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Question: "My last
question to you is about abandonment also. It is about those Jews who say
about the Polish Home Army and about the Resistance that they did not help
Jews enough. How do you answer such a query?"
Jan Nowak: "You know, if the Allies could not help Jews, how
could defeated people save them? We were, after all, not armed. We were
victims ourselves. The country was occupied. It was the most bloody terror
in the history of mankind. There were people who were heroic, but they
were in the minority… Of course, at the beginning there were doubts
(among the Polish Home Army) about whether the Jews would fight, because
of the school of thought that if they wanted to survive, they could not
resist. But once people like (Henryk) Wolinski convinced them that the
Jews were going to fight to the bitter end, they were provided with arms,
and this was when there was a great scarcity of arms. We had no machine
guns at all, and whatever we had was either produced by
ourselves or dropped by the British. So if the whole world could not save
Jews,
how could people who were in a country occupied, dominated, terrorized --
how could they save them? They couldn't. Of course, many people feel they
have not done enough. I mean, I didn't save any human life and I'm sorry.
But they were simply the circumstances. I was trying to help Jews by
trying to alert public opinion in the West."
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