two important Jewish organizations, the Bund and the Jewish National Committee, totaling 3.2 million zlotys. This money was repaid by the end of 1944, with Kossak approving a Zegota contribution in addition to the original amount that had been borrowed. From the start of its work, Zegota's finances were strictly supervised, so that as early as the autumn of 1943 the organization was able to repay a substantial sum—the equivalent of $23,000—to the International Organization of Polish Jews.

Zegota's aim of saving Jewish lives called for several strategies. One was to provide financial assistance to individuals who had been either confined in or had escaped from ghettos. In an environment that was often intensely anti-Semitic, and in which Polish informers made a living by turning over Jews to the Germans for money, Jews had to remain in hiding. Food had to be procured on the black market, and sometimes medications purchased, all of which was expensive. In January 1943, soon after its founding, Zegota provided financial assistance to 300 persons, a number that increased to 2,000 by the end of the year. By the summer of 1944, 4,000 Jews were able to live in hiding as a result of the organization's monetary support. Although the amount provided by the financially hard-pressed Zegota was pitifully small (400 to 700 zlotys monthly, about $15 on the black-market exchange rate), this modest sum was enough to provide a subsistence existence in hiding, and with it came a chance of survival in the Holocaust. Many Jews in hiding who came down with illness owed their lives to the clandestine Komitet Lekarzy Demokratów i Socjalistów (Democratic and Socialist Doctors' Committee), which created a remarkably efficient network to help Jews in hiding receive medical attention from specialists at short notice.

In addition to financial assistance, Zegota provided forged "Aryan" documents for the Jews under its care as well as for personnel of the Bund and the Jewish National Committee. The facilities of the Polish Home Army initially provided these life-saving documents, but as Zegota gained in experience as a clandestine organization it was able to create high-quality forgeries of its own, providing false baptismal and marriage certificates as well as identity and employment cards that turned Jews into non-Jews.

A special division of Zegota was devoted to saving the lives of Jewish children. Some of them were placed in the care of foster families, while others found safety in public orphanages or similar institutions maintained by Catholic convents. In Warsaw alone, Zegota found safe refuge for 2,500 children. All of the activities undertaken by Zegota members on behalf of Jews represented an extreme danger to those non-Jews caught in the act of assisting Jews. Under the German occupation regime, concealing Jews was an act punishable by death, not only for one individual but for all of the individuals, including children, living in a house or apartment where Jews had found refuge.

Zofia Kossak and her colleagues created in Zegota one of the very few organizations in Nazi-occupied Europe that was run jointly by Jews and non-Jews from a broad spectrum of political ideals and ideological values. Despite the great risks to which its members were exposed, the organization survived as a functioning organism to the end of the Nazi occupation. The exact number of Jewish lives saved by the work of Zegota will never be known—it is probably less than 10,000—but one author has estimated that between 40,000 and 50,000 Polish Jews were positively affected by the various Zegota activities during the Holocaust.

In September 1943, Kossak was arrested by the Germans; her forged papers were excellent, however, and her real name was never discovered. Nevertheless, she was sent to Auschwitz, where she witnessed countless horrors which she would later describe in her 1946 memoir Z otchlani: Wspomnienaia z lagru (From the Abyss: Memoirs from the Camp). Released from Auschwitz by the Germans before their defeat, she left Poland in 1945, settling with her husband in the United Kingdom. Despite her detestation of Communism, Kossak remained profoundly Polish in spirit, and, often homesick, she yearned to return to her native country. The intellectual liberalization that began in 1956 was sufficient to lure her back, and she returned in 1957. Although critics had never been unanimous in appraising her work, and often criticized the less than academic knowledge of history and theology reflected in her novels, her books long remained popular with the Polish reading public because of their rich panoramic detail and her essentially Romantic view of human nature. During her last years, Kossak wrote a number of short stories for young people as well as several more historical novels, including a massive epic in three volumes, Dziedzictwo (Heredity, 1961–1967). Much beloved by the people of her country, she died in Górki Wielkie on April 9, 1968.

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