Wladyslaw Bartoszewski: Polish resistance hero and Auschwitz survivor who joined Solidarity and twice served as foreign minister

After the war he was jailed by the new regime, which saw the resistance fighters as a threat

Bartoszewski speaks a few days before his death, at a ceremony to mark the Warsaw Uprising (Reuters)

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski was an Auschwitz prisoner and member of the Polish resistance who helped save Jews and later served twice as the his country’s foreign minister. He was widely respected not only for his wartime resistance, but also as a historian, author of books on Second World War history, social activist and politician. He spent a large part of his life working for Polish-German reconciliation, making it a focus of his writings and speeches in Poland and in Germany.

A Catholic, Bartoszewski was born in 1922. The son of a bank clerk, he grew up next to Warsaw’s Jewish district and had many Jewish friends. He fought in the defence of Warsaw but was caught in a street round-up and sent to Auschwitz, which was first used for Polish resistance fighters. In a rare event, he was released in 1941 thanks to the efforts of the Polish Red Cross, for which he had worked .

Back in Warsaw he wrote a report about his time in the camp, the first known written witness account from Auschwitz. He also reported on Auschwitz to Poland’s clandestine Home Army, commanded from London by Poland’s government-in-exile. He joined the resistance and organised secret help to prisoners in the Pawiak prison, where the Germans held and tortured resistance members.

He also joined a resistance unit devoted to saving Jews, known as Zegota. For his efforts he was honoured by the Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, as a “Righteous Among the Nations” in 1965. He was also an honorary citizen of Israel. Before the war was over he took up arms yet again against the Germans, fighting in the ill-fated Warsaw Uprising of 1944.

The war’s end meant new hardship: Bartoszewski became a target of the communist regime, which considered Home Army independence fighters a threat because they opposed the Soviet-backed communist rule. For his independent thinking and pro-democracy writings he was imprisoned on fabricated espionage charges and spent nearly seven years in prison before a court ruled in 1955 that he had been unfairly arrested. He worked as a lecturer at a Catholic university, wrote for Radio Free Europe and lectured in Germany. In the 1980s he was active in Solidarity, which earned him four months’ confinement under martial law.

Bartoszewski was an animated speaker who often met young people, hoping to encourage them to embrace peace and tolerance. He said he saw it as an obligation to bear testimony to the cruelty he had witnessed. He was active and charismatic until the end, taking a leading role a few days before his death at observances marking the 72nd anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

MONIKA SCISLOWSKA

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, resistance operative and politician: born Warsaw 19 February 1922; twice married (one son); died 24 April 2015.