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POLAND'S ETHNIC MINORITIES INTRODUCTION Tadeusz M. Piotrowski From POLAND'S HOLOCAUST
Copyright © 1998 Thaddeus M. Piotrowski After 123 years of partitions by its imperialistic neighbors Russia, Germany (Prussia) and Austria, Poland finally regained its independence in 1918. In the years following World War I, two major problems confronted this young republic: the problem of its forever-straying borders and the problem of its minorities. The resulting six wars fought concurrently by Poland between 1918 and 1921 taxed both - its strength and its resources - to the breaking point. The short-lived Polish-Ukrainian War was one of these, the Polish-Soviet War was another, and the Polish-Lithuanian dispute over Wilno was a third [1]. By 1921 all the wars were over, and after the Conference of Ambassadors' decision regarding Eastern Galicia, a reborn Poland emerged on the maps of Europe [2]. It included some of the territories that had belonged to the first Polish Republic before all the partitions, and more: the province of Wilno, a large part of Belorussia, the western part of Wolyn (Volhynia), all of Eastern Galicia, the 'Polish Corridor', a part of Upper Silesia, a sliver of East Prussia, and some contested territories along the Czechoslovak border. These territorial acquisitions, along with the thousand-year history of conquest and migration that characterized Central and Eastern Europe, resulted in the presence of a substantial ethnic minority population within Polish borders as well as sizable Polish minorities within the borders of all the neighboring nations: Germany, the Soviet republics of Ukraine and Belorussia, Lithuania, Czechoslovakia, and Latvia [3]. According to the 1921 census, over 30 percent of all Polish citizens belonged to ethnic minorities. These included Ukrainians/Ruthenians (over 15 percent), Jews (8 percent), Belorussians (4 percent), Germans (3 percent), and small pockets of Lithuanians, Russians, Czechs, and Tatars and even smaller groups of Gypsies, Kashubians, and Karaites [4]. In many regions of Eastern Poland, these minorities, taken collectively, actually constituted a majority of Polish citizens. Almost half a century before the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act in America, Poland not only had agreed to the League of Nations June 28, 1919, supplementary Treaty of Versailles on the treatment of minorities, but also had passed its own rather progressive constitution in 1921, in which it voluntarily incorporated many of these same civil rights. In post-World War I Poland, there was to be equality under the law for all Polish citizens in respect to their economic, political, cultural and religious interests irrespective of race, national origin, or creed. Initially, genuine efforts were made to implement that legislation, though not always with success. In spite of the best of legislative intentions, there was (often officially sanctioned) Polish prejudice toward and discrimination against the ethnic minorities, especially in the eastern provinces, in almost every category guaranteed by the Constitution. The recitation of this litany of civil-rights transgressions begins usually with the incontestable fact that the 1919 Treaty for the Protection of Minorities was unilaterally abrogated by Poland in 1934. Without a basis of historical context, this statement is often cited as "proof" of Poland's bad-faith attitude toward its minorities. To begin with, this treaty itself, if not its content, was doomed from the very beginning, since the Poles regarded the Supreme Council's demand for its acceptance - in order to receive the formal recognition of the Polish state - both as an affront and as infringement on their sovereign rights as a nation to manage their own internal affairs. It was, after all, a matter both of international principle and of national pride. Second, although many countries had large minorities within their borders, not all were bound by this humanitarian treaty. The exceptions included Germany and the USSR, which, after their entry into the League of Nations, freely availed themselves of their right as member nations to supervise and criticize Poland's track record. Poland expressed its willingness to allow the League of Nations to continue to supervise its treatment of minorities, provided that the procedure was applied to other member countries as well - a fair request for equal treatment and one that would have immensely benefited the oppressed Polish minorities, among others, of Germany and the USSR. This point was brought home by Jozef Beck [Poland's Minister of Foreign Affairs] in a statement delivered to the League of Nations on September 13, 1934. And finally, the Treaty for the Protection of Minorities, like other such treaties, not only accorded certain rights and privileges to the Polish ethnic groups, but also imposed on them certain responsibilities and obligations: cooperation with the legitimately established government, loyalty to the nation that was to be their home, military service, national defense, and the obligation to obey the laws of the land and to preserve public order - civic duties that were often forgotten and, in the case of the radicals, always disregarded. However, since Poland did not grant autonomy to Eastern Galicia and, furthermore, adopted a centralist rather than the federalist plan proposed initially by Jozef Pilsudski [5] (to be sure, Poland had its share of radical nationalists), there may also have been other motives for Poland's abrogation of the Treaty. This is borne out by the fact that in the 1930s, many of the policies of the Pilsudski regime were assimilationist. These policies, in turn, led to an escalation of the already existing conflicts between the nationalist leaders and their followers on the one hand and the Polish authorities on the other. Some of the nationalists - the Ukrainian nationalists - resorted even to sabotage and terrorism. Unfortunately, when all else failed, the Polish government finally (in the early 1930s) attempted to address this public danger by launching a military "pacification action" against the Ukrainian nationalists, during which action those in charge sometimes failed to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty. Still, far fewer people died in this ten-week pacification campaign in Eastern Galicia than, for example, in the Ukrainian nationalists' relentless terrorist attacks on Polish citizens between 1921 and 1939. Moreover, the Polish policies of colonization, agrarian reform, and land grants to Polish veterans of war in the eastern territories produced much bitterness among the land-hungry Belorussians and Ukrainians, who resented the settlers and felt that all of the land, most of which was previously owned by Polish landlords, should go to them. Repressive measures were carried out sporadically against the Eastern Orthodox Church. There was also an effort to Polonize the public school system by decreasing the number of ethnic schools and increasing the number of bilingual ones (attended by both Polish and non-Polish children). And finally, preference was given to ethnic Poles over Jews in the professions that were hitherto over-represented by the latter, and proportionate quotas were imposed on Jewish university students. These restrictions were also applied to and affected both the Ukrainian and the Belorussian minorities. Nevertheless, it is also fair to say that, in the words of Jan Tomasz Gross:
The truth of this statement is borne out by the presence of numerous legal and even illegal political parties, as well as religious, educational, and sociocultural organizations in every major ethnic group. Moreover, the minorities had representation in the Polish Parliament, and all of them had access to the "free" press, which, to be sure, from time to time also ran embarrassing blank patches in the pages of various newspapers. In assessing the nature end extent of Polish interwar prejudice and discrimination, we must beware of judging the situation in Europe during those years by our own contemporary standards. Although the comparison to the contemporaneous plight of the minorities, including the Polish minorities, in the Soviet Union, Germany, or even Lithuania may be too extreme, what was the situation of the minorities in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s? When exactly did our minorities (specifically our Native Americans and African Americans, but others as well) finally achieve that full integration and equality promised by the United States Constitution? The United States, unlike Poland, embraced a prosperous nation of immigrants. The point is that in spite of the best legislative intentions, these matters take a long time to sort out in any pluralistic society; the new Republic of Poland - ravaged as it was by World War I, a series of continuing wars, and economic depression - was no exception. The cycle is a familiar one. Previous modes of accommodation break down, giving rise to social unrest and upheaval. Then, new forms of accommodation replace the old, only to eventually produce similar results, and so on and so forth until full assimilation, integration, or independence is finally achieved. In Poland, the root of the problem lay not in the Polish Constitution, but in its application and in the understandable impatience of the minorities who wanted justice from the newly established Republic and wanted it now. Some nationalist leaders, many of whom were of college age, wanted much more than that. They wanted national independence and the reunification of "their" ethnic territories. Theodore Herzl's words, mutatis mutandis, echo the political aspirations of all the nationalists in interwar Poland:
To Poland, the home of ethnic and religious minorities for centuries, the prospect of housing national minorities (i.e., Polish citizens, who did not regard themselves as Poles by nationality) constituted a grave danger to its very survival. The political objectives of all radical nationalists were, after all, separatist. The Ukrainian nationalists wanted a unified and independent Ukraine, or at least an independent "Western Ukraine". Their ultimate ambitions are best illustrated in both the old and the new maps of "Greater Ukraine", whose boundaries overreach even those of the present-day vast Ukrainian Republic and meander into the Polish heartland, Belarus, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and the Russian Federation [8]. The Belorussian nationalists also wanted their country reunited, but they dreaded the prospect of being forced to live under the Soviet yoke. Their formula was the same - reunion and independence. The Lithuanian nationalists wanted the predominantly Polish city of Wilno, the historic capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, "returned" to the Lithuanian Republic. The German nationalists wanted to continue living in their prewar domiciles, now on Polish soil - but how they wished those domiciles were back in their good old Vaterland, where they belonged! The Jewish nationalists and the Zionists looked to Palestine and meanwhile wanted to be regarded as a national minority in Poland, a nation within a nation. And that segment of the younger generation of politically active Jews, who were neither Bundists, nor noncommunist Zionists (as opposed to the Zionists who were "covertly or overtly" pro-communist [9]), nor assimilationists, nor Agudar Israel [10] in orientation, not having any territorial claims of their own, wanted all the rights and privileges promised by the communist ideology, which they embraced wholeheartedly. In Eastern Poland, they would have preferred the Soviet to the Polish rule. As long as Poland remained strong, ethnic conflicts - if not ethnic tensions - were effectively kept in check. Once Poland was weakened by the events of the war, all the safeguards of this fragile and unfinished democracy failed, and the most radical elements of the 'oppressed minorities' took advantage of this moment of weakness to settle old scores with the Polish ruling class as well as the underclass and to implement their own political agendas. As the Polish-Jewish intellectual, Aleksander Smolar, noted:
It was the radical members of this minorities who, rather than supporting Poland in its hour of need, chose to side with the enemy and vied with one another in their support of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, hoping thereby to achieve their objectives at Poland's expense. One group, the Ukrainian nationalists, did much more than that: beginning in the fall of 1942, they engaged in a campaign of ethnic cleansing. Meanwhile, both the Soviet Union and Germany attempted to achieve their own military and territorial objectives by taking advantage of and contributing to the ethnic tensions within Poland. And so, Marshal Pilsudski's worst fears became a reality. After the Polish-Ukrainian War, he said:
During World War II, it was murderous... The vast majority of the perpetrators, collaborators and accomplices of World War II are no longer alive, but the nations they represent live on, and the children of these nations will eventually have to come to terms with the "sins of their fathers". * * *
title page illustrations:
Last modified December 27, 2009 12:41 PM |
