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	Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust was a History good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Article milestones Date Process Result February 24, 2009 Good article nominee Not listed

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WARNING: ACTIVE ARBITRATION REMEDIES Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Antisemitism in Poland#Article sourcing expectations (9 May 2021): The Arbitration Committee advises that "reliable-source consensus required" is in effect on this article. When a source is used that is not a high quality source (such as an article in a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, an academically focused book by a reputable publisher, and/or an article published by a reputable institution) and subsequently challenged by reversion, no editor may reinstate the source without first obtaining consensus on Talk:Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust, or consensus about the reliability of the source in a discussion at the Reliable Sources Noticeboard. A fact from Rescue of Jews by Poles during the Holocaust appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 11 November 2008, and was viewed approximately 2,004 times ( disclaimer) ( check views). The text of the entry was as follows: Did you know... that historian Richard C. Lukas estimated that upwards of one million Poles were involved in the rescue of Jews by Polish communities during the Holocaust? A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2008/November. Daily pageviews of this article A graph should have been displayed here but graphs are temporarily disabled. Until they are enabled again, visit the interactive graph at pageviews.wmcloud.org This article has been mentioned by multiple media organizations: Jan Grabowski (28 February 2020). "Wrzuć brednię na Wikipedię. Polscy nacjonaliści wciskają kit zagranicznym czytelnikom". Gazeta Wyborcza. Piotr Konieczny (12 March 2020). "Mamy taką Wikipedię, na jaką zasłużyliśmy. Eksperci nie chcą tworzyć dobra publicznego". Gazeta Wyborcza. {{ cite news}}: |author= has generic name ( help) Ofer Aderet (14 February 2023). "'Jews Helped the Germans Out of Revenge or Greed': New Research Documents How Wikipedia Distorts the Holocaust". Haaretz. Graphs are unavailable due to technical issues. There is more info on Phabricator and on MediaWiki.org.

@ Gitz6666: or @ Marcellus: Do you have Nechama Tec's book "When Light Pierced the Darkness"? It's an older book and a bit hard to get and I'd like to check out the relevant section if possible. Volunteer Marek 04:10, 4 March 2023 (UTC) reply

Sorry, bad ping @ Marcelus:. Volunteer Marek 04:10, 4 March 2023 (UTC) reply

Unfortunately, I don't have this book Marcelus ( talk) 06:22, 4 March 2023 (UTC) reply

It's accessible on archive.org (you need to register and "borrow" it) and here [1] you'll find the quoted page. By the way, I saw your edits on the article (I mean, VM's) and I think that most of them are improvements - thank you - but there's a couple of points I'd like to discuss, so I'll open a thread or two later and/or make some follow-up edit. Gitz ( talk) ( contribs) 19:38, 4 March 2023 (UTC) reply

Couple helpful sources (my translation).

Number of Poles aiding Jews:

The exact number of rescuers and rescued will never be known. What is known is that the helping attitude in Polish society was rare and did not meet with universal approval. Thousands of stories of help are known, but we will never know about many rescuers. Difficulties in documenting the history of aid are due, among other things, to the secretive nature of the rescuers' actions, the concealment of the fact that they were helping for fear of social ostracism, the post-war migration of the population and political conditions. These factors determined the disproportion between the cases of aid that were able to be confirmed by irrefutable testimonies and the likely larger number of people who were involved in this activity. 6,992 Polish women and men have been honored with the title of Righteous Among the Nations (as of January 1, 2019). The award is given by the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem to people of non-Jewish descent who gave selfless help to Jews during the Holocaust. Estimates of the number of Poles who sheltered Jews are scarce, especially those based on specific calculations. In the 1980s. Teresa Prekerova indicated 160-360 thousand, assuming that the number of Jewish survivors was 40-60 thousand, and that each survivor received support from 2-3 people. In 2002. Gunnar Paulsson estimated the number of people helping Jews in Warsaw at 70-90 thousand, and those seeking refuge at 28 thousand. Referring to Mordechaj Paldiel's assessment, he surmised that the number of rescuers in Warsaw was ¼ of the total, giving a national figure of 280 to 360 thousand.
—  sprawiedliwi.org

Number of saved Jews by Poles:

The number of rescued reported by Datner [80-100,000] is not confirmed by the research of other historians. Shmuel Krakowski estimated that about 300,000 Jews escaped from the ghettos and camps, while about 30,000 survived on the so-called Aryan side. Michał Borwicz, on the other hand, calculated that 40-50,000 Jews survived on Polish soil. According to Teresa Prekerowa's estimates, 60-115 thousand Jews survived the occupation of Polish lands, of whom 30-60 thousand on the Aryan side, 20-40 thousand in the camps, and 10-15 thousand in the woods or in the partisans. Lucjan Dobroszycki estimated that with the help of Poles, about 30 thousand Jews survived the occupation. Similar figures were given by Philip Friedman (20-30 thousand) and Israel Gutman (30-35 thousand saved this way). Grzegorz Berendt indicated that the number in the occupied territories of the Second Republic did not exceed 50,000. The already mentioned Stankowski and Weiser estimated that about 15-20 thousand Jews were saved by Poles.
— Grądzka-Rejak, Martyna; Namysło, Aleksandra (2022). "Prawodawstwo niemieckie wobec Polaków i Żydów na terenie Generalnego Gubernatorstwa oraz ziem wcielonych do III Rzeszy. Analiza porównawcza" [German legislation towards Poles and Jews in the General Government and the lands incorporated into the Third Reich. Comparative analysis]. In Domański, Tomasz (ed.). Stan badań nad pomocą Żydom na ziemiach polskich pod okupacją niemiecką (in Polish). Warsaw: Institute of National Remembrance. pp. 109–110.

Marcelus ( talk) 13:28, 4 March 2023 (UTC) reply

Thank you, Marcelus. Do you think that "sprawiedliwi.org" is reliable? Gitz ( talk) ( contribs) 23:59, 4 March 2023 (UTC) reply

I think it is, the site is run by Jewish Historical Institute and Museum Polin, but I don't think it should be our direct source, since they giving the name of the researchers Marcelus ( talk) 00:50, 5 March 2023 (UTC) reply

POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews provide the name of the researchers, but no references to their work. We shouldn't report "Teresa Prekerova says so", if we don't know where and when she said so. Gitz ( talk) ( contribs) 01:11, 5 March 2023 (UTC) reply

Hello Volunteer Marek, a few remarks to recent edits:

1. With regard to this edit [2], We should take a closer look at the sources. 1) The quotation from Paldiel 1993 in footnote can be completed with the immediately subsequent sentence: These coercions came not only from strangers, but also from next-door neighbors and members of the rescuer’s family, who were infuriated at the rescuer for risking the lives of his family, of neighbours, and the local community ... all for the sake of the “despised” Jews. 2) The same applies to the quotation from Zimmerman 2003. After the text quoted in the footnote, Zimmerman quotes Tec (also in the footnote) and the testimony (reported by Tec) of one rescuer: My husband hated Jews ... Many Poles feel the way he did. I had to be careful of the Poles. One can read this also in Tec 1986 at p. 54. 3) Most of Tec 1986 is devoted to understanding the phenomenon of the antisemitic rescuers; however, the book cannot be interpreted as claiming that antisemitism did no hamper the rescuers. E.g., The environment in which Polish rescuers lived was hostile to the Jews and unfavorable to their protection (p. 58, already included in the article).
2. With regard to this edit [3], perhaps we could restore Blonski and qualify him as "intellectual"? He is mentioned in the quoted source (Friedrich 2005). Do you think we should modify the opening sentence of Jan Błoński: a Polish historian, literary critic, publicist and translator?
3. With regard to this [4], apart from the WP:WEASEL word "several", the content looks dubious/contentious to me; perhaps we shouldn't address this controversial point here on this article but rather at Collaboration in German-occupied Poland. I suggest we remove this text from this article:

   Several scholars have stated that, unlike in Western Europe, Polish collaboration with the Nazi Germans was insignificant

Gitz ( talk) ( contribs) 02:49, 5 March 2023 (UTC) reply

Re 1 - the point here is that there were lots of different motivations for why people turned away Jews. Some out of anti-semitism, some out of fear, etc. The direct passages that are being quoted refer to and imply the threat of death as the cause. Pulling that together with other footnotes or passages from the text which discuss anti-semitism appears to be WP:SYNTH. In the lede, I think we should just leave it general like this since the quotes don't explicitly provide a reason.

Re 2 - sure, "intellectual" is fine. And the Blonski article should be modified as well.

Re 3 - "looks dubious" is not really an argument - one could say that about any piece of text one doesn't like. Collaboration and anti-semitism aren't the same thing though, so again, this is WP:SYNTH. As far as Tanini goes (in fact she stresses that distinction repeatedly through out her article), I think this might have been discussed some time ago (like years). Anyway, here's some relevant quotes: Unlike in Belarus and in Ukraine, where the Nazis sought (and found) collaborators, no Poles were given positions of authority. This policy ruled out any kind of legal collaboration at the political and economic level. and the ease with which the Poles created a split reality, where the occupiers were circumvented and ignored, was not due to specific anthropological qualities of the Poles, but to their experience of foreign occupation in the nineteenth century and Collaboration with the Nazis is still considered a marginal issue by both Czesław Łuczak and Tomasz Sztrzembosz, two of the leading experts on the Second World War in Poland, while Andzrej Paczkowski reminds readers of his recent History of Poland that the Germans found people willing to work with in all the countries they controlled and that Poland was no exception.1 (Iread that sentence as saying, yes there was some (Paczkowski) but it was marginal (Luczak and Sztrembosz). And Gross concludes that ‘there was no suitable structural collaboration in the Generalgouvernment’ Volunteer Marek 05:49, 5 March 2023 (UTC) reply

Re 1, I see no WP:SYNTH. Quoted sources are entirely explicit about antisemitism being a risk factor that the rescuers had to face; at most, the point is whether a reference to Polish antisemitism is DUE there, e.g. Polish rescuers were hampered by the German occupation, potential betrayal by local population and widespread home-grown antisemitism looks fully verifiable to me.

Re 2, since I'm not familiar with Blonski, I won't modify the dedicated article myself, but I'm now restoring the reference in this article.

Re 3, this is an important discussion - perhaps this t/p is not the best venue for it, but let's start it. On many articles I've noticed a serious distorion with regard to "Polish collaborationism". Yes, up until the 1980s Polish historiography firmly denied the existence of anything like that; and also today, I guess, nationalist historians deny the existence of Polish collaborationism. But we need to be clear about what's the subject of controversy. As the quote from Tonini makes clear (and I could provide other sources, e.g. Friedrich's essay), in Poland there has never been what she calls "legal collaboration". What does she mean? The point is that, contrary to other European countries, in Poland the Germans had set out to complete crush and annihilate the nation. They didn't want to have a Polish state, not even a puppet state. "Legal" collaboration means institutionalized cooperation by representatives of the Polish nation: that was impossibile because the German did not even try to create a collaborationist government. They had to use the local police, yes, but that's basically all the collaboration they needed (and obtained). Our articles often present the absence of Polish legal collaboration as a moral/political choice. Yes, it was also a moral/political choice, and the Poles loathed the German occupiers and created one of the strongest resistence movement against Nazism. But there were collaborators in Poland - obviously there were, as anywhere else in Europe. This must be said clearly, because there's plenty of historical evidence to support that - e.g., the role of the Blue Police cannot be denied. Moreover, there was also widespread antisemitism. Jan Karski himself reported at the beginning of 1940 that German persecutions against the Jews were creating "a narrow bridge upon which the Germans and a large portion of Polish society are finding agreement" (Zimmerman, The Polish underground and the Jews, p. 75). So I think that Several scholars have stated that, unlike in Western Europe, Polish collaboration with the Nazi Germans was insignificant over-simplifies and is UNDUE in this article; the topic is complex and requires more space and better sources. Gitz ( talk) ( contribs) 11:52, 5 March 2023 (UTC) reply

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In the Bibliography, please remove the errant ref tag after the listing for Friedrich, Klaus-Peter (2005) 76.14.122.5 ( talk) 19:27, 1 March 2024 (UTC) reply

 Done Hyphenation Expert ( talk) 21:09, 1 March 2024 (UTC) reply