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Victims of Choice
Although the fact that Jewish communists also wronged
fellow Jews, may be relevant for settling internal (intra-Jewish)
accounts, it is an irrelevant or, at best, a marginal consideration
in terms of Jewish relations vis-a-vis Poles, especially since
these Jewish communists, with very few exceptions, lost no time
reintegrating themselves into the Jewish community once their love
affair with the Soviets ceased.
Yaffa Eliach describes the fate of the communist
collaborators from the small town of Ejszyszki, populated by some
3000 Jews, as follows:
... there were about fifty Communists operating
clandestinely in Eishyshok during this period, about forty of whom
were Jewish. Many of them were highly committed political activists ...
The Communists considered the government of Poland their enemy,
and made violent attacks on the Polish police. When members of
Beitar assisted the Polish police on market day during the
mid-1930s, the Communists sometimes fought with them, too.
... The majority of the shtetl Communists survived the Holocaust,
having either fled to the Soviet Union or been exiled there by
the time the Germans arrived. In a stunning reversal, they who
had once denounced Zionists, who had sought to reform what they
saw as the parochial ethnicity of shtetl life so that the Jews
could move beyond that stunted identity to the Communist ideal
of a universal brotherhood, ended up as staunch Zionists and
fierce defenders of their Jewish, shtetl roots. For them ... life
in the Soviet Union proved the best antidote of all to their
Communist fervor ... Taking advantage of a post-World War II
repatriation act, most of them left the Soviet Union and returned
to Poland, from whence they were eventually able to make their
way to Canada, the United States, and Israel.
Moreover, when assessing Polish-Jewish relations under
the German occupation, Jewish historians, for example, lend little, if
any, weight to the fact that the Poles, who blackmailed Jews also
often targeted fellow Poles. Moreover, there is a dearth of evidence
that Jews suffered at the hands of Polish communists.
For the most part, in the Soviet zone, Poles were the
victims. The persecution and mistreatment of Poles took on a number
of forms from anti-Polish agitation and denunciations to arrests and
plundering of their possessions. The misdeeds were committed not only
by those formally in the service of the Soviet regime, but also by
countless unaffiliated helpers from all walks of life and social
classes.
The town of Mosciska, near Przemysl, is rather typical
in this regard. A Jewish eyewitness reports:
... The changes were implemented by the militia
and a committee of citizens, the majority of whom were Jews. By
and large they were the dregs of the shtetl, led by a few Jewish
communists, who now found themselves in charge after being released
from jail. The Poles were contemptuous of the Jewish rabble parading
through the streets with red armbands and rifles which they hardly
knew how to use, glorying in power that was all too short-lived. A
couple of months after they had done the dirty work, these Jewish
officials were replaced by Russians and Ukrainians.
In Oleszyce, a small town near Lubaczow, when the
Soviets entered on September 27, 1939:
... The Jews came out into the street in droves.
They threw red flowers and kissed the [Soviet] tanks. Kaufman
Durio, a Jew, was the first to hang a red blanket outside his
prosperous store. The barber Anhalt (who used to kiss the priest's
hand) pulled out some documents attesting to his long-standing
membership in the Communist Party. They congratulated one another
on their good fortune.
... 'The Poles are history, good riddance to Poland' - those were
the Jewish slogans one heard.
... The first days of 'freedom' in Oleszyce were accompanied by
plundering and robbery. Livestock and fields belonging to Polish
estates were distributed, the park and palace were ruined ...
A "selrada" [village council] was formed ... consisting
entirely of Jews and Ukrainians.
... Apart from the "selrada", the authority to spy and denounce
was vested in the local militia and its helpers. At first it
consisted of a dozen or so people, later it was reduced to a few.
They were almost all Jews.
... There were also Bolshevik confidants in Oleszyce. The fate of
the common people was in their hands. Most of the victims were
entirely innocent. Among the undercover agents were apparently
some Poles and in all probability some Ukrainians. However, the
participation of the Jews is beyond question. The most brutal were
the four Jews Kaufman, Spindel, Schneider and Schiller.
... In a short time Spindel managed to denounce one hundred people
who tried to cross over the Soviet-German frontier. ... For his
accomplishment he was called to Moscow, where he personally
received a distinction from Kalinin.
... All of the Jewish children and many of the Ukrainian children,
more than forty of them, joined the "pioneers".
... The Jewish school was moved to the chancellery of the Catholic
parish ... The upper rooms of the rectory were taken over by a
Jewish doctor, Jozef Schneebaum. ... Unkempt, impudent Jews filled
the entire rectory groaning and spitting on the stairs and walls.
The patients also came during the night, knocking by mistake on
the priest's door ...
In Boryslaw:
... From the first days they began to organize
a local citizens' militia. I knew almost all of them by sight and
their names, but couldn't find a Pole among them. These police
wore civilian clothes; they had red bands on their sleeves bearing
Russian writing and a crest. They were armed with hunting and
sporting weapons that had been seized. ... Their task was to
point out to the NKVD Polish families which, according to Soviet
criteria, should be counted among the exploiters, bourgeois and
bloodsuckers. They also helped to carry out searches and assisted
with the transport of Polish families into the interior of the
Soviet Union. They compiled separate lists of those to be
arrested and those to be deported.
A Jew named Wal together with his NKVD colleagues
descended on the home of a teacher in order to arrest her 18-year-old
son, Jerzy Kozlowski. "That's the one", Wal said, pointing to his
schoolmate Jerzy. When the Germans opened up the Soviet jail located
in the local "commissariat", after their entry into Boryslaw in June
1941, Jerzy's father found his son's body there, among hundreds of
others. His wife fainted as her husband carried him out. A large,
public funeral was organized to commemorate the victims of Bolshevism.
Later on, the Germans apprehended the parents of Wal, who had fled
with the Soviets, but the Kozlowskis wanted no part of German revenge.
"It's true their son is a bandit, but the parents are decent people.
I would like you to release them", Mrs. Kozlowska told the Germans.
They were taken aback by her magnanimity.
An eyewitness from Horodenka, Aleksander Topolski,
stated that: ... most of the local men who volunteered to work in
the Soviet militia and other security related establishments were
Jewish. He described their activities as follows:
... About a hundred men stood on the sidewalks
along the street through the main square. A lot of them were members
of the newly formed Communist militia, still in civilian clothes but
with red armbands. The militia, or properly the People's Militia,
was the name for the new policemen, the civil force of the Communist
state. Their job was to maintain public order and to serve the NKVD,
the Soviet secret police.
... Those in the streets welcoming the Red Army were waving their
arms, cheering, throwing flowers and blowing kisses at the Soviet
tanks rolling by. Most of them were Jewish.
From the moment they took over, the Communists seemed to be obsessed
with meetings. All day long there were meetings in the streets, in
front of important buildings (especially churches), in the workplaces,
in the schools. All of them followed the same routine. People were
ordered to attend them and those who simply happened to be in the
vicinity were rounded up and persuaded to join the meeting. The
militia and party members would take down the name of anybody trying
to leave a meeting before the end.
One day our geography teacher Jan Jurkow did not show up for his
morning lecture. ... In the middle of the night he was taken from his
home by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, assisted by the local
militia ... A few days later the son of a local printer, a high school
student two years older than me named Ziunek Prager, was arrested
the same way. ... His parents found out that after a week in
Horodenka he was transferred to a prison in Kolomyya [Kolomyja]
40 km away where he died a few months later.
More arrests followed. Eventually they became a daily occurrence. We
could see no pattern in the selection of people taken from their homes
in the middle of the night - lawyers, teachers, factory workers, small
farmers with half an acre of land and one mangy cow or two goats,
young people and ninety-year-old pensioners. They were mainly Poles
but with a sprinkling of Ukrainians and Jews.
... Meanwhile the local militia was trying to outdo the NKVD in their
attempts to eradicate the "counter-revolutionary element" in Horodenka.
They compiled lists of people who had been active in such pre-war
"counter-revolutionary" organizations as the Red Cross, Voluntary Fire
Brigade, Boy Scouts, and Sokol Gymnast Association. All of them were
considered suspect and one by one they were being arrested.
News about the departure of my uncles, aunts and cousins reached the
local militia and in no time a red-haired misshapen creature with a
star on his cloth cap banged at our front door. As soon as we let him
in he started going from room to room looking around. He carried a
rifle slung under his arm the way hunters carry their shotguns. He
wasn't used to carrying one and it kept banging against furniture and
doors. His gibberish, which purported to be Russian, was a mixture of
Yiddish, Polish and Ukrainian, garnished by a few Russian words. But
his message was clear. We had too much free space in our house and
father's study would be requisitioned for two Soviet soldiers.
The three [Jewish] doctors [from Krakow] were caught
by the Soviets while trying to cross the border to Romania. Somehow
they had contacted Kielec who lived in Stecowa. For a few dollars he
agreed to show them the way to Romania and walked them to a spot from
where they could see the border. ... Although they were left almost
at the border, the doctors lost their bearings and ran into a Soviet
patrol. Hoping for more lenient treatment by their captors, they led
the patrol to Kielec's house. Kielec was arrested together with an
innocent friend of his who just happened to be at his house when the
patrol arrived.
The prison staff [in the main prison in Czortkow] who conducted
the search were a forbidding looking lot. They were recent recruits
from the local population. ... Our new guard, a swaggering young
Jewish fellow, was the most abusive of them all, swearing at us in
crude Russian.
My family also tried to obtain my release by bribing NKVD officials
in Czortkow. They did not know then that NKVD officials at every level
of the Soviet administration were terrified of being denounced by
somebody for helping imprisoned "enemies of the people". As a rule
they would refuse even to meet petitioners. However, the local
militiamen would hint to the naive that they had ways and means to
reach the top commissars who could drop the charges and release the
prisoners 'but it would cost a lot of money'.
After the war my mother and my sister Maria told me that they both
fell for that. For a pair of golden earrings with emeralds and a
matching brooch, a local militiaman promised to arrange a meeting
with the 'top NKVD man'.
Next in line of our official visitors were the vospitateli, a term
loosely translated as educators or counsellors. They were free men
who lived outside the prison. ... This title was applied to
individuals whose official job was to indoctrinate us with the proper
communist ideas, ... act as monitors and watch for any signs of
negative attitudes toward the Soviet system, all the while quietly
organizing a network of stool-pigeons ...
All of the vospitateli counsellors were Jewish. As a matter of fact
nearly the entire administration of the Corrective Labour Colony
[in Kiev] was staffed by Jews. They also held all the better
jobs where no hard physical work was needed.
Filek Birnbaum, a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew from Sniatyn near my
hometown of Horodenka, was in charge of our cell. ... Filek
Birnbaum's dad was a wealthy merchant in Sniatyn.
... Filek Birnbaum had been under the wing of a group of Jewish adult
prisoners who were working in the bedstead assembly shop. This was a
good place to work. The low norms of production in that workshop had
been set in cahoots with the normirovshchik (official who establishes
the norms), the naryadchik (output calculator) and the accounting
office. As a result every worker there was a Stakhanovite, a title
awarded to those whose output soared well beyond the norm for the job.
... Those workers who more than fulfilled their norms were not only
paid extra but were given access to special stores with better food
and clothing, and sometimes moved into better apartments.
In the early spring of 1940 the NKVD began rounding up and deporting
to Siberia or the steppes of Central Asia the "socially dangerous
element" from Soviet-occupied Poland. About that time an unexpected
visitor came to see my family in the middle of the night. He was the
aged Mr. Frischling whose son had been my father's pupil before the
first world war and whose grandson Dov was in one class with me in
our high school. Under the Soviets, Dov's father became the chief of
the local militia unit. It was he who sent his old father, Mr.
Frischling, with a message that our family was on the list of people
to be arrested and deported the following morning. They left Horodenka
by train in the wee hours of the morning, taking with them a few
suitcases and a large wicker basket full of clothes. It was kind of
the Frischlings to warn them, but they rewarded themselves promptly
for that good deed. No sooner had my family left Horodenka than the
Frischlings and their friends helped themselves to everything they
fancied in our house.
Wanda Pomykalska, a young Polish woman, who fell into
the hands of the NKVD when caught trying to cross the border over to
Hungary, recounts a similar experience including betrayal and a brutal
interrogation with racial overtones:
... Becoming suddenly affable, [Kindrachuk,
the Ukrainian militiaman] said, 'I will see you across the border
safely if you will pay me one hundred zlotys (approximately twenty
dollars, US)' ... Kindrachuk confided that he would have to take us
to the local militia who has spotted us. ... The peasant driver
cracked his whip, and the horses trotted on to Delatyn. ... The
peasant stopped in front of a small, dimly lit building. ... A few
minutes later, he escorted us to the office.
I stopped in astonishment. There at the desk, sat David Glucksman,
from my home town [Warsaw]. I had known him when we were
students together. A large picture of Stalin with dark frame was
behind him. Glucksman was as surprised as I was. ... All I could
think to say was, 'I had no idea you were a Communist'. Glucksman
glanced sharply at Kindrachuk, then looking at me steadily, he said,
'I ... ah ... well ... it so happened the job was offered, and here
I am'.
[In the jail in Nadworna, after being double-crossed by Kindrachuk]:
... Here, too, were a few Jewish people, which was a surprise
because so many of them served the Communist cause. However, there
were also some Jews here who apparently opposed the collectivization
and were arrested along with the rest of us. Some warned us that this
jail was known for brutal treatment ...
Then the story of Rosa was told. 'Rosa was a communist', another of
the women told me. 'Her father is a rabbi. She worked for the NKVD
here in Nadworna, and was unexpectedly arrested late one night by
the very people she worked for. She was charged with being an enemy
of the people. 'The only clue we have to what it was about is that
her boyfriend was arrested first. We don't know what he might have
aid. Then, her father - who had tried to intervene - was also
arrested. They charged him, too, with being an 'enemy of the people'.
... The big truck I was led into was tightly packed with fifty men
and women. All were dirty from their long prison stay, yet were
very intelligent, able people. There were teachers, farmers,
foresters, doctors, and even a mayor among them.
... After an hour drive, I saw that the road, visible above the rear
half doors, looked familiar. It was the road into Stanislawow. Soon
the familiar city streets appeared. The truck rounded a corner and
entered a large backyard of what was once a school building. Drawn
up around it was a large contingent of NKVD and local militia. The
militia were carrying recognizable Polish rifles - stolen from the
hands of our disarmed Polish soldiers, as I had seen before. This
group seemed to be composed of half Jews and half Ukrainians. Despite
their local origin, the two groups were working together. This fact
struck me as a curious combination because I had always thought the
two hated each other. Their hate seemed now to be directed against
us, and with their pointed bayonets, they charged up to us with cold
fury and roughly ordered us into the basement of the building.
[During interrogations at the prison in Kiev in the spring of 1940]:
... An NKVD lieutenant sat at the table. He gestured for me to
sit down opposite him ... He wore a crew cut and appeared to be about
thirty-five years old. ... He knew some Polish. ... 'You were
illegally crossing the Hungarian border'. ... 'If you refuse to give
the truth', he said, 'You will get a much longer sentence'. He blew
a stream of smoke from his cigarette, pushed the papers toward me,
extended the pen, and said, 'Sign'.
... Again and again, he would start the interrogation over, repeating
himself step by step.
... With two or three hours of sleep, we kept going like this for
almost a month, never knowing which would be one's fateful night.
... I was told again, 'You Poles are against our best friends, the
Germans. We, the Soviets, have an alliance with Hitler. Being against
the Nazi-communist alliance is counter-revolutionary', he barked. ...
Some hours later, he leaned back in his chair and told me he was a
Jew. Then he burst into laughter, saying, 'Well now ... answer me -
would a Polish girl be allowed to date a Jewish boy in Poland?'
Good God, I thought, another guilt was poured on me. But I was told
about these questions in my cell. These questions were often aimed
at Poles because they were Poles, and sometimes even misdirected at
the Polish Jews, too. I forced a smile, and then as mother used to
do, I answered the question with a question, 'Yes, but how about the
good Jewish mother who always wants her son to marry a nice Jewish
girl?'
He reddened. Moments later, he began scribbling furiously and was
silent. The writing went on and on. ... once more I found myself
asking a question. I asked whether the churches here stay open or
closed. 'The synagogues, yes. The churches, no', he said. He told
me that the churches were turned into cinemas or horse stables and
named Odessa's Cathedral which was first closed and then leveled
by dynamite.
One young observer from Luck, in Volhynia, noted:
... Among those arrested were Ruthenians
[Ukrainians] and Jews and both of these minorities started
changing their, at first very warm-hearted, attitude toward the
actions of the Bolshevik authorities. After several Communist Jews
and Ruthenian nationalists were arrested, the more reasonable ones
began to turn away from the Reds. The Jewish intelligentsia led by
the rabbi evidently drew up a list of Jews involved in the actions
of the red authorities. Nevertheless the attitude of both these
minorities toward the Poles continued to be very unfriendly and
annoyances were the order of the day. This hatred manifested itself
particularly during elections to the "supreme soviet", when the
Communists (mostly Jews) marked the Poles who dodged the balloting,
they brought the urns to the beds of sick people, and also
'accompanied' people to the polling place.
Elsewhere in Volhynia, a Pole recalls with some
bitterness:
... The Ukrainians in the rural areas and the
Jews from the urban areas were recruited into Soviet intelligence.
The Polish Jews, who, in general, had been better off than the
Polish gentiles, showed their "gratitude" to the Poles. I am not
an anti-Semite, but I cannot overlook the fact that the Jews, who
had been welcome in Poland for several centuries (since at least
the days of King Kazimierz Wielki [Casimir the Great]),
enthusiastically supported the occupying powers. By collaborating
with the Russian Communists, the Jews themselves sowed the seeds
of anti-Semitic feelings among the Polish population of the Polish
Eastern Borderlands. The Jews had no idea what the Germans were
planning for them. Despite the conduct of many Polish Jews, a
large bloc of Polish gentiles later risked their lives to assist
the Jews during the later German occupation of Wolyn [Volhynia]
and the ensuing Holocaust.
The Polish chief of police, Eugeniusz Kowalski, was
told by the Soviet invaders to continue in his post in Tuczyn, Volhynia.
Within a week, however, the NKVD, accompanied by two Jews wearing red
armbands, arrived at his home during the night to take him away.
Similar scenes were enacted throughout Volhynia.
In Kowel, a Polish doctor was denounced by a Soviet Jew,
a doctor from Kiev, in October 1939, and deported to Karaganda. The
Pole's home was taken over by this Jew and later on his wife and four
children were also deported to Siberia.
A cruel fate awaited a Polish woman by the name of
Marusia, who, dodging machine-gun fire, miraculously managed to escape
from Soviet Ukraine in 1932 at the height of the artificial famine that
had consumed her immediate family and millions of other "kulaks". She
settled in Dubno, where she rebuilt her life as a factory worker, only
to be betrayed to the NKVD in October 1939 by a Jewish co-worker, a
professional denouncer, who reported her as an escapee from the USSR.
Marusia was imprisoned and disappeared in May 1940.
Anti-Semitism could also be readily invoked as a pretext
to strike at Poles.
In Huta Stepanska near Kostopol, a farmer by the
name of Henryk Sawicki was denounced as an "anti-Semite" and promptly
arrested. His "anti-Semitism" stemmed from the competition that his
bakery generated in the town of Stepan, where hitherto Jewish bakeries
enjoyed a monopoly.
In a small town near Pinsk, a Jewish woman with a red
armband appeared on the doorstep of the home of a postmaster and
denounced him to the NKVD as a Polish government employee. He was
arrested and deported, never to be seen again. The Jewish woman had
been poor before the war and, out of compassion, the postmaster's wife
would often leave milk or bread when passing by her house. When the
postmaster's wife asked her Jewish neighbour, why she did this after
all the help she had received, the woman answered: ... Well, maybe
someday I'll bring milk for your children. In due course, as the
family of a deported Polish government employee, the postmaster's wife
and daughter were also exiled.
A Jewish woman by the name of Weizingrin, who lived at
no. 10 Sw. Kinga Street in Lwow, made it her business to get as much
information as possible regarding the whereabouts of the two sons of an
elderly Polish woman by the name of Janowska, a fellow tenant. One of
the sons had been a policeman in Przemysl; the other a high-ranking
member of the scouting organization. Unable to learn anything,
Weinzigrin started to harass the Poles, who lived in her building. She
would scream on the staircase:
... Nu, your whore, Poland, lies in a grave again
for a hundred years!
One Pole recalled how, on October 2, 1939, two Jewish
school colleagues from Tarnopol chased after him in Kosciuszko Park in
Lwow, screaming to the "red militia": Polish fascist! Catch that
fascist! One of these Jews, Fritz Wechsler, joined the Soviet
"militia", while the other, Jozef Ostersetzer, later became a policeman
in the Tarnopol ghetto. Fortunately, this Pole managed to escape from
the clutches of his foes.
Tadeusz Niewolanski, a sergeant in the Polish Army, was
less fortunate. After returning from war to Lwow, he laid low in his
home. When he ventured out on All Souls' Day, November 1, 1939, to
visit the grave of his sister in the Janow cemetery, he was recognized
by local Jews, whom he knew. They immediately called NKVD soldiers, who
chased after and captured him in the street. Niewolanski was imprisoned
in the Zamarstynowska Street and Brygidki prisons, and subsequently
murdered by the Soviets in Kiev in the spring of 1940.
On October 20, 1939, Iusimov, the Soviet commissar
appointed to oversee the Lwow Polytechnic University, convoked a
meeting for the purpose of liquidating the prewar students' corporation,
whose leadership was accused of abuses against the working class. The
meeting was attended mostly by Jewish students. When Jewish communists
got up to speak they railed against activists of "anti-Semitic"
organizations present in their midst and fingered several Polish students
in the audience. In an atmosphere reminiscent of rallies in Nazi Germany,
these students were dragged from their places, punched and kicked, and
then forcibly removed from the meeting room. They were shot dead in the
corridor outside while the orchestra played on at the meeting.
Jewish students - "komsomol" activists, who were often
doing poorly in their studies - received the majority of appointments to
admission committees and even instigated a witch hunt that led to the
removal of Polish faculty members for allegedly oppressing Jewish
students. These students were the ones who had gone out of their way to
deride prewar Poland and the Poles until a visit by the deputy minister
of education, who let it be known that their conduct was unacceptable.
Their enthusiasm for the Soviet regime did not wane, however, and was
evident by the pictures of Stalin they wore on their breasts.
Polish lawyers were one of the first groups to be arrested,
after many of them had been denounced by their Jewish colleagues.
According to Aleksander Wat, a leading inter-war communist literary
figure of Jewish descent:
... In Lwow, there were jailers and denouncers,
quite a few Jewish denouncers, in fact a very large number. Jews were
more inclined to collaborate with the Soviet authorities. Many prewar
Communists appeared on the scene, like mushrooms after a rain, and
prewar Polish Communists were for the most part Jews.
Stanislaw Skrzypek, a Pole arrested in November 1939 for
his underground activities, had a first-hand opportunity to view
denouncers at work while he was held in the NKVD premises on Pelczynska
Street in Lwow:
... In the course of those two days that I had to
wait in the corridor I realized that the N.K.V.D. had succeeded in
organizing an information gathering network. Every now and then there
would pass in the corridors older men, women, even school students,
who came to denounce their friends and colleagues. To be sure most of
them were Jews ...
In Trembowla, the arrest and mistreatment of Poles was
facilitated by local Jews and Ukrainians:
... who formed the core of the Soviet militia, donned
red armbands, were issued rifles and took to collaborating with the Soviet
authorities in getting rid of the remnants of Polish influences.
In nearby Wierzbowiec, local Jews with red armbands pointed
out Poles who were then arrested and mistreated by the Soviets.
In Skalat, Maciej Bernard, the head of the new Bolshevik town
council, agitated for the pacification and deportation of Poles from the
area, and mobilized the "Workers' Police", composed almost exclusively of
Jews, to carry out those objectives.
A Pole, who had made his way to Podwoloczyska on a
reconnaissance assignment for the nascent Polish underground aroused the
suspicion of two young, ardent Jewish militiamen who arrested him and brought
him to the NKVD office. Before his interrogation, the Pole had managed to
eat the notes and photographs he had made. He convinced his NKVD interrogators
that he had gotten lost looking for his family. He was released and taken
to the train station.
In Zloczow, Stefan Zugaj was arrested in November 1939, after
being denounced by a Jewish woman named Lajder, an agent of the NKVD. Until
May of 1941 he was imprisoned in the Castle in Zloczow, but his later fate
remains unknown.
The Polish underground in Czortkow began collecting information
about the activities of the NKVD and its collaborators consisting mostly of
Jews, who were especially active in the "militia", where they compiled
dossiers about the local population. As a result of such a denunciation Witold
Lozinski, a Polish activist, was arrested already in the first weeks of the
occupation, and subsequently murdered by the Soviets in Kiev in the spring of
1940.
After a failed revolt against Soviet rule staged by the Polish
underground on January 21, 1940, mass arrests of suspected Poles ensued based
on intelligence reports prepared by local collaborators. One participant in
the revolt was fortunate enough to escape to Romania after the NKVD, guided
by a young local Jew, descended on his family's home in search of him.
Markus Ajzenszer, a Jew from Mizun, was assigned the task of
organizing the Soviet "militia" in Stryj and took an active part in arresting
and deporting Poles. He became well known for his brutal treatment of Polish
officers, soldiers, settlers, teachers and priests.
In Sniatyn, Wladyslaw Bielecki and Wasilewski were two of
several teachers at the local high school arrested by the NKVD after being
denounced by Jews, who were filled with glee. Bielecki's denouncer confided:
... So why did he fail my son? Now he'll sit. Bielecki, also a reserve
officer of the Polish Army, was subsequently murdered by the Soviets in Kiev
in the spring of 1940.
Stanislaw (Staszek) Jackowski, a "Righteous Gentile" credited
with saving the lives of 32 Jewish men, women, and children in Stanislawow,
recalled that:
... thousands of Jews willingly cooperated with the Soviets
after their occupation of eastern Poland in 1939.
An account from Zaleszczyki states:
... My grandfather was deported to Siberia with his wife
and four of my father's siblings after being denounced by a Jewish co-worker
whom he had helped to get a job.
Another Pole from the Stanislawow region also commented on the
large number of Jews, who were guilty of betrayal.
An eyewitness from Kosow Huculski, a small town of about 7000
people in that same voivodship, recalls:
... The first to be arrested were professional military
men, police functionaries, township clerks, and some of the forest wardens.
Some of the Ukrainians and Jews took an active role in compiling lists of
"enemies of the people" and hunting down those earmarked for deportation to
Siberia.
In Drohiczyn, the NKVD soon attracted a network of helpers and
denouncers made up of Jews and Belorussians. The Jews, in particular, took
over important functions in the administration and militia. Out of a population
of 2500, some 30 families, for the most part Poles, were deported to the "gulag".
In Wilno, which was reoccupied by the Soviets again in the
summer of 1940 after their takeover of Lithuania:
... All former Polish civil servants, army officers, large
estate holders, factory owners ... were arrested and put in prison. The
arrests took place mostly at night. They were carried out by NKVD
functionaries with the assistance of the local militia consisting mostly of
Jews.
The author of that account, a former policeman, was fingered in
the town of Podbrzezie on November 13, 1940 by Eljokum Berson, a Jewish
communist from Wilno, who recognized him. He was arrested by the local "militia"
and sent for interrogation to Wilno and then to Lukiszki prison. He was
sentenced to eight years of hard labour and exiled to Vorkuta.
Jews played a prominent role in the network of NKVD confidants,
established by the NKVD in Wilno, and turned in many Polish officers in hiding,
prewar officials and political activists.
Tadeusz Kiersnowski, a prominent lawyer, town councillor and
activist in the National Party (Stronnictwo Narodowe), was arrested on July 12,
1940 by the NKVD, who came to his home in the company of a Jew. Kiersnowski was
imprisoned in Lukiszki prison and deported to the "gulag" on June 23, 1941.
That same Jew then went to arrest Dr. Dobrzanski, a member of the Polish
Committee.
Professor Stanislaw Cywinski, a publicist in the nationalist
Catholic press, was denounced by Jews in Wilno. He was imprisoned in Kirov,
where he died in March 1941 after being severely tortured.
Leftists were not immune either - Witold Dewojno, the director
of the Revenue Office in Bialystok, was also denounced by Jews and subsequently
murdered by the Soviets in Katyn in the spring of 1940.
According to Polish reports, mass arrests of Poles in the
Bialystok region commenced in October 1939. The NKVD and the "red militia",
recruited mainly from the local Jewish population, used the materials
copiously gathered by the illegal Alliance of Communist Youth of Western
Belorussia (even before the war that ethnically Polish area was not regarded
as part of Poland in communist propaganda).
Even in small towns of under 1000 people, such as Jody, near
Braslaw, there was no shortage of collaborators. According to a Jewish resident:
... The NKVD (Soviet Secret Police) soon created a climate
of fear in Jody. A few of our Jewish boys worked with the NKVD and a few Jews
became prominent in the new government of Jody.
... Our families were considered neutral because of two episodes which brought
us suffering under the Russians.
In December, 1939 our mill in Jody burned to the ground. The next morning my
father and my uncles Abraham, Meir, Leibke, and Hillel were arrested and sent
to the jail in Braslaw, charged with arson and as enemies of the State.
Someone (we think we know who) [one can safely assume it was a fellow Jew
- M.P.], had told the NKVD that my uncle Hillel had said that: '...
rather than give the mill to the Communists, we will burn it down'.
Of course, that was not true, but under Soviet "justice" no witness had to
face the accused. A signed statement by a single witness was sufficient to
condemn anyone to a long prison term or even death.
... The following day, my father and my uncle Abraham were released
[this was accomplished with the intervention of Soviet officers quartered in
the family home, who also helped to get the others out of prison. Poles, on the
other hand, rarely had such connections - M.P.].
The NKVD was systematically arresting and deporting thousands of people. Anyone
that was rich in Poland, or was a Polish government employee, or anyone they
did not like or just suspected may be an enemy of the state was at risk. A new
system of informers developed and many innocent people were arrested and
deported without any trial.
In Kleck, near the Soviet border, a local Jew led some Soviet
soldiers to the home of a Polish notary, whose automobiles they seized. In
February 1940, another local Jew came to register the notary's family - that
family was subsequently deported to Kazakhstan in April of that year. The
notary's wife recalled:
... Unfortunately, many of our local Jews assisted the new
arrivals [ie: Soviets] by pointing out families [for deportation]
and by taking part in searches and other activities.
In the town of Kurzeniec, near Wilejka, according to a Jewish
source:
... The Soviet authorities were helped along in these and
other matters by local activists who cooperated with them, often to the
detriment of others - Jews as well as non-Jews - and informed on them as to
their wealth, political reliability, and so forth. Some people were taxed
into poverty, deprived of their houses, furniture, and all material goods.
Some were even sent to Siberia as a result of the activities of informers.
... Most of these activists had retreated along with the Soviets, well ahead
of the approaching Germans, because they feared retribution from the
non-Jewish population who were anti-Soviet.
... Many of those who fled survived the war. Of the families that activists
left behind, none survived. During the first weeks of the German occupation,
such an outcome could not be foreseen. Had anybody described such a scenario
as eventually coming to pass, we would have considered them deranged.
Bronislaw Cianiecki, who lived in an area north of Wilno,
described the fate of his family which was ruined by a denunciation:
... In 1940 my father was a medical officer in the area of
Hoduciszki, Swieciany, Lyntupy and Moldziewicze. A Jewish woman by the name
of Birgsztajn, his assistant, reported to the Soviet authorities that my
father was connected with, helped and sheltered enemies of the Soviet Union.
In the middle of winter, the NKVD arrested my father in his white frock and
with his medical first-aid case.
My mother and we four underage children - two older sisters, a younger brother
and myself - were left to fend for ourselves. After a while a local
Belorussian state employee told my mother in confidence that any day we
would be exiled to Siberia.
We escaped to Wilno at night taking refuge with some friends. The NKVD found
us indirectly through the Lithuanian police. We - four children - were taken
away from our mother by force and placed in a house near the Orthodox church
on Ostrobramska Street.
... After some time, we were taken from Ostrobramska Street and, together with
a few hundred Polish children, placed in some cottages located in a forest on
the Wilia River - more than a dozen kilometres from Wilno ...
[after the Germans attacked the Soviets on June 22, 1941]: ... during the
night the Jewish-Bolshevik teaching staff shut the doors of the children's
buildings with steel bars, leaving us to die without food, while they drove
off in vehicles ...
The children yelled and cried terribly. The doors were opened by a woman from a
forester's lodge who happened to be gathering dry twigs in the forest and
responded to the children's screaming. Hundreds of children scattered in the
forest and I do not know what became of them. The four of us returned to Wilno
holding each other's hands.
Eugeniusz Klimowicz, a member of a Polish underground organization
in Naliboki, northeast of Nowogrodek, was arrested and imprisoned by the Soviets.
During his interrogation, he was shown a denunciation concocted by Chaja
Szymonowicz, a local Jewish woman.
The area around Jedwabne had a particularly strong Polish anti-Soviet
underground. On June 25, 1940, a resolution was passed at a special meeting of the
"Communist Regional Committee Office" in Bialystok to engage the security forces,
the "militia" and the "local committees" to liquidate the Polish underground
(according to Soviet sources, the attempts to recruit Polish agents and informants
was largely unsuccessful and their usefulness was very limited - those were mostly
members of the Polish underground, apprehended by the Soviets, spared in exchange
for their services as agents).
A corporal in the interwar Polish Army from the village of Witynie,
near Jedwabne, who was next in command of the local Polish underground organization,
was delivered into the hands of his sadistic NKVD torturers on July 4, 1940 by a
local Russian resident and a Jew by the name of Jocher Lewinowicz, who had been put
in charge of the newly formed village cooperative.
After enduring months of torture in various prisons, he was coerced
to confess and was sentenced to eight years in the "gulag". He was deported to the
far northern reaches of Russia in January of the following year.
Kazimierz Zebrowski, a small landowner, denounced to the NKVD after
returning from the September 1939 campaign, managed to flee from his home in
Zebry-Wybranowo, near Lomza, and went into hiding. The NKVD became frequent
visitors - in particular a Polish Jew, who served in their ranks - harassed the
family on account of the disappearance of its head. The entire family was
eventually arrested on June 20, 1941, at two in the morning, and deported.
During the voting in November 1939 to sanction the incorporation of
this area into Soviet Belorussia, an NKVD officer accompanied by a Jew came to the
rectory in Szumowo to ensure that the priests went to the polls.
After the German aggression on thir former Soviet allies in June 1941,
when the NKVD office in Sniadowo was broken into, one of the priests from Szumowo,
Rev. Kazimierz Lupinski, was shown a denunciation filed by a local Jew accusing him
of contacts with a Polish Army officer.
In the Volhynian villages near Rokitno, arrogant Jews wearing red
armbands - in their new roles as reeves, militiamen and functionaries of all manner
- became conspicuous. They struck fear in the villagers when they came around to
record the names of the residents and carry out inventories of all kinds -
landholdings, livestock, etc. They posted placards depicting Polish farmers as
yoked oxen and summoned them to lengthy meetings at which the Polish legal
authorities were maligned.
Jews also came around to purchase cattle and hogs at cut-prices,
urging the Poles:
... Sell quickly because you'll need the money. The freight
trains have already been assembled for you at the station in Rokitno.
In Krzemieniec, Jews assumed leading positions in the administration
and educational facilities. The task of purging the holdings of the library of the
famed "Lyceum" fell to a young Jewish communist - Jews were omnipresent in the
"electoral committees" agitating in favour of the formal incorporation of Eastern
Poland into the Soviet Union.
A large number of NKVD confidants, recruited from the ranks of
local Jewish communists, facilitated the arrests of scores of Polish officials.
In October 1939, the NKVD, accompanied by local Jewish and
Ukrainian militiamen, arrested Zaufal, the Polish "starosta" (county supervisor)
of Krzemieniec.
Jan Sulkowski's turn came on March 22, 1940 (Good Friday), when
he was arrested in Krzemieniec, after being denounced by a Jewish neighbour,
Josek Kagan, an informer for the NKVD (Sulkowski, the county secretary, was charged
with such crimes as "associating with kulaks" and "speaking of the poor quality of
products from the USSR". The case was a plain travesty of justice with local Jews
testifying against him as "witnesses" and a Jewish people's "judge', rubber-stamping
the verdict.
His daughter, Janina Sulkowska-Gladun, recalls her own arrest in
Krzemieniec in late March 1940. She was imprisoned in Dubno for a year together
with her Polish colleagues from the underground and was subjected to forms of
torture and racist taunting at the hands of the sadistic Jewish warden similar
to those administered by the Nazis in their prisons.
... I recognized Truchun [Trukhun] as the NKVD officer,
who had arrested my father; he was accompanied by an ordinary Red Army soldier
and a local Jewish militiaman. I did not know that most of my underground comrades
were similarly being rounded up, or were already in custody and undergoing
interrogation. Our underground organization was being methodically smashed by the
NKVD.
Truchun announced that I was under arrest and we were pushed into a corner of the
kitchen while a search was conducted. The house was ransacked and my personal
property scattered; Truchun threw my letters and a school photo of me into his
briefcase. They were searching for "evidence" - and for booty which they could
claim.
I was frightened that they would discover my secret messages and orders which I
kept in a hollowed-out soap near the stove. False ID's and other incriminating
documents were hidden in our sofa and in an old wineskin. The Jew had heard
something rustling in the wineskin and was greedily throttling it like it was
an animal that had swallowed something valuable. But luckily for us he abandoned
the search to go with Truchun to get a car.
I was driven to Dubno by car and immediately taken to the office of NKVD Colonel
Vinokur, the Nachalnik or Commandant for the region. His office was crammed with
an assortment of furniture, food, and plundered items that included commodes,
sofas, tapestries and a glass-case with jams and conserves.
... Vinokur was seated behind a large desk and politely asked me to sit down
across from him in a plush chair.
... Chaim Vinokur spoke to me in Ukrainian (he was a Jew from Kiev) while I
answered in Polish.
The interrogators peppered me with questions in Russian ... A rather dim-witted
Jewish girl was called in as a translator but I was able to befuddle her. She was
quickly sent away by Vinokur who would soon demonstrate to the boys from Moscow
the finer points of an interrogation.
... The session had been going in circles for several hours and I was very tired.
... How easily I had fallen into his trap! I felt like a child caught with her
hands in the cookie jar.
Take this 'polskaia kurva' [Polish whore] out! - Vinokur waved his hand as
the men from Moscow nodded their heads in awe.
I soon discovered that most of the positions in the prison and security systems
were given to the dregs of Jewish society.
Following my family's arrest, my interrogations became more vicious as I would
spend some 40 sessions on a chair beneath a glaring light surrounded by NKVD
interrogators. The anger in Vinokur and Titow now flowed to the surface. They
screamed in my face and promised me a death sentence. They paraded tortured
friends in front of me whom they would later murder. They kept me in solitary
confinement and in a frozen cell. And they tortured me. The majority of my
interrogations took place in the first half of my year-long stay in Dubno jail
which was from March 1940 to March 1941.
One particular session is burned into my memory. It seemed like another dreary
night. I was dismissing Titov's endless and predictable questions which he spit
into my face, with my usual shrugs, when Colonel Vinokur emerged from the
background and twisted my chair close to his face. 'So you don't think I could
just kill you like a dog?', he growled. I sensed that this was something more
than the usual threats. He narrowed his eyes and a muscle twitched in his cheek.
He undid his holster and took out his revolver. ... Suddenly I felt him brushing
my cheek with the cold barrel, and then against my temple. I could distinctly
feel the rolling of the tumbler, and then the click of the trigger. My God!
He was playing Russian roulette against my head!
'Believe. Believe, you Polish cunt!', Vinokur screamed and pulled the trigger.
The sound of the hammer exploded in my head - but no bullet came forth. And
then he pulled it a second time, and a third time.
... I came close to fainting ... and then Vinokur put his gun away.
... A week later I was to experience another unusual and "shocking" method of
torture which had been concocted by my tormentors. I became a guinea pig in their
experimentation in the art of arriving at the "truth". This was their "electric
chair". I was taken for a nightly session and was seated in the regular chair
under the light. ... suddenly I was thrown out of the chair by some great unseen
force! I found myself on the floor with my legs twitching. What had happened?
They picked me up and threw me back into the seat. I was asked the same question,
which I barely heard and didn't answer - and once more I was hurled into the air.
I shook like a rag doll. The shock was repeated a third time and I started to
choke. After a minute or so of trying to catch my breath, the disembodied voice
of Colonel Vinokur boringly announced that he was satisfied - for now.
I was dragged back to my cell. My body felt peculiar, but it was my mind that
took somewhat longer to recuperate. Marusia (my cellmate) later told me that I
was babbling and sobbing.
It was also a chair that in a less dramatic way caused even more excruciating
and much longer-lasting pain. I was barely 5 foot 2 inches and my legs dangled
like a child's, when seated in the interrogation chair. The sessions almost
always lasted through the night for eight hours and longer, during which I was
not allowed to eat or go to the washroom, nor could I get off this throne to
rest my feet on the ground. The cumulative effect of muscular inactivity and
the buildup of blood in my lower limbs caused my feet and legs to swell - and
produced horrible pain, especially when first trying to walk.
... However, I realized that my treatment at the hands of the NKVD was mild
compared to what many of my friends were subject to, perhaps in the very same
interrogation chambers. Leon Kowal was repeatedly beaten as was Pius Zaleski
[Pius Zaleski was subsequently sent to the "gulag" in the Komi ASSR, where he
died on Oct. 6, 1941 - he was 29]. Others had needles jammed under their
fingernails, their fingers were crushed and their testicles burned. Women were
also beaten or kept in cells of freezing water or human sewage. Many of them
would eventually be murdered. Yet what I was to experience later in the Gulag
was such that I looked upon my stay in Dubno as my "golden days".
Zbigniew Jan Dabrowski, who was imprisoned in Luck before being
deported to Kolyma, shared a cell with a Jewish dentist from Torczyn, who had
been denounced for hiding valuables and arrested. This Jew was again denounced
inside the jail by a Jewish "kapo", who had been planted in their cell and in
whom the dentist confided. When Dabrowski was finally taken to trial after five
months of interrogation, he and his fellow accused were assigned a lawyer from
the security office by the name of Rachman, a Jew who spoke Polish poorly.
Rather than defending his "clients", Rachman worked hand in glove
with the judges to ensure their speedy conviction as counter-revolutionaries.
Dabrowski received a fifteen-year sentence of hard labour in the "gulag".
In Derazne, local Jews and Ukrainians denounced the former
Polish authorities and openly rejoiced at the downfall of Poland.
Local Jews (as well as Ukrainians) were also involved in the
arrest of Polish settlers in the colony of Pilsudy (Horodziec), near Antonowka,
in Sarny county.
In Niweck, a colony near Dabrowica, local Ukrainians and Jews,
among them members of the "communist committee", robbed the homes of the Polish
settlers and denounced them to the Soviet authorities.
An eyewitness reported on the frequent denunciations and arrests
in Boryslaw:
... Denunciations and arrests ensued. The informers - mostly
Jewish Communists - are operating at full steam. For the most part those who
held state positions - policemen, judges and teachers - were being arrested.
Even a forester was arrested. Those who had been imprisoned were loaded into
cattle cars the windows of which were covered with barbed wire. Even women and
children were forced into the wagons. Then at the main train station in
Drohobycz the wagons were hooked up to form one train.
My godmother, Janina Latowska, helped to hide two policemen. These people had
to change their sleeping places every night. They had to do this because
arrests usually occurred at night. One day they took my godmother and her two
sons, Jan and Kazik, and her daughter, Jadzia, from their home. Two days later
they took the family of my cousin Kazimierz Turkiewicz along with his wife and
four children, the youngest of which was six months.
We tried to help our family, but it wasn't easy. We went to Drohobycz daily to
bring them some food. Sometimes we were successful - it depended on who was
guarding the prisoners at the time. And one had to bring some vodka [as a
bribe].
... Poles were brought into Drohobycz over a two week period. One day two
locomotives were attached to the wagons and the train moved forward. Everyone
was in tears - it was apparent that they were being deported to Siberia. Those
poor unfortunates in the wagons intoned the Polish national anthem, "Jeszcze
Polska in zginela" ["Poland has not yet perished"].
After learning of a Polish student's participation in the war with
Germany as a cadet, a "komsorg" ("komsomol" organizer) at his high school in
Drohobycz rebuked him: ... You fought on the side of the "Pans", you defended
the capitalists and large landowners of "Pans"' Poland. Even though the school
was a Polish-language school, the "komsomol" consisted almost entirely of Jews
and Ukrainians.
At a meeting of the heads of school committees, the son of a Jewish
lawyer railed against the Poles: ... You're already in the sack. All that's
left to do is to tie you up and throw you in the water. Poles were openly
discriminated against in state offices. Soon mass arrests and deportations
ensued - the victims were all Poles.
A Jew by the name of Sussman, who became the director of his now
nationalized brickyards in Drohobycz, was notorious for mistreating and insulting
his Polish workers, whom he also underpaid. At their grumblings he thundered:
... Stupid Polacks. Don't you know that you're already all in a sack and all
that's left is to ship you out. He threatened to call in the NKVD and indeed
some of the workers were denounced and arrested. Sussman was equally outspoken at
meetings: ... That damned rule of Polish Pans, capitalists and exploiters has
come to an end. The Pans' Poland has fallen apart and will never return. In a
highly unusual turn of events, the workers struck back at this erstwhile
capitalist and denounced him as an exploiter. It turned out that Sussman had had
connections with the prewar Polish government and, at that time, denounced
communists. Sussman himself was arrested by the NKVD in a stroke of poetic
justice.
When Tadeusz Chciuk, a courier for the Polish government-in-exile,
dropped by unexpectedly to see his family in Drohobycz during one of his missions
to Poland, his mother informed him of the sudden interest taken in him by Hela
Wajs, a Jewish neighbour, who had become an ardent champion of the Soviet regime
and a vociferous opponent of Poland. His mother warned him:
... You have to be terribly cautious and don't show yourself
to people. Most of the Soviet supporters are found among the Jews. There are
swarms of people like Wajs. You have to be on your guard day and night.
Little wonder then that Chciuk, like Poles at the time, proclaimed:
... we, Poles, fear Jews - not all of them, of course, but
when we fear, we fear them more than anyone else. They are first in line to
cooperate with the Bolsheviks, they are the most dangerous, they are everywhere,
they are the most ardent Communists, they know a lot, they help to carry out a
thorough investigation of the community. I myself have such colleagues from
high school and university.
To this a Jewish woman, a family friend, replied: ... I know, I
know. You speak the truth. But you yourself said that they are not all like that. ...
And for those respectable Jews, other Jews, those Communists are also dangerous.
Chciuk answered her: ... Certainly. But not as dangerous as for the Poles, not
even half as dangerous. This righteous woman offered a heartfelt apology for
all those Jews, whom she also detested, who were cooperating with the Bolsheviks.
Another memoir from Lwow describes the warm reception given by many
Jews to the invading Soviet army; their employment as informers at schools; their
pro-Soviet political activity especially during the sham "elections" of October
1939; their political opportunism; and their anti-Polish agitation. The author also
notes sporadic acts of Jewish solidarity with Poles, as when an elderly Jewish woman
was brought to tears by the sight of Jews flocking to greet the Soviet invaders and
the loss of her homeland - Poland.
Scores of Polish priests were imprisoned, deported or executed in
Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland between September 1939 and July 1941. One of them
was Rev. Adam Gromadowski from the town of Podwoloczyska near Skalat, who was
arrested by the NKVD in April 1940, along with others, for distributing Polish
underground newspapers and later executed. The arrest came about as a result of
betrayal by a Jewish family in whom some Poles had confided.
The death of Rev. Waclaw Rodzko, pastor of Traby in the archdiocese
of Wilno, was also attributed to local Jews. He was murdered in May 1940 in the
village of Rosalszczyzna while visiting a sick parishioner.
Rev. Jozef Zator-Przytocki, who organized illegal crossings of Poles
to Romania and Hungary and supplied endangered Poles with false documents, was
more fortunate. Although betrayed to the NKVD by a Jewish confidant, he was able
to leave Stanislawow in the Soviet occupation zone surreptitiously and make his way
to Krakow in the German occupation zone.
Contrary to what some Jewish apologists contend, moving into Soviet
positions did not necessarily signify that such well-placed Jews cut off contact
with fellow Jews, forsook their Jewish roots in favour of the communist ideology,
and no longer functioned as Jews. The argument that they should not be judged as
Jews, but simply as communists who happened to be of Jewish origin, is by and large
untenable. There were just too many cases where such Jews were able to reconcile
their new positions of status with their Jewishness.
In the town of Kisielin (Volhynia), for example, Jews from the town
council and "militia" transferred large quantities of Jewish goods from the town by
stealth to store in hiding places in the countryside.
A local teacher by the name of Ginzberg, who taught Jewish religion
before the war, became a vociferous anti-religion agitator during the Soviet
occupation, who targeted Polish and Ukrainian youth. He continued nonetheless to
practice Jewish religious rituals in his home and to instil them into his two sons,
who had joined the "komsomol". When confronted by a Pole regarding his hypocritical
behaviour, out of fear of being exposed, Ginzberg ceased his anti-Christian
agitation.
A Jew from Kisielin, who oversaw the collection of the onerous taxes,
levied on church property openly relished, in the presence of a Catholic priest, the
prospect of the Soviet authorities destroying the "Polish" church.
POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS UNDER SOVIET
OCCUPATION, 1939-1941
POLAND'S ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE NAZI-SOVIET
OCCUPATION OF POLAND
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