Ronald Reagan Writes About How Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto Joined the Polish Uprising Against the Nazis

History is an exacting discipline, and even the most eminent historical figures, in relating it, can sometimes make mistakes. Here Ronald Reagan, in telling of a little-known but extraordinary aspect of the Warsaw Uprising, gets his facts wrong but the point right: Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto rose up with the Polish Home Army to fight the Nazis. But Reagan says the “freedom fighters… were largely from the Jewish ghetto” and this attribution is wrong. The “Armia Krajowa,” which fought the Germans in 1944, was comprised of about 40,000 Polish irregulars led by a handful of professional soldiers and supported by children, civilians and the 350 or so Jews it freed from Warsaw’s Gesiowka Concentration Camp. That 1/1000th of the Polish Jews who remained alive, from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 to the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, were joined by a few dozen Jews who had survived the destruction of the Ghetto by living in the sewers and, perhaps, by some four or five hundred others who had somehow managed to stay hidden in Warsaw. If there were, as some estimate, 1,000 Jews with the Polish freedom fighters in ’44, most of them died in the Warsaw Uprising, which claimed 200,000 lives and left 80% of the city in ruins. 

Where Reagan was correct was in noting that the “the Soviets stood back and didn't enter Warsaw until the Nazis had massacred the Polish freedom fighters…” - and that as much as anything, made him regard the Soviet Union as evil.

Autograph Letter Signed ("RR"), 3 pages, large octavo, no place, no date (c. 1967-1989); to a Mr. Nelson, abroad. With a secretarial slash across the first page, indicating it had been typed and  signed (secretarially or by autopen) "Ronald Reagan."