Noteworthy Deaths

Auschwitz survivor, champion of Jews

WARSAW, Poland -- Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Auschwitz prisoner and member of Poland's underground World War II resistance who helped save Jews and later served twice as the country's foreign minister, died Friday in Warsaw. He was 93.

Bartoszewski died after being taken to a hospital in Warsaw on Friday afternoon. His death was confirmed by a number of leaders, including President Bronislaw Komorowski, who wrote on Twitter that he was deeply saddened.

Bartoszewski was widely respected not only for his wartime resistance but also as a historian, author of books on World War II history, social activist and politician. He spent a large part of his life working for Polish-German reconciliation.

Bartoszewski, a Polish Catholic, was born in 1922 in Warsaw and grew up next to Warsaw's Jewish district.

While he was a teenager, he fought in the defense of Warsaw against the Germans, who invaded the country in September 1939. Caught in a street roundup in Warsaw in 1940, he was sent to Auschwitz, which was first used by the Nazi Germans for Polish resistance fighters.

In a rare occurrence, he was released in April 1941 thanks to the efforts of the Polish Red Cross, which he had worked for before his arrest.

He also joined a resistance unit devoted to saving Jews, known as Zegota. For his efforts to help the Jews, he was honored by the Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, as a "Righteous Among the Nations" in 1965.

In the 1980s, he was active in Solidarity, the movement that eventually helped toppled communism in Poland.

Bartoszewski met often with young people, hoping to encourage them to embrace peace and tolerance. He said he saw it as an obligation to bear testimony to the decades of cruelty he witnessed during the war and under communism.

Metro on 04/26/2015

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