NEIGHBOURS ON THE EVE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Mark Paul

Atmosphere of Fanaticism

The mood of insecurity that descended on the towns and villages under Soviet rule cannot be adequately explained without regard to the role of Jewish communists and those, who were simply pro-Soviet. Very often, their fanaticism was expressed by open displays of anti-Polish and anti-Christian sentiments.

Surprisingly, anti-German sentiments were not voiced by the Jews publicly even in areas that initially experienced a short period of German rule.

Gratuitous denunciations of Poles assumed massive proportions. Jewish officials, who very often had no suitable professional qualifications for their new positions, became omnipresent. Poles were removed from their positions and Polish monuments and library collections were sacked.

The sullen atmosphere that enveloped Przemysl was captured evocatively in a memoir recorded contemporaneously by Jan Smolka, the town's principal archivist, who proved to be an astute observer of those events. The brief German occupation did not pit the Polish population against the Jewish townspeople.

As one Jewish witness recalls:

... When the Germans came to Przemysl in 1939 they burned the old synagogue. I saw Polish people rushing with water to try to extinguish the fire.

Already within hours of the Soviet entry on September 28, 1939, a group of Jewish women burst into the grounds of the local museum, where Smolka was employed. They trampled the flower beds and shrubbery and tore out flowers with which they ran to greet the Red Army.

When Smolka left the museum that evening:

... Throngs of Jews had poured into the streets and squares, which were overflowing, making it difficult to squeeze through. The Jews were overjoyed, insolent and arrogant.
... All sorts of riff-raff and criminal elements emerged and pushed their way around ... The shop windows were lit up and adorned with (rather poor) portraits of Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, and other Bolshevik dignitaries. The same scene recurred over the next few days.
The Jews were delighted.
In the shops they screamed vulgarities about Poland which they directed at the Polish public. Even young Jewish women vented their joy. 'You have no idea how happy I am that the Soviets have come', said one young Jewish woman to another on Franciszkanska Street.
Every evening Jewish women assembled in front of the building of the Revenue Office to sing to the Bolsheviks. When the administrative offices were opened up, they were inundated with Jewish officials. Except for the top positions that were given over to Bolsheviks sent in for that purpose, here and there a token Aryan could be found, usually a Ukrainian, for decoration, but the bulk of the officials were Jews.
The Bolsheviks held various rallies in the town square where they erected a hideous stage of sorts which was painted red. They convened all those over whom they had some influence, above all the youth with their teachers. There was never any shortage of Jews to fill the square en masse. Once during such a masquerade the Jews started to shout invectives at the [Catholic] bishops and priests, but when some boy from the crowd yelled back at them 'Down with the rabbis!' they threw themselves at him and wanted to beat him up. Luckily he escaped. Anti-religious propaganda targeted only the Christian faiths and not the Jewish religion, which the Jews were able to practice freely. They openly kept the Sabbath and baked matzo which they displayed on stands, but at the same time carefully scrutinized those who attended church and reported them to the authorities.
The Bolsheviks expelled Poles from the shops and kiosks and in their place brought in Jews. The entire public life was in their hands.
... Poles could not show their faces among them. I myself saw how they destroyed on Kazimierz Wielki Street the goods of a small Polish boy who was in tears over the loss of - it seemed - his only belongings.
Many Jews wandered in the street without any apparent purpose. In reality they occupied themselves with spying on the Polish population. They looked into who of the Poles remained and what they were doing, and informed on them to the authorities. For that reason many people found themselves in jails or in the Russian interior.
The Jews spied ardently and manifested animalistic hatred towards all things Polish. Across from the museum, a Jewish woman by the name of Mehler, who lived at 8 Wladycze Street, used to sit at her window and look at what was happening in the museum. So that no one would see her she covered her head with a green cloth and hid it behind some flowers. Disguised in this manner she would sit there idly at the window for long hours.
On the first floor of the neighbouring house lived a Jewish tinsmith who also watched the museum and informed [Roman] Szancer [a communist who was recently put in charge of the museum] that counter-revolutionaries were visiting the Lesniaks [Adam Lesniak was active in the museum from before the war] and that Mrs. Lesniak was a remnant of the Polish bourgeoisie. He reported that Mrs. Lesniak did nothing under Polish or Soviet rule, spent her time in the garden and ate chicken and goose. Szancer was alarmed at this denunciation because he was afraid that the authorities might accuse him of not watching over the museum carefully enough. He therefore explained to the Jew that it was impossible for counter-revolutionaries to be coming by because he himself remained at the museum during the entire day and would have seen that those who came were there on official business.

Groundless denunciations by Jews continued. Jews, who before the war worked at market stalls or as craftsmen, now arrived in the museum as members of official inspection committees and the NKVD. Jewish officials and staff were particularly intent on destroying Polish libraries and artifacts, both public and private, whenever the opportunity presented itself. The holdings of the museum were devastated by them and many paintings ruined.

Smolka describes a number of such incidents that occurred in Przemysl:

... Around the middle of October [1939], the painter Marian Stronski brought word to [Adam] Lesniak that the Bolsheviks were evicting Rev. Dr. [Jan] Kwolek, [a professor at the higher seminary in Przemysl and director of the diocesan archives] from his home and that his library had to be saved. Lesniak ran immediately to the building of the Revenue Office where Rev. Kwolek lived on the third floor. Upon entering the building, he saw various people, mostly Jews, wandering in the courtyard and corridors. Official documents were being removed from offices and bookcases on the third floor and thrown out the window into the muddy courtyard. This task was in the hands of residents of Przemysl: three young Jewish women, one Jew and two Ukrainian women. Lesniak approached them and suggested politely that it was a shame to throw these documents out because they might still be useful, even as paper. One of the Jewish women shot back: 'What for? Whatever is Polish has to be destroyed. We can't afford to leave anything behind from the Polish bourgeois regime. It is now the time of the Soviets and Ukraine. We have nicer and better things'. And they continued to dump things into the courtyard. From there these documents were taken to a pond in Bakonczyce, so that no one would think of salvaging them.

There are numerous Jewish testimonies that corroborate Jan Smolka's assessment. According to Max Wolfshaut-Dinkes, who "never knew a non-Jewish communist", in Przemysl:

... The Jews lived in fear, haunted by the prospect of expropriation and deportation to Siberia. They mistrusted one another and, above all, they feared the Jewish communists. These latter were fanatical supporters of the regime, zealous servants of the authorities. Faithful to their "duty", they fought unscrupulously against the "terrible" class enemy, composed of shopkeepers and craftsmen [most of whom were Jews - M.P.].

In another passage, Wolfshaut-Dinkes states:

... I must confess that I found the conduct of the Jewish communists during the Soviet occupation terribly repugnant: they had a far too brutal attitude towards their employers. The Polish and Ukrainian employees did not denounce their former employers as exploiters so that their undertaking would be nationalised and they themselves sent to Siberia; unfortunately, the Jewish communists had no hesitation in doing this.

Another Jew from Przemysl concurs in this assessment:

... Most of the [Zionist] activists left Przemysl as they feared an "invitation" to the NKVD. The secret service arrests were undoubtedly the result of denunciations made by local communists, who operated as denouncers by order from above.

A Jew from Przemysl, who moved to Lwow to hide his capitalist background (his family owned a factory that employed a hundred workers), unexpectedly ran into trouble there.

... I enrolled into a course of Soviet bookkeeping, and soon started working for them as a full bookkeper. I got one of the highest salaries ...
However, this still did not go on smoothly; they discovered (with the help of Jewish Communists from Przemysl) that I had a wealthy (read criminal) past. I was fired, but managed to get each time another job, and so to survive the time of the paradise occupation.

But Jews from Przemysl point out that it was not just seasoned prewar communists they feared, but ordinary Jews caught up in the revolutionary fervour of those times.

As one Jew recalls:

... A boy from one of the poor families, whom we fed every Friday, was the first one to declare himself a communist when the Russians came in, and he was the one who took over our apartment and belongings. We didn't have to wait for the Germans at all - it was a Jewish fellow whom we had supported all along. He said, 'Now I'm a Communist; the Communists are here and I'm the boss and you're going to be subservient to me'. He lay in my bed and insisted that my mother serve him food in bed and polish his shoes.
... As it turned out, his Communistic patriotism did not bring him glory. He just got a job as a guard.
... Naturally, this was very heartbreaking to us because this was the boy we had known since he was a child. He grew up under our own eyes, and here he was the one who was kicking us out.

Another Jew recalls, how non-political relatives of his rallied to the support of the Soviet occupiers:

... When the Russians conscripted my father, he rose quickly to the rank of lance corporal and was involved in the training on new Polish conscripts.
... My mother's younger brother, Abramek, became an ardent spokesman for the Communist cause and her older brother, Mundek ... came under my father's command during his military training.
My father liked the Russians ...
These relatively good times were not to last. The return of the Nazis ...

The testimony of Poles reinforces this picture:

... One problem was that the Jewish people knew the Przemysl intelligentsia very well. When the Soviets came, the Jews would give them the names for the proscriptive lists. They sucked up to the Soviets terribly. They dominated all the offices, there were young, often uneducated, Jews everywhere.
We, young people right after the matura examination [matriculation], were pretty shocked by that, especially as we could not get any white-collar jobs at that time. I myself worked as a blacksmith's assistant.
... when the Soviets came to Przemysl ... everyone was obliged to register at "prowspilka", which was a trade union.
... That is, where I met Hertzberger [who came from an Orthodox Jewish family]. He was sitting next to some Soviet dignitary. Plenty of rich Jews were waiting to be registered ... They were all supposed to tell their biographies in order to be admitted to "prowspilka". That Hertzberger was censoring their stories. When Buchband had told his story, Hertzberger asked: 'Pray tell me, who owned that ironmonger's in Kazimierzowska Street?' Then Buchband leaned towards me and whispered: 'Damn you!' and said aloud: 'No, it wasn't mine, it was my wife's'.
The other Jews all used similar excuses.
... the Jews, who had been shop owners, weren't [admitted]. ... So, on the one hand he was orthodox, on the other hand he cooperated quite closely with the Communists, being very much involved with them.
Democratic slogans, issued by the Soviet government, resulted in the Jews starting to take the posts in the militia and the party offices, turning into Communists. They would put on peaked caps and when they passed one another in the street, their greeting would be: 'Hello, comrade!'
Along with the Soviet rule came hunger. The Jews were behaving in a provocative way at that time, pushing their way through people queuing for food, thus evoking anti-Semitic feelings among the Poles. Some Jews contributed to that themselves, saying with satisfaction that now came the end of Poland. Following the Soviet propaganda, they would say: 'The Poland of the lords is over'. The Jewish intelligentsia did not take part in that, however. The ones, who protested were lower classes, mostly petty shopkeepers [who depended on Christians for their livelihood - M.P.].
... I remember that once, during the Soviet occupation, a teenage Jewish boy joined the people queuing for bread (you could queue the whole day and get nothing) and, pushing his way to the front, announced that he was not going to stand in the queue because '... the Poland of the lords' was over. No one could say anything to that, since the queue was watched by a Jewish policeman, who took the boy's side and let him go first.

A Pole, who lined up at the German commission in Soviet Przemysl to register to return to his home in the German occupation zone in May 1940 recalled, how the petitioners, who included many Jews, were mistreated by the Soviet functionaries:

... A Jewish militiaman ran up, threw me to the ground by my collar, and kicked me ...

Throughout Eastern Poland the impressionable Jewish youth seemed to be enraptured by the New Order. Abraham Brumberg, who was a student at a Jewish high school in Soviet-occupied Wilno, recalls the mood that still prevailed in his school in January 1941. The collective psychosis that seemed to overtake the students was markedly different from the atmosphere in schools with Polish students.

... I was a student at the Yiddish Real Gimnazye, where most of my fellow students had enthusiastically welcomed the New Order and became members of the Young Pioneers, the Communist children’s organization. They trumpeted their love for Stalin and their detestation of the "bourgeoisie", among whom only a few weeks earlier they had counted some of their dearest friends.

Even when their would-be Soviet protectors turned on them, Jews could be found who lost none of their pro-communist and anti-Polish zeal.

For example, a Jewish woman from Lodz by the name of Hinda was caught crossing the German-Soviet border illegally. The Soviets accused her of spying for Germany and imprisoned her even though she insisted at every turn that she was a committed communist, who had done time in prison in Poland. Not only did she try to ingratiate herself with the guards and authorities in every conceivable way, but also used every opportunity to inform the Russians how bad the Jews had it under Polish rule, how they were persecuted, and what poverty they lived in.

Another young Jew from Lodz, also an ardent communist, continued to defend the communist ideology and the educational values of labour camps to, of all people, his fellow camp inmates.

One of the most shameful examples of collaboration involved prewar literary figures, for the most part Jews, who converged on Lwow after the German invasion. They were employed, in Stalin's words, as "engineers of the human soul". Their talent was put to good use during the "referendum" which was held to legitimize the Soviet takeover of Eastern Poland. They were also needed to staff communist newspapers published in Polish (which specialized in denigrating Poland, Poles and Christianity), to edit new textbooks in Polish "history" and "literature", to establish ties with the working class, to participate in mass mobilization campaigns, to promulgate official Soviet policies, to propagandize Soviet ideology, and to appear in public with Soviet writers and dignitaries. Some of their exploits have been described in Tadeusz Piotrowski's Poland's Holocaust and Jerzy Robert Nowak's Przemilczane zbrodnie.

Few of these members of the communist intellectual and literary elite departed from their chosen paths, and even fewer of those ever acknowledged their erroneous ways. One of the few, who did so was Aleksander Wat, who would later speak of this period as his "abasement' under communism and insist on paying the price for his two to three years of "moral insanity".

Most of these Jewish intellectuals, however, who resurfaced in Stalinist Poland, contented themselves with passing the years as communist mouthpieces, denouncing one another, or, much more frequently, as "non-conformist" intellectuals. Jerzy Borejsza (Beniamin Goldberg), for example, denounced several scholars in Lwow, including Dr. Antoni Lewak, director of the publishing house at the famed Ossolineum Institute, who subsequently was executed by the Soviets in Kiev in April 1940.

But above all, it was ordinary Jews, who swelled the ranks of the regime's offices and organs of oppression and whose commitment ensured the success of its policies in the field. While there is a marked tendency in Western writing to advance the view that Jews, who took part in such activities, were estranged from and even ostracized by their community, the biographies gathered in this book amply belie that contention.

Michael (Moishe Mordechai) Goldberg, who was born in Pinsk, Polesia, in 1916, presents a story that is not at all untypical. Like most Jews, he was raised in a household that was religious, conservative, and intensely nationalistic; was brought up in a community that fostered those values, and attended religious schools that molded the young generation in those traditions. These became lasting values that Goldberg, despite his many transformations, never forsook.

... I soon began to attend school. The schools at that time were styled in the form of a cheder, (a Hebrew school), but with a more modern system which taught the Polish language and mathematics. However, the main emphasis of our education was based on Jewish religious and nationalistic ideals which planted in our young minds the roots of Jewish heritage. I thus completed five years of private studies. As a result of the influence of my religious school teachers, I became very religious during that span of time. I remember that I used to go to pray three times a day in the neighborhood shul.
... My father [who ran a successful tailor shop], on the other hand, was far from the religious persuasion. He was, from his earliest years, very active in the Marxist-Zionist party.
At the age of 17, I met a girl my age. ... She became a great influence on my thinking and she brought me into the Halutz Youth organization. This was a Zionist organization which believed in the creation of a Jewish homeland. I became very active in this organization whose ideals I saw as the only solution to the problems of my people.
... During this time, I met a new friend, Rosenberg, who was to play a large role in my future. He was one of the leaders of the illegal Marxist youth organization in Poland. He brought me into the dream of a society which would solve all the international economic and social problems. I was carried away with this dream - that only a socialist revolution would solve the Jewish problem as it would solve all the other societal problems. I felt I had to join a movement which could improve our life in all aspects. I gave up the dream of leaving Poland as an impossible dream.
... This was the year [1937] I was to be called to serve in the Polish army, a situation which created problems for my father. First of all, he had become dependent upon me, and second of all, being a smart man, my father predicted the oncoming war. He decided to do everything in his power to see that I avoid serving time in the army. He went to a special complex to lose weight and arrived at the stage in which he was unable to do any physical work. Then he went for a government medical examination which decided that he could not support his children. I thus became the only provider for our family. I realized later what a personal sacrifice my father had to make to accomplish the task of keeping me out of the army.

As previously demonstrated, with the arrival of the Soviet invaders in September 1939, Polish officials were fingered by Jews in Pinsk, the "workers' guard" in that predominantly Jewish city executed captured Polish officers and policemen, and a Jewish mob swarmed the Catholic seminary, rounded up the priests and clerics and threatened to execute them. Oblivious to these events, Michael Goldberg embarked on his new career and became a mainstay of the new regime.

... On the morning of September 17th, I saw the remaining Polish soldiers crossing the bridge over the river, leaving Pinsk on their way south, hoping to escape the Red Army. We witnessed the destruction of the bridge by the retreating Polish army. That was the end of the Polish rule of Pinsk. A few hours later, we saw the oncoming Russian troops. I remember a moment when my sister Yetta and I started to kiss each other from excitement when we saw the "liberators". [since the Germans had never entered the town, Goldberg doubtless had in mind the town's "liberation" from the Poles]
And again my intelligent father passed a remark. 'Don't celebrate, give the new rule a chance to see how it is in life'. For me, personally, this looked like the final judgment, the beginning of an era of justice for all.
... Before the war, when I was active in the illegal Marxist movement, we had organized a group which was trying to educate itself and to prepare for a time when we had to really participate in leadership in a new society. Our teachers were students from Vilna [Wilno] University and leaders in the illegal movement. They taught us economic and political science from a socialist perspective, and also the Russian language.
... To establish the new rule, the Soviets needed to organize local political cadres, and people like me found themselves in demand as leaders.
... With the establishment of the new rule, my friend, Isaac Rosenberg, who brought me into the Marxist movement, had become one of the top leaders in the regime and also sponsored my activities. When the tailor cooperative was organized, I became the manager of the cooperative.
... Despite the political turmoil and economic hardships of the time, our family's life began to improve. I was paid a large salary and I found a job for my sister Yetta as the supply manager in the same organization.
... I advanced higher in my political career and when the central bureau of city cooperatives was created, I became the chief of propaganda. At the same time I became active in the city party committee.

Golderg maintains that his disenchantment with the regime started to set in in the winter of 1940, when the Soviets: ... began to conduct a reign of terror against the local populace. He nonetheless manoeuvred and adapted to the evolving situation, retaining his formal ties to the regime and informal ties to his community.

... First, during the night, portions of the Polish population of Pinsk started to disappear and were deported to Siberia. After that, came the deportations of Jewish people who were suspected of being members of socialist and Zionist organizations under the Polish rule.
... My father's younger brother [Moishe Goldberg] was a very rich man, one of the few Jews who was active in the former Polish ruling party. Suddenly, Soviet security police were looking for him.
... My father approached me to help hide my uncle, as he felt that I had the power to do this.
At that time, I was seriously involved with Raizel, who was living at her uncle's home in Pinsk. She found an apartment in her uncle's neighborhood which was formerly inhabited by a deported Polish family. She encouraged me to take this apartment, which was free from the government.
... When I moved to the apartment, my uncle came to live with me. Actually, he was hiding there and I provided all the necessities for him as he was afraid to leave the apartment. His family was meanwhile deported from Pinsk to some faraway village. This was part of the campaign to deport all of the (formerly) rich people from Pinsk. After hiding him for four months I helped my uncle escape to the town of Vilna, which had just become [part of] an independent Lithuanian republic.
... After my uncle left my apartment, my girlfriend Raizel moved in with me. Our parents, with their beliefs, started to pressure us to get married. In October 1940, ... At the home of Raizel's aunt was gathered the entire family, with a rabbi and a chupah. Thereafter a ritual Jewish wedding was performed.
When I look back at that period of time, I can see that my personal life had improved radically. I had a high position in the political administration which paid much better than the average worker. My wife obtained a government office position. We had a nice apartment.
... But I was not satisfied with my life because I started to detect more injustice in the new regime than in the previous ones.
... Besides that, with my Jewish nationalistic outlook on life, I realized that this new regime would not bring salvation to the Jews. I found myself becoming assimilated into a society which had no place for Jewish culture. For someone who had been raised in a completely Jewish environment during the Polish rule, an environment filled with Jewish daily newspapers, magazines and other publications, and with theatrical productions which were renowned world wide, it seemed to me that there was now no future for Jewish society.
By the end of 1940, the local party administration came to the conclusion that it no longer needed the help of the local cadres. ... Administrators from the original Soviet territories started to replace the local leaders, among whom I was one. At the time I had become very friendly with a couple from Leningrad who were in the highest party positions in the city. They were Jewish ... The husband confided in me one day that he had been approached by Soviet security people who were quite interested in my background of Zionist activities under the Polish regime, and that I was in danger of being arrested. He advised me to resign from my position and to look for some less noticeable means of employment. ... I achieved my resignation by stating reasons of poor health ...
In March 1941, with the heightening of international tensions, I was suddenly called up to join the armed forces.

Having spent the war years with the Soviet army, Goldberg - now an ardent Zionist again - decided to sever his ties with the Soviet Union and to take advantage of the possibility of "repatriating" to Poland. "Repatriation" was an option that Polish citizens of Jewish nationality, who once cheered the Soviet invaders could access with few obstructions. For tens of thousands of them, Poland was just a stepping stone on the way to Palestine or the West. On the other hand, the majority of patriotic ethnic Poles, who opted to move to Poland from eastern territories ceded to Soviet Belorussia and Soviet Lithuania were refused permission to do so by the Soviet authorities.

... I read in the Moscow official paper "Pravda" a communique about a treaty between the Soviet Union and the new Polish republic and the repatriation from the Soviet Union of former Polish citizens. This could give me a chance to free myself from the Russian army in which it appeared I might otherwise have to stay for a long time. By the same token, it would also get me out of Russia. I composed a letter requesting transfer to the Polish army because of my Polish citizenship and gave the request to my commanding officer to be forwarded to the higher authorities.
At the beginning of September 1945 Petya, Volodya and I got a pass for the first day of Rosh Hashanah to visit the city [of Galat in Romania]. After the Holy Days services, we went, as usual, to Leo's home ... I met Bunya's brother, David ... David turned out also to be part of the Bricha organization in which he played a big role.
... We were informed by a general that we were going to be transferred to the Polish army.
... During the months of December 1945 and January 1946 the Jewish population in Pinsk grew to the thousands, only to diminish thereafter when the mass exodus to Palestine by way of Poland commenced.

For personal reasons, however, Goldberg decided to remain in the Soviet Union. Although he had a "stormy relationship" with a Russian woman, who saved his life, he had broken up with her several times because she insisted on marriage; in his words: ... although I had made clear to her several times that I would not marry a non-Jewish woman. Indeed, he married a Jewish woman from Pinsk and did not leave the Soviet Union until the late 1950s, when a smaller "repatriation" of former Polish citizens, again largely Jews, were allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Having made a full circle, Goldberg and his family arrived in Legnica, Poland, in October 1958. They soon obtained: ... a nice apartment, where for the first time in our lives we had a bathroom, running water and even gas. But he remained bitter because he: ... was taught by the Poles and later by the Russians to hate that land which had swallowed all my dearest people, who were actually murdered by the German invaders. Goldberg did not waste time in going to the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw to register for immigration to Israel, but decided to join his sister in America instead. He arrived in the United States in January 1961, settled in and became active in the Zionist movement.

POLISH-JEWISH RELATIONS UNDER SOVIET OCCUPATION, 1939-1941
POLAND'S ETHNIC MINORITIES AND THE NAZI-SOVIET OCCUPATION OF POLAND

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