Protest!
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Protest! was a clandestine leaflet issued in 1942 as a protest by Polish Catholics against the mass murder of Jews in German-occupied Poland.[1][2]
Protest! was published on 28 August 1942 in Warsaw. It was signed by the Polish underground organization, Front for the Rebirth of Poland, which was a continuation of the prewar Catholic Action. Its president at the time was the Polish writer, Zofia Kossak-Szczucka. Protest! was clandestinely issued as a leaflet in 5,000 copies in Warsaw on 11 August 1942. It was published a few weeks after the start of the Germans' liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto, from which – as part of Operation Reinhard – Jews were deported to the Treblinka extermination camp.[3][4]
The world, Kossak-Szczucka wrote, was silent in the face of this atrocity. "England is silent, so is America, even the influential international Jewry, so sensitive in its reaction to any transgression against its people, is silent. Poland is silent... Dying Jews are surrounded only by a host of Pilates washing their hands in innocence." Those who are silent in the face of murder, she wrote, become accomplices to the crime. Kossak-Szczucka saw this largely as an issue of religious ethics. "Our feelings toward Jews have not changed," she wrote. "We do not stop thinking of them as political, economic and ideological enemies of Poland." But, she wrote, this does not relieve Polish Catholics of their duty to oppose the crimes being committed in their country.
We are required by God to protest," she wrote. "God who forbids us to kill. We are required by our Christian consciousness. Every human being has the right to be loved by his fellow men. The blood of the defenceless cries to heaven for revenge. Those who oppose our protest, are not Catholics.
We do not believe that Poland can benefit from German cruelties. On the contrary. ... We know how poisoned is the fruit of the crime. ... Those who do not understand this, and believe that a proud and free future for Poland can be combined with acceptance of the grief of their fellow men, are neither Catholics nor Poles.
