NEIGHBOURS ON THE EVE OF THE HOLOCAUST

Mark Paul

A Belated, but Reluctant Awareness

During the war, while the events were still fresh and looming, Polish political and military leaders were alarmed by what had occurred and voiced strong concerns about their impact on Polish-Jewish relations. Moreover, the topic was raised repeatedly at meetings of Polish and Jewish underground organizations.

Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, was well aware of the charges. As historian Samuel Kassow notes,

... He doubtless had also read several Jewish accounts, given to the Oneg Shabes archive, that seemed to corroborate some of these Polish claims. In April 1940 Ringelblum mentioned Jewish testimonies, from Bialystok and Zamosc, that described how Jews had jeered Polish officers and former civil servants. He also described a conversation with a Polish writer, who had been friendly to Jews. The writer had returned from Soviet-occupied Poland and had seen how a Russian soldier and a freshly baked Jewish commissar had searched the suitcases of two Polish students. Suddenly, the Jew spied a crucifix in the suitcase; it had been given to the student by his mother. The Jewish commissar threw it away, but the soldier retrieved it and gave it back to the student. 'You understand', the writer told Ringelblum, 'I can understand something like this, but is it a great surprise if an uneducated 17 year old becomes an anti-Semite? Why must the Jews be more Catholic than the pope?' Ringelblum noted this without comment or protest, except to add that many Jews were also coming back with similar stories.

General Wladyslaw Sikorski, the leader of the Polish government-in-exile, appealed in vain to Jewish circles to condemn the activities of those Jews, who had collaborated with the Soviets and committed crimes against Polish citizens.
The only Jewish group, known to have spoken out publicly on this topic, were the Polish patriots, a tight group of former Polish officers and non-commissioned officers, who formed the little known Jewish Military Union (Zydowski Zwiazek Wojskowy - ZZW) in the Warsaw ghetto (in Western literature one generally hears only about the larger Jewish Fighting Organization (Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa - ZOB). In the April 1942 issue of their underground publication Zagiew, ZZW boldly called for accountability by those Jews, and non-Jews, who collaborated with the Soviets in the Eastern Borderlands.
The vast majority of the Polish-Jewish leadership simply ignored the problem.

At that time, unbiased, knowledgeable observers readily acknowledged that Poles had ample cause for resentment in light of what had happened in Eastern Poland. Their feeling of bitterness was not, as many Jews would now have it, just some irrational and unsubstantiated bigotry that Poles were expressing. Reports of Jewish behaviour in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland did not escape the attention of British officials, who did not hesitate to label such conduct as collaboration and aver that the Jews were the mainstay of the Bolshevik regime.

In April 1940, officials at the British Embassy to Poland (in Angers, France, where the Polish government-in-exile resided at that time) wrote to the British Foreign Office:

... As regards the present attitude of the Poles, and especially of those now in foreign countries, towards Jews and the Jewish question, we must not forget that in September last the Jewish population in the provinces occupied by the USSR, notably in Eastern Galicia, with the exception of the wealthy Jews, who had much property to lose, sided in the main with the Russian invaders. According to recent reports which have passed through my hands, the Jews in those parts of Poland are still the main support of the Bolshevik regime.

In a similar tone, the British War Office wrote:

... The Jews' behaviour in Poland during the Russian advance must clearly have caused a feeling of animosity in Army circles which I think is justified.

Because of the Poles' preoccupation with other more pressing matters, a veil of silence descended on the activities of local collaborators, although thousands of accounts detailing this phenomenon were gathered by the Polish army from Polish deportees, liberated from the Gulag and deposited after the war in the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. Polish emigre authorities had no interest in publicizing these matters in the immediate postwar period since they underscored the hostility of the minorities, and hence undermined Polish claims to the Eastern Borderlands, which the Soviet Union had severed from Poland. Since Jews were universally portrayed as the primary victims of the war (which was true with respect to the Nazis), it seemed inconceivable that some of them could also have been among the villains (i.e., in the role of Soviet collaborators). Moreover, given the (belated) anti-Nazi alliance that the West had forged with the Soviet Union, the latter's role in wartime atrocities was not publicized or, to put it more precisely, was hushed up for political reasons for many decades. Since Stalin - "Uncle Joe" - was portrayed as a staunch anti-Nazi ally, how could assisting him be characterized as wartime "collaboration"?

There has been a near universal unwillingness on the part of Jewish historiography to come to terms with this aspect of the dark side of Jewish wartime conduct. A fuller appreciation of what transpired in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland has only recently made inroads among a small number of Jewish historians and intellectuals.

In his important essay, Tabu i niewinnosc (translated as Jews as a Polish Problem), Aleksander Smolar, a Polish-Jewish emigre intellectual, wrote that

... the welcome extended to the Bolsheviks was above all a demonstration of a separate identity, of being different from those against whom the Soviets were waging war - from the Poles - a refusal to be identified with the Polish state.

Smolar acknowledged that many Jews, not only communists, took up positions in the Soviet administration and collaborated with the Soviet security forces in identifying and hunting down targeted Poles. He went on to appraise the resultant conflict that inevitably arose between Polish and Jewish society thus:

... In no other country in Europe did the clash of Jewish interests and attitudes with those of the surrounding population reach such dramatic proportions as they did in Poland under the Soviet occupation of 1939-1941. In other occupied countries, the Jews were in conflict with parts of the surrounding population - with local collaborators, for example - but they were united in solidarity with the rest of society. In Poland, under the Soviet occupation, it was the Jews, who were regarded as collaborators. This should be borne in mind if one wants to speak honestly about mutual relations between Poles and Jews. [emphasis added]

Moreover, pro-Soviet sympathies were by no means restricted to communists or to those Jews residing in Eastern Poland. After surveying the underground Jewish press in the Warsaw ghetto, Teresa Prekerowa notes in her aforementioned study, that strong pro-Soviet sentiments were displayed by certain Zionist factions there as well. Leftist Zionists saw their future linked with the communists, whom the Poles considered an enemy on a par with the Nazis. Well into 1941, Hashomer Hatsa'ir, for example, regarded the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact of August 1939 and the consequent partition of Poland to be a "wise and justified" development. Mordechai Anielewicz, the young leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, was the editor of a periodical that openly embraced communism over capitalism and the Soviet Union over Poland.

The Polish underground was well aware of these leanings and, understandably, sometimes less than enthusiastic when these same groups turned to them for arms and other forms of military assistance. As we know, however, help was not withheld to the Jewish insurgents of Warsaw even though the Home Army's resources were scarce and the Jewish struggle obviously doomed.

Polish-Jewish historian, Marian Fuks, has stated:

... It is an absolutely certain fact that without help and even active participation of the Polish resistance movement [i.e., the Home Army] it would not have been possible at all to bring about the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the revolt, expressed a similar view:

... We didn't get adequate help from the Poles, but without their help we couldn't have started the uprising. ... You have to remember that the Poles themselves were short of arms. The guilty party is Nazism, fascism - not the Poles.

It is also worth noting that unlike commemorations in honour of Poles, who risked their lives to assist Jews, which have been marred by incessant recriminations of anti-Semitism levelled against Poles (e.g., the unveiling of the Zegota monument in Warsaw in September 1995), the unveiling - earlier that same year - of a monument in Warsaw to commemorate the Polish citizens deported by the Soviets in 1939-1941, regardless of their faith, was not used by Poles as an occasion to hurl accusations against the Soviets' many collaborators (mostly non-Poles, but including many Jews) at whose hands the Poles suffered disproportionately.

The admissions of Aleksander Smolar are the closest thing to a public reckoning by anyone on the Jewish side for the behaviour of far too many Jews in Soviet-occupied Eastern Poland. Only this year, were they seconded by Michael Schudrich, rabbi of Warsaw and Lodz, who stated:

... We, Jews, have to acknowledge that there were Jews in the service of the communists, or even the Nazis, who committed crimes against the Poles, and also against other Jews. However, they never said that they were doing this in the name of the Jewish nation. Nevertheless, the time has come for us Jews to feel and understand the Polish pain in order for the Poles to feel and understand our pain.

These events continue to fester on the Polish psyche like a sore wound. Without a candid and open recognition of the dimensions of these tragic events and a collective apology to the Polish nation, they will stand as an insurmountable impasse to Polish-Jewish rapprochement.

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

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