1968, forty years after 9781904113362, 9781904113614

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Note on Place Names (page xv)
Note on Transliteration (page xvii)
PART I: THE 1968 CRISIS AFTER FORTY YEARS
Introduction (LESZEK W. GŁUCHOWSKI AND ANTONY POLONSKY, page 3)
The Hate Campaign of March 1968: How Did It Become Anti-Jewish? (DARIUSZ STOLA, page 16)
1968: Jews, Antisemitism, Emigration (JERZY EISLER, page 37)
The March Events: Targeting the Jews (WŁODZIMIERZ ROZENBAUM, page 62)
A Critical Analysis of the Polish Military Intelligence Service, 1945-1961 (LESZEK W. GŁUCHOWSKI, page 93)
'Israel' in the Events of March 1968 (BOŻENA SZAYNOK, page 150)
A Community under Pressure: Jews in Poland, 1957-1967 (AUDREY KICHELEWSKI, page 159)
Facing Antisemitism in Poland during the Second World War and in March 1968 (MAŁGORZATA MELCHIOR, page 187)
Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools of the 1960s (JOANNA WISZNIEWICZ, page 204)
The Exile of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk: Polish Jewish Communist (HOLLI LEVITSKY, page 230)
The Fate of a Yiddish Poet in Communist Eastern Europe: Naftali Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 (KAREN AUERBACH, page 243)
Domestic Shame: A Conversation with Professor Jerzy Jedlicki (ANNA JARMUSIEWICZ, page 265)
An Interview with Mirosław Sawicki (August 2006) (JOANNA B. MICHLIC, page 270)
Testimony (HENRYK DASKO, page 285)
THE CONTROVERSY AROUSED BY THE ROLE IN 1968 OF GENERAL WOJCIECH JARUZELSKI
The Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-1968 (TADEUSZ PIÓRO, page 290)
A Painful and Complex Subject (WOJCIECH JARUZELSKI, page 310)
Reply to General Jaruzelski (TADEUSZ PIÓRO, page 315)
THE CONTROVERSY AROUSED BY THE 1968 EVENTS IN 2006
A Meeting with Jacek Kuroń as Reported by Secret Collaborator 'Return' (Lesław Maleszka): A Contribution to the Discussions about the Events of March 1968 (PIOTR GONTARCZYK, page 317)
The Institute of National Remembrance Slanders Jacek Kuroń (WOJCIECH CZUCHNOWSKI AND SEWERYN BLUMSZTAJN, page 326)
I Am, Therefore I Write: Uses and Abuses (MACIEJ RYBIŃSKI, page 331)
Selective Indignation (RAFAŁ ZIEMKIEWICZ, page 333)
Attention, Moczar Lives! An Interview with Karol Modzelewski (ADAM LESZCZYŃSKI, page 334)
Between the Institute of National Remembrance and Gazeta Wyborcza: The Cracked Code (TADEUSZ WITKOWSKI, page 342)
'Gniazdo'-The Moral Bankruptcy of the Security Service (TERESA BOGUCKA, page 350)
PART II: NEW VIEWS
The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki (KALMAN WEISER, page 363)
Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment (JULIAN J. BUSSGANG, page 401)
The Case of Moses Schorr: Rabbi, Scholar, and Social Activist (MICHAEL BEIZER AND ISRAEL BARTAL, page 426)
You Can't Do It Just Like That...or, Jerzy Ficowski's Path to Reading the Ashes (KRZYSZTOF CZYŻEWSKI, page 460)
Contemporary Debates on the Holocaust in Poland: The Reception of Art Spiegelman's 'Graphic Novel' Maus (TOMASZ ŁYSAK, page 469)
Apollo, Mercury, and Soviet Jews (PIOTR WRÓBEL, page 480)
PART III: OBITUARIES
Father Stanisław Musiał (JACEK MAJ, page 495)
Józef Andrzej Gierowski (ANDRZEJ KRZYSZTOF LINK-LENCZOWSKI, page 499)
Jerzy Ficowski (KRZYSZTOF CZYŻEWSKI, page 504)
Notes on the Contributors (page 509)
Glossary (page 517)
Index (page 521)

Citation preview

THE INSTITUTE FOR POLISH-JEWISH STUDIES The Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies in Oxford and its sister organization, the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, which publish Polin, are learned societies that were established in 1984, following the First International Conference on Polish—Jewish Studies, held in Oxford. The Institute is an associate institute of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and

Jewish Studies, and the American Association is linked with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University.

_ Both the Institute and the American Association aim to promote understanding of the Polish Jewish past. They have no building or library of their own and no paid staff; they achieve their aims by encouraging scholarly research and facilitating its publication, and by creating forums for people with a scholarly interest in Polish Jewish topics, both past and present.

To this end the Institute and the American Association help organize lectures and international conferences. Venues for these activities have included Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the Institute for the Study of Human Sciences in Vienna, King’s College in London, the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, the University of Lodz, University College London, and the Polish Cultural Centre and the Polish embassy in London. They have encouraged academic exchanges between Israel, Poland, the United States, and western Europe. In particular they seek to help train a new generation of scholars, in Poland and elsewhere, to study the culture and history of the Jews in Poland. _ Each year since 1987 the Institute has published a volume of scholarly papers in the series Polin: Studtes in Polish Jewry under the general editorship of Professor Antony Polonsky of Brandeis University. Since 1994 the series has been published on its behalf by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, and since 1998 the publication has been linked with the

American Association as well. In March 2000 the entire series was honoured with a National Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council in the United States. More than twenty other works on Polish Jewish topics have also been published with the Institute’s assistance.

_ For further information on the Institute for Polish—Jewish studies or the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, contact . For the website of the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, see .

THE LITTMAN LIBRARY OF JEWISH CIVILIZATION

Dedicated to the memory of

Louis THOMAS SIDNEY LITTMAN who founded the Littman Library for the love of God

and as an act of charity in memory of his father JOSEPH AARON LITTMAN

712 DDT ND

‘Get wisdom, get understanding:

Forsake her not and she shall preserve thee’ |

: PROV. 4: 5

The Littman Library of Fewish Civilization ts a registered UK chanty Registered charity no. 1000784

STUDIES IN POLISH JEWRY FETE IEE FETT IE FEE ITE TE IE IE TEE TE ES TT ET TT TT TT TT TT

VOLUME TWENTY-ONE

Forty Years After Edited by

LESZEK W. GLUCHOWSKI and

ANTONY POLONSKY FFE FEE TEE TE TEE INE IEE IEE FETE FE EEE TE TT Published for

The Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies and The American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies

Oxford : Portland, Oregon

The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization 2009

The Littman Library of Fewish Civilization Chief Executive Officer: Ludo Craddock Managing Editor: Connie Webber PO Box 645, Oxford 0x2 oUJ, UK www. littman.co.uk

Published in the United States and Canada by The Littman Library of Fewish Civilization c/o ISBS, 920 NE 58th Avenue, Suite 300 Portland, Oregon 97213-3786 © Institute for Polish—Fewish Studies 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of The Littman Library of fewish Civilization. The paperback edition of this book 1s sold subject to the condition that 1t shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or othermise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which tt 1s published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data applied for

ISSN 0268 1056 ISBN 978-1-904113-61—4 ISBN 97&—1—-904113—376—2 (pbk)

Publishing co-ordinator: Janet Moth Production: John Saunders Copy-editing: Bonnie Blackburn Proof-reading: George Tulloch and Joyce Rappoport Index: Bonnie Blackburn Design: Pete Russell, Faringdon, Oxon. Typeset by Hope Services (Abingdon) Ltd Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by

Biddles Ltd., Kings Lynn. www.biddles.co.uk

Articles appearing in this publication are abstracted and indexed in Mistorical Abstracts and America: History and Life

This volume 1s dedicated to the memory of

HENRY DASKO 1947-2006 who was forced to leave Poland in 1968 but remained actively engaged in Polish and Polish Jewish affairs

This volume benefited from grants from

THE MIRISCH AND LEBENHEIM CHARITABLE FOUNDATION WLADYSLAW T. BARTOSZEWSKI

THE LUCIUS N. LITTAUER FOUNDATION

Editors and Advisers EDITORS Monika Adamczyk-Garbowska, Lublin Israel Bartal, Jerusalem Antony Polonsky (Chair), Waltham, Mass. Michael Steinlauf, Philadelphia Jerzy Tomaszewski, Warsaw

EDITORIAL BOARD

Chimen Abramsky, London Elchanan Reiner, Tel Aviv David Assaf, Tel Aviv Jehuda Reinharz, Waltham, Mass. Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Warsaw Moshe Rosman, Te/ Aviv

Glen Dynner, Bronxville, NY Szymon Rudnicki, Warsaw David Engel, New York Henryk Samsonowicz, Warsaw David Fishman, New York Robert Shapiro, New York ChaeRan Freeze, Waltham, Mass. Adam Teller, Haifa

Jacob Goldberg, Jerusalem Daniel Tollet, Paris

Yisrael Gutman, Jerusalem Piotr S. Wandycz, New Haven, Conn. Jerzy Ktoczowski, Lublin Jonathan Webber, Birmingham, UK

Ezra Mendelsohn, ferusalem Joshua Zimmerman, New York Joanna Michlic, Bethlehem, Pa. Steven Zipperstein, Stanford, Calif. ADVISORY BOARD

Wladyslaw T. Bartoszewski, Warsaw Heinz-Dietrich Lowe, Heidelberg

Jan Bionski, Krakow Emanuel Meltzer, Te/ Aviv

Andrzej Chojnowski, Warsaw Shlomo Netzer, Tel Aviv

Andrzej Ciechanowiecki, London Zbigniew Pelczynski, Oxford Norman Davies, London Alexander Schenker, New Haven, Conn.

Frank Golczewski, Hamburg David Sorkin, Madison, Wis. Olga Goldberg, Ferusalem Edward Stankiewicz, New Haven, Conn.

Jerzy Jedlicki, Warsaw Norman Stone, Ankara

Andrzej Kaminski, London Shmuel Werses, Jerusalem Hillel Levine, Boston Jacek Wozniakowski, Lublin

Stanistaw Litak, Lublin Piotr Wrobel, Toronto

Preface THIS volume of Polin examines the crisis of 1968 which led to a vicious ‘antiZionist campaign’ and the forced emigration of the majority of the small remaining Jewish community in Poland. It appears on the fortieth anniversary of these events, and seeks to demonstrate the importance of this upheaval in the process which led to the collapse of communism. Our goal in this volume has been to illuminate all aspects of that tumultuous year in Poland, and our contributors include most of the leading scholars on this topic in Poland and abroad. As in earlier volumes of Polin, in the New Views section considerable space is also given to new research into a variety of topics in Polish Jewish studies. These include an analysis by Kalman Weiser of the evolution of a key figure in the political life of Polish Jewry, the Folkist leader Noah Prylucki, an analysis of the career

of the Metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church, Andrei Sheptytsky and his role in saving Jews during the war, and a moving account by Michael Beizer and

Israel Bartal of the tragic fate under Soviet rule of the Polish Jewish scholar and political activist Moses Schorr. An article by Krzysztof Czyzewski analyses the poetry of the late Jerzy Ficowski on the Holocaust; a younger Polish scholar,

Tomasz Lysak, examines the Polish reception of Art Spiegelman’s ‘Graphic Novel’ Maus, while Piotr Wrobel analyses the controversial history of Jews in the twentieth century by Yury Slezkine. Polin is sponsored by the Institute of Polish—Jewish Studies, which is an associ-

ated institute of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, and by the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, which is linked with the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University. As with earlier issues, this volume could not have appeared without the untiring assistance of many individuals. In particular, we should like to express our gratitude to Professor Jehuda Reinharz, president of Brandeis University, Mrs Irene Pipes, president of the American Association for Polish—Jewish Studies, and Professor Jonathan Webber, treasurer of the Institute for Polish—Jewish Studies. These three institutions all made substantial contributions to the cost of producing the volume.

A particularly important contribution was that made by the Mirisch and Lebenheim Foundation. The volume also benefited from grants from Wladyslaw

T. Bartoszewski, Robert and Rochelle Cherry, and the Lucius N. Littauer Foundation. As was the case with earlier volumes, this one could not have been published without the constant assistance and supervision of Connie Webber, managing editor of the Littman Library, Janet Moth, publishing co-ordinator, and the tireless copy-editing of Bonnie Blackburn and Joyce Rappoport.

Vili Preface Plans for future volumes of Polin are well advanced. Volume 22 is devoted to the Jews in premodern Poland—Lithuania; volume 23 examines the history of the Jews

in Krakow; and volume 24 will examine the long trajectory in the relations between Jews and their neighbours in the area. Further volumes are planned on the history of the Jews in Lithuania, on Jewish—Ukranian relations, and on Jewish elites in the lands of the former Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth. We should welcome articles for these issues, as well as for our New Views section. We should also welcome any suggestions or criticisms. In particular, we should be very grateful for assistance in extending the geographical range of our journal to Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, both in the period in which these countries were part of the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth and subsequently. We note with sadness the death of Abe Brumberg, a member of our editorial board and a major figure in the study of the Polish Jewish past.

POLIN

LS We did not know, but our fathers told us how the exiles of Israel came to the land of Polin (Poland).

When Israel saw how its sufferings were constantly renewed, oppressions increased, persecutions multiplied, and how the evil authorities piled decree on decree and followed expulsion with expulsion, so that there was no way to escape the enemies of Israel, they went out on the road and sought an answer from the paths of the wide world: which is the correct road to traverse to find rest for their soul? Then a piece of paper fell from heaven, and on it the words: Go to Polantya (Poland)!

So they came to the land of Polin and they gave a mountain of gold to the king, and he received them with great honour. And God had mercy on them, so that they found favour from the king and the nobles. And the king gave them permission to reside in all the lands of his kingdom, to trade over its length and breadth, and to serve God according to the precepts of their religion. And the king protected them against every foe and enemy. And Israel lived in Polin in tranquillity for a long time. They devoted themselves to trade and handicrafts. And God sent a blessing on them so that they were

blessed in the land, and their name was exalted among the peoples. And they traded with the surrounding countries and they also struck coins with inscriptions in the holy language and the language of the country. These are the coins which have on them a lion rampant from the right facing left. And on the coins are the words ‘Mieszko, King of Poland’ or ‘Mieszko, Krol of Poland’. The Poles call their king ‘Krol’. And those who delve into the Scriptures say: “This is why it is called Polin. For thus spoke Israel when they came to the land, “Here rest for the night [Po /in].” And this means that we shall rest here until we are all gathered into the Land of Israel.’ Since this is the tradition, we accept it as such.

| S. Y. AGNON, Ig16

POLIN Studies in Polish Ffewry VOLUME 1 Poles and fews: Renewing the Dialogue (1986)

VOLUME 2 Jews and the Emerging Polish State (1987) VOLUME 3. The fews of Warsaw (1988) VOLUME 4 Poles and fews: Perceptions and Misperceptions (1989) VOLUME 5 New Research, New Views (1990)

VOLUME 6 Jews in Lodz, 1820-1939 (1991) VOLUME 7 Jewish Life in Nazi-Occupied Warsaw (1992) From Shietl to Socialism (1993): selected articles from volumes 1~7 VOLUME 8 fews in Independent Poland, 1915—1939 (1994) VOLUME g__ fews, Poles, and Socialists: The Failure of an Ideal (1996)

VOLUME 10 _ Jews in Early Modern Poland (1997) VOLUME I1_ Aspects and Experiences of Religion (1998)

VOLUME 12 Galicia: Jews, Poles, and Ukrainians, 1772-1918 (1999) Index to Volumes 1-12 (2000)

VOLUME 13. The Holocaust and tts Aftermath (2000) VOLUME 14 _ Jews in the Polish Borderlands (2001)

, VOLUME 15 Jewish Religious Life, 1500-1900 (2002) VOLUME 16 fewmish Popular Culture and tts Afterlife (2003)

VOLUME 17_ The Shtetl: Myth and Reality (2004) VOLUME 18 Jewish Women in Eastern Europe (2005) VOLUME 19 _ Polish—fewish Relations in North America (2007)

VOLUME 20 Making Holocaust Memory (2008)

VOLUME 21 1968: Forty Years After (2009) VOLUME 22 Early Modern Poland: Borders and Boundaries (2010) VOLUME 23. fems in Krakow (2011)

Contents

Note on Place Names XV

Note on Transhteration XVII PART I

Introduction 3 THE 1968 CRISIS AFTER FORTY YEARS

LESZEK W. GLUCHOWSKI AND ANTONY POLONSKY

The Hate Campaign of March 1968: How Did It Become Anti-Jewish? 16 DARIUSZ STOLA

1968: Jews, Antisemitism, Emigration 37 JERZY EISLER

The March Events: Targeting the Jews 62 WLODZIMIERZ ROZENBAUM

Service, 1945-1961 93

A Critical Analysis of the Activities of the Polish Military Intelligence LESZEK W. GLUCHOWSKI

‘Israel’ in the Events of March 1968 150 BOZENA SZAYNOK

A Community under Pressure: Jews in Poland, 1957-1967 159 AUDREY KICHELEWSKI

in March 1968 187

Facing Antisemitism in Poland during the Second World War and MALGORZATA MELCHIOR

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools of the 1960s —_ 204 JOANNA WISZNIEWICZ

The Exile of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk: Polish Jewish Communist 230 HOLLI LEVITSKY

xii | Contents The Fate of a Yiddish Poet in Communist Eastern Europe:

Naftali Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 243

KAREN AUERBACH

Domestic Shame: A Conversation with Professor Jerzy Jedlicki 265 ANNA JARMUSIEWICZ

An Interview with Miroslaw Sawicki (August 2006) 270

Testimony 285 JOANNA B. MICHLIC

HENRYK DASKO

THE CONTROVERSY AROUSED BY THE ROLE IN 1968 | OF GENERAL WOJCIECH JARUZELSKI

The Purges in the Polish Army, 1967—1968 290 TADEUSZ PIORO

A Painful and Complex Subject 310 WOJCIECH JARUZELSKI

Reply to General Jaruzelski 315 TADEUSZ PIORO THE CONTROVERSY AROUSED BY THE 1968 EVENTS IN 2006 A Meeting with Jacek Kuron as Reported by Secret Collaborator ‘Return’ (Lestaw Maleszka): A Contribution to the Discussions

about the Events of March 1968 317

PIOTR GONTARCZYK

The Institute of National Remembrance Slanders Jacek Kuron 326 WOJCIECH CZUCHNOWSKI AND SEWERYN BLUMSZTAJN

I Am, Therefore I Write: Uses and Abuses 331 MACIEJ RYBINSKI

Selective Indignation 333 RAFAL ZIEMKIEWICZ

Attention, Moczar Lives! An Interview with Karol Modzelewski 334 ADAM LESZCZYNSKI

Contents xiii The Cracked Code 342

Between the Institute of National Remembrance and Gazeta Wyborcza: TADEUSZ WITKOWSKI

‘Gniazdo’—The Moral Bankruptcy of the Security Service 350 TERESA BOGUCKA

PART II

NEW VIEWS

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 363 KALMAN WEISER

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 401 JULIAN J. BUSSGANG

The Case of Moses Schorr: Rabbi, Scholar, and Social Activist 426 MICHAEL BEIZER AND ISRAEL BARTAL

the Ashes 460

You Can’t Do It Just Like That . . . or, Jerzy Ficowski’s Path to Reading KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI

Contemporary Debates on the Holocaust in Poland: The Reception of

Art Spiegelman’s ‘Graphic Novel’ Maus 469 TOMASZ LYSAK

Apollo, Mercury, and Soviet Jews 480 PIOTR WROBEL

PART III

OBITUARIES

Father Stanislaw Musial 495 Jozef Andrzej Gierowski 499 JACEK MAJ

Jerzy Ficowski 504 ANDRZEJ KRZYSZTOF LINK-LENCZOWSKI

KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI

xiv Contents

Glossary 517 Index 521

Notes on the Contributors 509

Note on Place Names POLITICAL connotations accrue to words, names, and spellings with an alacrity unfortunate for those who would like to maintain neutrality. It seems reasonable to honour the

choices of a population on the name of its city or town, but what is one to do when the people have no consensus on their name, or when the town changes its name, and the name its spelling, again and again over time? The politician may always opt for the latest version, but the hapless historian must reckon with them all. This note, then, will be our brief reckoning. There is no problem with places that have accepted English names, such as Warsaw. But every other place name in east-central Europe raises serious problems. A good example is Wilno, Vilna, Vilnius. There are clear objections to all of these. Until 1944 the majority of the population was Polish. The city is today in Lithuania. ‘Vilna’, though raising the fewest problems, is an artificial construct. In this volume we have adopted the following guidelines, although we are aware that they are not wholly consistent. 1. Towns that have a form which is acceptable in English will be given in that form. Some examples are Warsaw, Kiev, Moscow, St Petersburg, Munich.

2. Towns that until 1939 were clearly part of a particular state and shared the majority nationality of that state will be given in a form which reflects that situation. Some examples are Breslau, Danzig, Rzeszow, Przemysl. In Polish, Krakow has always been spelled as such. In English it has more often appeared as Cracow, but the current trend of English follows the local language as much as possible. In keeping with this trend to local determination, then, we shall maintain the Polish spelling.

3. Towns that are in mixed areas should take the form in which they are known today and which reflects their present situation. Examples are Poznan, Torun, Kaunas, Lviv. This applies also to bibliographical references. We have made one major exception to this rule, using the common English form for Vilna until its first incorporation into Lithuania in October 1939 and using Vilnius thereafter. Galicia’s most diversely named city, and one of its most important, boasts four variants: the Polish Lwow, the German Lemberg, the Russian Lvov, and the Ukrainian Lviv. As this city currently lives under Ukrainian rule, and most of its current residents speak Ukrainian, we shall follow the Ukrainian spelling.

4. Some place names have different forms in Yiddish. Occasionally the subject matter dictates that the Yiddish place name should be the prime form, in which case the corresponding Polish (Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian) name is given in parentheses at first mention.

| BLANK PAGE

Note on Transhteration HEBREW An attempt has been made to achieve consistency in the transliteration of Hebrew words. The following are the key distinguishing features of the system that has been adopted: 1. No distinction is made between the a/eph and ayin; both are represented by an apostrophe, and only when they appear in an intervocalic position. 2. Veit is written v; het is written h; yod is written y when it functions as a consonant and 1 when it occurs as a vowel; kha/fis written kh; tsadi is written ts; kof is written k.

3. The dagesh hazak, represented in some transliteration systems by doubling the letter, is not represented, except in words that have more or less acquired normative English spellings that include doublings, such as Hallel, kabbalah, Kaddish, rabbi, Sukkot, and Yom Kippur.

| 4. The sheva na is represented by an e. 5. Hebrew prefixes, prepositions, and conjunctions are not followed by a hyphen when

, they are transliterated; thus betoledot ha’am hayehud:. 6. Capital letters are not used in the transliteration of Hebrew except for the first word in the titles of books and the names of people, places, institutions, and generally as in the conventions of the English language.

7. The names of individuals are transliterated following the above rules unless the individual concerned followed a different usage.

YIDDISH Transliteration follows the YIVO system except for the names of people, here the spellings they themselves used have been retained.

RUSSIAN AND UKRAINIAN The system used is that of British Standard 2979:1958, without diacritics. Except in bibliographical and other strictly rendered matter, soft and hard signs are omitted and word-final -, -HU, -bIU, -1 in names are simplified to -y.

BLANK PAGE

PART I

The 1968 Crisis after Forty Years

BLANK PAGE

Introduction LESZEK W. GLUCHOWSKI and ANTONY POLONSKY We maintain that every Polish citizen should have only one fatherland—People’s Poland. (Applause) This view is shared by the overwhelming majority of Polish citizens of Jewish nationality, who faithfully serve our country. The state authorities treat all citizens the same irrespective of their nationality. Every citizen of our country has the same rights, but also the same citizen’s responsibilities towards People’s Poland. But we do not want a fifth column to be created in our country. (Applause) Speech of WLADYSLAW GOMULKA

to the Sixth Trade Union Congress, 19 June 1967

Everything started collapsing then. I lost hope that a Jew would ever be able to live in Poland without the stigma of his or her origin. The feeling of pre-war humilia-

tion returned. I was depressed by the awareness of the intensifying isolation and ,

| loneliness. Fear that had been suppressed from the time of the war now resurfaced. Embittered and disillusioned, I decided to emigrate from Poland. I was parting

, from all my nearest and dearest, I was leaving behind everything I had achieved. I , was going to strangers in an unknown world. I felt the burden of responsibility for my own and my son’s life. The past was being repeated. HALINA ZAWADZKA

Uciezcka z getta (Warsaw, 2001)

THE communist regime, which consolidated its hold on power between July 1944 and the beginning of 1947, never succeeded in establishing its legitimacy in the eyes of the bulk of Polish society. As a result its history was punctuated by a series of crises, which ultimately led to the negotiated end of communism in the summer of 1989. Some of these crises, most notably the events which brought Gomulka to power in 1956, the workers’ revolt which caused his fall in December 1970, and the period from the establishment of the Solidarity movement in the late summer of 1980 to the introduction of martial law in December 1981, have given rise to a large literature. Until recently, less attention has been devoted to the crisis of 1968. Even at the time it was difficult to characterize the ‘March events’. Were they a challenge to party hegemony by radical students seeking to emulate the changes which were taking place in neighbouring Czechoslovakia? Were they a struggle for control of the party in which a younger and more nationalistic group attempted to win

4 Introduction popular support by purging the regime of the alleged taint of its ‘Jewish’ origin? How much support did the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign, with its blatant echoes of prewar antisemitism, evoke in Polish society? How far can the student opposition which emerged in those years be seen as the basis of later movements like the Komitet Obrony Robotnikow (Committee for the Defence of the Workers; KOR)

and Solidarity itself? There was also the larger question of how far the ‘antiZionist’ campaign of 1968 was the result of domestic developments and how far it was inspired by the Soviet Union and its policies—the condemnation of Zionism and the breach of the whole socialist bloc with Israel. In recent years, much more attention has been devoted to the 1968 crisis as its importance in the process which led to the collapse of communism has become increasingly evident. Mieczystaw Moczar and his supporters, by admitting that communism had been imposed on the country by ‘alien elements’ and offering a more ‘Polish’ alternative, believed they would be able to create a more national and

legitimate political system. This merely contributed further to undermining Marxism-Leninism in the eyes of most Poles. At the same time, this was also the point at which the young socialist rebels abandoned the effort to transform the system from within and started to establish alternative structures outside party control, a key factor in the development of the movements which led to the collapse of

the communist system. Different aspects of the crisis have been examined in monographs by Jerzy Eisler, Dariusz Stola, and Pawet Oseka, while collections of essays have been edited by Marcin Kula, Pawel Oseka, and Marcin Zaremba, by

Grzegorz Soltysiak and Jozef Stepien, and by Konrad Rokicki and Slawomir Stepien.? Our goal in this volume is to illuminate all aspects of the 1968 crisis. The general

outline of what occurred in 1968 is clear and is set out in the chapters by Stola, Eisler, and Rozenbaum. From 1964 things began to go seriously wrong for the Gomulka regime. The ‘little stabilization’ he had established began to crumble. Gomutka himself, plagued by worsening health, became increasingly rigid and inflexible and tended to fly into rages if his views were contradicted. He was also

considerably taken aback by Nikita Khrushchev’s approaches to the West Germans in 1964, which he seems to have feared would endanger the security of

Kosygin. a |

, Poland and might even lead to territorial changes on the Polish western border. Khrushchev’s fall further increased his feeling of political isolation, though he did quickly establish close relations with his successors Leonid Brezhnev and Andrey

1 J. Eisler, Marzec 1968: Geneza, przebieg, konsekwencje (Warsaw, 1991), and id., Polski rok 1968 (Warsaw, 2006); D. Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967—1968 (Warsaw, 2000); P. Oseka,

Syjonisci, imspiratorzy, wichrzyciele: Obraz wroga w propagandzie Marca 1968 (Warsaw, 1999); M. Kula, P. Oseka, and M. Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968: Trzydziesci lat pégniej, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1998); G. Soltysiak and J. Stepien (eds.), Marzec 68: Miedzy tragedia a podtoscig (Warsaw, 1998); and K. Rokickiand S. Stepien (eds.), Oblicza Marca 1968 (Warsaw, 2004).

Introduction 5 The economic situation, too, became increasingly unsatisfactory. The halfmeasures of economic reform, introduced since 1956, did not stimulate a high rate

of growth, which was all the more necessary because of the rapid population growth in Poland. It is true that the rate of natural increase of the population fell from 18.5 per thousand in 1956 to g.4 in 1966, but the high birth rate of the 1950s meant that there was a large number of young people coming into the labour market in the early 1960s for whom it was difficult to provide jobs. Little progress was made after some attempts to introduce further reforms of the economic system in 1964 and 1965, although the need was recognized to allow individual factories to establish their own investment policies. Standards of living remained low by west

: European standards. As late as 1968 the average monthly wage was still only 4,200

| zlotys ($50 at the official exchange rate). ! Relations with the Roman Catholic Church also deteriorated. A major conflict | was precipitated by the Church’s desire to commemorate the thousandth anniver: sary of the introduction of Christianity into Poland in 966. The state authorities bitterly resented the Church’s appropriation of the millennium celebrations, since, in an effort to provide itself with a degree of legitimacy, the state wished to stress 1n its own commemorations ‘the achievements of our history in conjunction with the achievements of our state and our generation . . . [together] with the cele-

: bration of the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of People’s Poland’.? An appeal of the Polish episcopate in November 1965 to its German counterpart asking forgiveness for all Polish wrongs to the Germans was thus seized upon to attack the Church for craven appeasement of the hereditary national enemy. The conflict escalated throughout 1966, with a ban on Polish bishops travelling abroad and a refusal to allow Pope Paul VI to attend the millennium celebrations at the Jasna Gora monastery in Czestochowa. The church was able successfully to withstand communist pressure, and in the summer half a million faithful made a pilgrimage to Jasna Gora, where the empty papal throne bore eloquent witness to the depth of the conflict. Yet, as before, both sides were unwilling to push the clash beyond certain limits, and from December 1966 the bitterness began to subside somewhat. In May 1967 a number of new Church appointments were made and four apostolic administrators replaced the Vicar-General in the western territories, a tacit acceptance by the Vatican of the Oder—Neisse frontier. However, the Church continued to complain of restrictions on its activities and censorship, and an atmosphere of mutual suspicion persisted. The communist authorities were also not able to heal their breach with the intellectual community. They responded to a letter from thirty-four writers attacking * Notatka w sprawie obchodéw Tysiaclecia Paristwa Polskiego, AAN, KC PZPR, k. 47, quoted in M. Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalzm: Naconalistyczna legitymizacja wladzy komunistycznej w Polsce do 1980 roku (Warsaw, 2001), 316. B. Noszezak, ‘Sacrum’ czy ‘profanum?’: Spor o istote obchodow Milenium polskiego (1949-1966) (Warsaw, 2062), and B. Noszczak (ed.), Milenium czy Tystaclecie (Warsaw, 2006).

6 Introduction their cultural policy by launching a strong counter-offensive. Attempts were made to obtain signatures for a declaration of support for the regime, without much success, while publication of the works of the letter’s authors was discontinued 1n a number of cases. In autumn 1964 one of the signatories of the letter, Melchior Wankowicz, was even sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for criticizing the rulers of People’s Poland in a private letter to his family in the USA, although the sentence was never carried out. Efforts were stepped up to impose the party line on the writers, who were accused of being ‘out of step with the rest of the nation’.® These proved largely unsuccessful, and Warsaw University in particular became

one of the main centres of opposition to the regime. In 1965, for instance, the authorities arrested two young lecturers and party members, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski, for circulating what was in effect a ‘Trotskyist critique of the regime for betraying the interest of the workers. More significant was the expulsion from the party of a leading revisionist, Leszek Kolakowski, for a speech on the tenth anniversary of the ‘Polish October’. Kolakowski dared to contrast the high hopes raised by Gomutka’s return to power with the grim reality of life in People’s Poland. The crudity of the regime’s cultural policy was well exemplified by the speech of Zenon Kliszko, regarded as Gomutka’s number two, at the session of the Department of Science and Education of the Central Committee in October 1965 in which he stressed that those working in the social sciences ‘needed to be aware of the conditions in which they expressed their views and, in particular, the ideologi-

cal struggle and its requirements. This imposes an obligation to define clearly one’s position and role in the ideological conflict which socialism is conducting against its enemy, Imperialism.’ These years also saw significant changes in the character of the small Jewish community which had remained in Poland since the mass exodus of 1946-7. Audrey Kichelewski describes the general evolution of this community between the consolidation of Gomutka’s power in 1957 and the outbreak of the Six-Day War; Malgorzata Melchior examines the responses to the crisis of those who had survived in Poland during the war; and Joanna Wiszniewicz provides a group portrait of pupils of Jewish origin in Warsaw schools in the 1960s, a milieu from which

important elements in the student opposition were drawn. The difficult situation of one of the last Yiddish writers in Poland at this time, Naftali Herts Kon, 1s examined by Karen Auerbach. Gomutka’s own position within the party now also came under fire. ‘The increasing difficulties of the regime and the feeling of immobility aroused by Gomulka’s unimaginative policies stimulated the growth of the new faction within the party, composed mainly of people who had spent the war years in the communist under-

ground in Poland. The Partisans, as this group came to be known, were bitterly opposed to those communists, many of whom were of Jewish origin, who had 3M. Fik, Kultura polska po Jatcie: Krontka lat 1944-1981 (London, 1989), 366—7. 4 Nowe Drogi, 12 (Dec. 1965), 154.

Introduction 7 spent the war in the Soviet Union. In addition, they called for more authoritarian policies vis-a-vis the Church and the intellectuals and a greater stress on Polish nationalism. Their leader, Moczar, had served as the head of the security police in Lodz after the war and he became minister of internal affairs in 1964. A primitive populist who sought popularity by stressing that ‘he who is not against us is with us’, Moczar soon built up the veterans’ organization, the Zwiazek Bojownik6ow o

Wolnosé 1 Demokracje (Union of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy; ZBoWiD), into a formidable political base, providing valuable privileges for its 250,000 members. ‘The Partisans first emerged as a significant force at the Fourth

Congress of the party in June 1964, when one of their supporters, Ryszard Strzelecki, became a candidate member of the Politburo, which he entered as a full member at the end of the year. Moczar was able to establish his followers in power-

ful positions in the police force (citizens’ militia), the security apparatus, and the military. He also won the support of a number of intellectuals, above all in the journals Kultura, Stolica, and Zoltnierz Wolnosci, which were attracted by his assertive Polish nationalism.

The evolution of one aspect of the security apparatus, the Polish Military Intelligence Service, is the subject of the chapter by Leszek W. Gluchowski, who

| stresses that a long series of defections by intelligence officers of Jewish origin before 1964 had already set in motion a series of measures that spread intense sus-

: picion and paranoia, including antisemitism, throughout the officer corps of the | military as well as the security organs. ‘Treason investigations collectively accused | Polish Jews of disloyalty and effectively undermined the position of those among them who remained inside the party—state apparatus. The end result was that the most senior Polish Jew in the party, the Politburo member Roman Zambrowski, was forced to resign from power in 1963. All the pent-up forces in Polish society came to the surface in 1968. The Israeli victory in the Middle East war of June 1967, which was generally welcomed by

the Poles, was seized upon by the Partisans as a means of getting rid of their Jewish opponents. The role of ‘Israel’ in the crisis is examined in the chapter by Bozena Szaynok. The Partisans took as their pretext a speech of Gomutka shortly after the war in which he attacked ‘Zionist circles of Jews who are Polish citizens’ and who constituted a ‘fifth column’ in Poland. As a result, in the second half of 1967 a large number of Jewish party officials, particularly those in the military

and journalists, were purged from their posts. They included Leon Kasman, editor-in-chief of the party daily 7rybuna Ludu; Leopold Unger, de facto editor of Zycie Warszawy; and Janusz Zarzycki, chairman of the Warsaw National Council. We reprint in this issue an exchange between General Tadeusz Pidéro and General Wojciech Jaruzelski on the purge of Jewish officers in the Polish People’s Army.

At the same time, events in Czechoslovakia, where the hardliner Antonin Novotny had been overthrown in December 1967 and a new, ostensibly reformist,

8 Introduction regime was set up under Alexander Dubéek, stimulated demands by students and

intellectuals for similar changes in Poland. ‘Poland is waiting for its Dubcek’ (‘Polska czeka na swego Dubczeka’) became a popular slogan. The banning under Soviet pressure of the production of Dziady by Adam Mickiewicz in late January

1968, in which critical remarks about Russians were loudly applauded, led to growing unrest. This culminated in the outbreak of a large number of student demonstrations between 8 and 23 March. Considerable police violence was used against the demonstrators, and altogether over a thousand students were arrested.

These riots, in which agents provocateurs played a part, were seen by the Partisans as a way of further strengthening their position and perhaps also of challenging that of Gomutka. University lecturers who were critical of Gomutka and the Partisans were held responsible for the unrest and dismissed. More important, the Partisans and their adherents seized upon the fact that among the protesters

were a good number of children of leading communist functionaries, many of them of Jewish origin. They included Andrzej Duracz, whose father was a hero of the wartime communist resistance, and who was now senior editor of a leading state-owned publishing house; Adam Michnik, whose parents had been members

of the pre-war Communist Party; and Antoni Zambrowski, son of the former Politburo member Roman Zambrowski, who also led the ‘Pulawy’ faction. Articles

in the press underlined the ‘Zionist’ character of the disturbances, stressing the original names of Jews who had adopted more Polish names after the war, creating

a climate of antisemitism that enabled the Partisans to obtain the dismissal of

many of their opponents. | The character of this student opposition has given rise to considerable controversy in recent years. This echoes a wider debate over the character of People’s Poland and the nature of the negotiations that led to the end of the communist system. Here, the main division has not been between the communists and the opposition. Instead, echoing the ‘war at the top’ and the conflicts within the postSolidarity camp which marked the years immediately following 1989, the division

has been between those in the opposition who oppose comprehensive decommunization and those who support it. Essentially the dispute 1s about the course the democratic Polish republic should chart in the near future and whether or not to continue the uneasy consensus reached at the Round Table agreement that ended communist rule in 1989. At one end are those who argue that the deal was the best that could have been reached at the time and that it should stand. At the other end are those who argue that too many concessions were made to the communist authorities and that democracy in Poland cannot evolve normally until there is full reckoning with the communist past.

Those linked to Adam Michnik among the student opposition of 1968 have generally taken the view that one should avoid demonizing the ex-communists. In Michnik’s view Polish collective memory has two skeletons in the cupboard, one of which is authoritarian and nationalistic, the other of which is communist. Writing

Introduction 9 in Gazeta Wyborcza on 4 January 2000, he claimed that the former had not come to terms with antisemitism and the repressive policies pursued towards the national minorities during the twenty years between the First and the Second World Wars, while the latter had not come to terms with nearly five decades of communist dic-

tatorship. Under the communists it was impossible for meaningful historical debates to take place. In his words: Communism acted as a deep freeze, preserving collective memory in a state of immobility. With the end of communism, the old semi-totalitarian formations, like the ghosts of the

past, have returned to the public scene together with democracy. However, they have returned in a new role—not as the inheritors of the national-radical revolution of the 19308, but as fighters for freedom, sovereignty, and national identity against the past communist dictatorship. Thus we have witnessed a paradox. In the past a positive marker was attached to communism as a manifestation of radical anti-fascism; today a positive marker has been attached to all forms of anti-communism, even those that are close to fascism. By viewing fascism as an absolute evil, public opinion, in the past, did not want to remember

the terror and the cruelty of the Gulag, with its millions of victims, and the aggressive expansionism of the Stalinist state. Today, by treating communism as an absolute evil and

by glorifying all forms of anti-communism, public opinion seems to forget that Adolf : Hitler was an exceptionally committed anti-communist. In other words, anti-communism, | like anti-fascism, is not in itself a marker of human decency.

Michnik concluded that the use of anti-communist rhetoric in political life had

| debased the political process. It created conditions in which the debate on communism will become a way of fighting for power through the blackmail and

stigmatization of one’s political opponents. This is a parody of what was envisaged in the

| ‘reckoning with the past’. Here, we have a parody of the supposed reckoning debate. | Communism presented as absolute evil in this way ceases to be a dangerous ideological nar| cotic, whose effects are fanaticism, force, and captivity, and instead becomes a way of falsifying reality. The old lie—the lie of the communists settling accounts with fascism—becomes replaced by the new lie: the lie of anti-communists settling accounts with communism.

The conviction that in post-1989 Poland the ex-communists had used their newly gained legitimacy to obfuscate the horrors of the communist past led the editors of the conservative and highly respected journal Arcana, based in Krakow, to pose the following questions to four distinguished historians: ‘How should one write about communism?’ and ‘How should one write about People’s Poland?”° Explaining why they felt this discussion was necessary, the editors argued that

younger Poles’ ‘image’ of communist Poland had been clouded by nostalgia. Fascinated as they were with the ephemera of period television series, songs, cheap vacations at the seaside, and the ‘pomp of party ceremonies, viewed as more amus-

ing than awful’, they were in danger of forgetting why it had been necessary to > ‘Jak pisa¢ o komunizmie? Jak pisa¢ o PRL-u? (pytania do historykow)’, Arcana (Krakow), 32 (2000), 5-13.

10 Introduction struggle against communist oppression. The editors were concerned whether a ‘complete and trustworthy image’ of the communist past was being communicated. Is what is being passed on ‘sufficient’ to convey the lessons of communism—‘surely the most important [historical lesson] of the twentieth century’? Their misgivings were shared by the late Tomasz Strzembosz. How should one write about communism? “Truthfully’, he answered. ‘With a feeling of great responsibility. With the understanding that one is dealing with the greatest misfortune which the world has known.’ The ‘only adequate reaction’ when reading about communism, he added, is to ‘feel horrified and terrified’. The historian’s obligation (like that of ‘publicists, intellectuals—and politicians’) is ‘to warn, to steel ourselves, [and] to guard against this plague’. Communism ‘lives on, although it has changed the colour of its flags and although leather jackets have replaced suits and ties. It looks like a viper with the eyes of Putin. . .’. Only vigilance, by historians among others, can keep it from returning to victimize Poles (and presumably others) again.®

A position similar to that of Strzembosz has been articulated by Zdzislaw Krasnodebski, a sociologist and philosopher based in Germany and a leading Polish conservative. He has expressed his reservations on ‘concentrating on one’s

own ignoble actions’, since this could be harmful for civic education, ‘which requires positive models’. In his recent book, Demokracja peryferu, he has sought to explain the reasons for what he describes as the crisis of Polish democracy. These, he argues, are not only the consequence of the stratification of society and the demoralization caused by the period of transition when the norms of the former system were no longer operational and those of the new system had not yet been worked out and established. More important, in his view, was the incorrect political philosophy which underlay the transformation. This was based on the liberal principle of moral pluralism and the neutrality of the state. Poland was supposed to follow the Western example in its restructuring, it was supposed to be distrustful of national traditions, and it should have seen that the main goal of the transformation was the speedy modernization of the country rather than its de-

communization. Principally responsible for this wrong course were ‘Tadeusz Mazowiecki and Adam Michnik, who prevented an unequivocal condemnation, buttressed by law, of the communist system, with consequences in the sphere of criminal law and in the construction of the democratic state.’ Krasnodebski argues that ‘post-modern liberalism’ has completely discredited itself and he attacks the whole project of ‘modernity’. In his view, lay modernization has had destructive consequences and is responsible for religious fundamentalism, from Khomeini to Rydzyk. Under these circumstances, a Fourth Republic ° 'T. Strzembosz, in ‘Jak pisa¢ o komunizmie?’, 6, 7.

’ Z. Krasnodebski, Demokracja peryferii (Gdansk, 2003). There were interesting discussions of Krasnodebski’s views by Adam Krzeminski in Polityka, 6 Mar. 2004 and by Jerzy Jedlicki and Jarostaw Gowin in Tygodnik Powszechny, 24 (2004).

Introduction 11 needs to be created, based on a different political philosophy, rejecting postmodern liberalism and harking back to the ethos of Solidarity, which was rejected by the

Round Table, and to republican conservatism. The Polish legacy for the new Europe is multi-ethnic coexistence as in the First Republic and a Catholic road to modernity. The essence of what he is calling for is a return to ‘authenticity’. In addition, he argues that the adherents of Polish liberalism, most notably on the

pages of Gazeta Wyborcza, have been unwilling to discuss the recent past in Poland. “To some participants in the debate, it 1s easier to identify with the victims of Jedwabne than with the victims of communism.”®

While both groups agree that for its entire existence the Polish People’s Republic was politically dependent on the USSR, the level of dependence and its consequences, particularly after 1956, have aroused bitter controversies. This has led to very different assessments of the character of the opposition to communism. Andrzej Paczkowski has used four concepts to examine popular attitudes: resist-

ance (or rejection), adaptation, acceptance, and affirmation. In the immediate post-war period, resistance was the dominant posture, but even then, as the falsified referendum of 1946 showed, a quarter of the population voted for the socialist bloc. In the first decade, there was considerable affirmation; after 1956, adaptation

and acceptance became the most common.’ Thus he undermines—even in relation to the Stalinist period—the dichotomy between party-state officials and

| the oppressed society, looking for intermediate stages and ambiguous situations, without proposing an alternative model. He also points out that, alongside fear and

| ideological indoctrination, one of the principal elements defining the behaviour of ; society, particularly in the countryside, was the hope of social advancement— | although what this meant in practice can be debated. The argument also has a moral dimension. Historians such as Antoni Dudek have stressed the importance of the concept of totalitarianism since it undermines the position of those who believe ‘that the general balance of communist rule in Poland was favourable to our country’.'° This leads to a further issue—the moral assessment of those who participated in the pre-1989 system. For some, mainly on the political right, support for the Stalinist regime was a criminal act, which was

not effaced by subsequent commitment to reform. This explains their negative attitude to the revisionists of 1956 or to the members of KOR. They contrast the ‘opposition of the intelligentsia’ with that of the Catholic Church and of ‘ordinary

people’, who retained their commitment to religion and traditional values throughout the communist period. This resistance was, in their view, much more important than the activities of the ‘dissidents’. A good exponent of this position 8 Demokracja peryferit, 189.

9 A. Paczkowski, ‘Nazism and Communism in Polish Experience and Memory’, in H. Russo (ed.), S talinism and Nazism: History and Memory Compared (Lincoln, Nebr., 2004), 254—6. 10 Slady PeeReLu: Ludzie, wydarzenia, mechanizmy (Krakow, 2000), 8.

12 Introduction is Tomasz Strzembosz, in his article ‘Polacy w PRL: Sprzeciw, opozycja, opor’ (The Poles in the PRL: Rejection, Opposition, Resistance).'? Among those who have taken an opposite point of view are Andrzej Friszke, in | his many articles and two books, Opozyca politiczna w PRL 1945-1980 (Warsaw, 1994) and Oaza na Kopernika: Klub Inteligencjt Katolickiey 1956-1989 (Warsaw, 1997). He stresses the significance of the different forms of organized and systematic opposition, the weakening of the totalitarian characteristics of the system, the creation of areas where independent ideas could be exchanged, and the creation of new political conceptions, which sketched out a path to pluralism and democracy and defined the concept of ‘civil disobedience’. In his view, these developments gradually weakened the party—state apparatus (for instance in its ability to deprive its citizens of freedom), and led to the monopoly of information being broken and to the creation of autonomous enclaves of freedom in the society as well as the core of a democratic elite. This opposition was decisive in creating both the form and the goals of ‘Solidarity’. The exchange provoked by Piotr Gontarczyk, who presents a revealing document from the newly opened files of the secret police about the views of Jacek Kuron, a leading figure in the student opposition, reveals these differences clearly. The report, prepared in 1977 by one of Kuron’s colleagues, who turned out to bea secret police informer, sheds light on the strategy of those around Kuron and provides a powerful account of the March events. The extent to which the campaign against ‘Zionism’, which now claimed that the opposition to the regime was the product of a ‘West German-—Israeli conspiracy’,

was directed against the position of Gomutka became clearer when the First Secretary delivered a speech to party activists on 19 March 1968. The content of that speech is analysed in detail in the chapter by Dariusz Stola. Gomutka refused to associate himself fully with the anti-Zionist campaign, supported vociferously by a Partisan clique in the audience, and stressed that ‘it would be a misunderstanding to see in Zionism a danger to socialism or to the existing socio-political system’. At the same time, his rejection of antisemitism was less than categorical. He divided Jews into three groups: ‘patriotic Jews’, ‘Zionists’, and those who were neither Jews nor Poles but ‘cosmopolitans’, who should ‘avoid those fields of work where the affirmation of nationality is indispensable’. He also made a strong attack on the reformers and the intelligentsia, whom he held responsible for the March disturbances. Gomulka’s speech did not end the campaign to oust Jews and reformers from

positions of authority. A large number of university teachers lost their posts, including ninety-nine at Warsaw University, while in the Foreign Ministry it has been estimated that about 40 per cent of those in senior and middle positions were dismissed. Altogether some 9,000 people lost their positions, while nearly 15,000 11 'T. Strzembosz, ‘Polacy w PRL: Sprzeciw, opozycja, opor. Zachowania opozycyjne w systemie totalitarnym’, Studia Polityczne, 11 (Warsaw, 2000), 137-57.

Introduction 13 Jews left Poland for Israel, western Europe, and North America. Among those who left was the long-established communist writer Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, whose travails are described in the chapter by Holli Levitsky. We also reprint the testimony of several people who lived through these painful events: Jerzy Jedlicki, Henryk Dasko, and Miroslaw Sawicki. Gomulka himself made little attempt to reinstate those dismissed and this tactic

of swimming along with the tide meant that by July he was in a much stronger position in the party. At the same time Moczar also gained in strength, becoming a candidate member of the Politburo with responsibility for military and security affairs. The First Secretary’s position was further buttressed by the growing Soviet unease at the development of the situation in Czechoslovakia, which culmi-

| nated in the invasion of that country by forces of the Warsaw Pact in August. Gomutka had consistently opposed the reformists’ plans in Czechoslovakia and had been a strong proponent of Soviet military intervention, which took place

| mainly from Polish territory. In the aftermath of the invasion, he was able to count

| on Soviet support for his loyalty, the more so since the Soviets were extremely | unwilling to countenance any changes that could affect their position in eastern : Europe. Thus, at the Fifth Congress of the Polish party in November 1968, : Gomulika was able to reassert his firm control. Moczar did not become a full member of the Politburo, and while the reformers lost almost all their remaining

| positions on the Central Committee they were not replaced by the Partisans. For | the first time since 1956, Gomutka now had a clear majority of his own adherents | in the Politburo as well as the Central Committee, although the Partisans gained : control of the Secretariat. At the same time, Edward Gierek, the technocratic First | Secretary of the highly industrialized area of Upper Silesia, increased his authority and that of his supporters.

But Gomutka’s triumph, further strengthened by a major success in foreign policy, proved short-lived. Since 1969 the new Social Democratic government in Bonn had been attempting to pursue a more flexible policy towards the Soviet Union and the rest of the Soviet bloc. Following an agreement with the USSR, the West Germans declared their willingness to sign a treaty with the Poles that effectively recognized the Oder and western Neisse rivers as the western frontier of Poland. Gomutka also hoped that credits from West Germany would help revive

the flagging Polish economy. Moreover, the West German Chancellor Willy Brandt journeyed to Poland in December 1970 to sign the treaty. This act of personal reconciliation helped to underpin Gomulka’s undisputed position in Poland. However, by removing the threat from a ‘revanchist’ West Germany, the agreement significantly weakened the First Secretary’s hold on the Polish population, particularly in the region previously claimed by West Germany.

What finally undid Gomutka was the persistence of the economic crisis. Although economic problems had been discussed at the Fifth Congress, little had been done to deal with their pressing nature. The campaign against ‘revisionists’

14 Introduction and ‘Zionists’ had meant that many of the ablest economists in the country had been dismissed, while Bolestlaw Jaszczuk, the party secretary appointed by Gomulka to take charge of the economy, was both erratic in his judgements and lacking in any real understanding of the principal problems facing the country. The rigid centralization of the economic system was thus not modified, while the policies of increasing the indices of economic growth without any real regard for consumer preferences or the standard of living of the population were maintained. The percentage of the GNP invested rose from 24.2 in 1960 to 29.7 in 1969, with results similar to the period 1949-55: the neglect of housing, services, and the standard of living. Even according to official figures real wages rose by less than 10 per cent in the years 1965-70. In discussions of this problem after Gomutka’s fall, it was admitted that there were some groups of workers who actually suffered a decline in their real wages. Yet although the rate of investment was higher than

that of all the other socialist countries of eastern Europe, the rate of growth remained very unsatisfactory because of poor productivity and the growing tech-

nological gap between Poland and the rest of the industrialized world. | The negative effects of this policy were further exacerbated by the need to import Western machinery to bridge the technological gap. In order to meet the growing trade deficit, the export of Polish agricultural products, above all meat, was stepped up, with obvious effects on the domestic market. According to a Warsaw wit, Gomulka’s policy was to create a ‘meatless zone in central Europe’. The shortage of food products was made still worse by a drought and poor harvest in 1969. The First Secretary’s response to criticism of his economic policy was to claim that the country was ‘living beyond its means’ and to call for a further cut in consumption. As early as November 1968 a series of price increases was introduced and a further set was decreed in early 1970, in terms of which the price of some basic foodstuffs would be raised by as much as 30 per cent. In compensation, the prices of some consumer durables were to be lowered. A modification of the wage system was also proposed, which was seen by better-paid workers as a threat to their lucrative bonuses. This economic package proved the last straw. Mass strikes and demonstrations broke out among shipyard workers in the three northern cities of Gdansk, Gdynia, and Szczecin, which were brutally suppressed between 14 and 19 December. At least 500 people lost their lives and civil war seemed near. Gomutka appealed vainly for Soviet support, but it was clear that he was losing his grip politically. At the Politburo meeting of 18 December he suffered a minor stroke, and the majority of that body now swung to support Gomulka’s main opponents, Gierek, Moczar,

and Piotr Jaroszewicz, the deputy premier and Poland’s representative on the Comecon executive committee. On 19 December Gomutka was asked for his resignation as First Secretary and suspended from the Central Committee. Kliszko and Spychalski also lost their positions. On the following day Gierek was appointed First Secretary. His political career had come full circle. Gomutka, whose rise to

Introduction 15 power had been the direct consequence of a revolt by workers in Poznan, was over-

_ thrown fourteen years later by a new set of demonstrations by the workers his party—state claimed to represent. The fall came little more than two and a half years after the March events.

The 1968 crisis was many-sided. It saw the emigration of a large part of the remaining Jewish community and effectively ended Jewish life in the country for over a decade. It saw an attempt whose success was somewhat limited to use antisemitic rhetoric in order to provide a degree of public support for the regime. The failure to reform the Polish United Workers’ Party from within led to the adoption of a new and ultimately successful strategy by the opposition of creating an ‘alternative society’. At the same time, there is still no agreement as to the character of this opposition or on who was ultimately responsible for the defeat of communism in Poland. Indeed, as Andrzej Paczkowski has pointed out, ‘one of the most sig-

nificant phenomena of the last fifteen years has been the emergence and concretization (also in political life) of competing positions in the sphere of memory and in relation to the national past’.1” *2 A. Paczkowski, ‘Czerwone i czarne: Czy Polska jest przywiazana do narodowej historii?’,

| Tygodnik Powszechny, 11 (2004).

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 How Did [t Become Anti-fewish? DARIUSZ STOLA IN POLIsH historiography the dramatic events of spring 1968 are often simply referred to as ‘March’, and for many people the term is synonymous with an antiJewish witch-hunt. The witch-hunt’s official name was ‘anti-Zionist campaign’. In the following discussion I place the terms Zionism and Zionists in italics as they

belong neither to Polish nor to English but to another language: the Orwellian newspeak of the Communist Party. They were not used to refer to a particular

variety of nationalism or its proponents, but were substitutes for ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’, including cases where the person referred to as a Zionist was neither Jewish nor pro-Israeli at all.

The hate campaign that began in March 1968 included aggressive and omnipresent antisemitic propaganda—barely covered with the fig leaf of antiZionism; mass mobilization against ‘the enemies of socialist Poland’, among whom

the Zionists stood prominently; expulsion of Jews from the party, government posts, and other positions; the destruction or drastic restriction of Jewish institutions and organizations; and discrimination against and harassment of individuals for being Jewish. Last but not least, the wave of Jewish emigration that followed the campaign (encouraged, induced, sometimes simply forced by the authorities) reduced the Jewish population in Poland by half and brought organized Jewish life to the edge of extinction.

The anti-Zionist campaign was secondary to the main chapter of the March events, which consisted of a rebellion by the young and its pacification by the authorities.” Street riots broke out when police and groups of the Communist 1 For a more extensive presentation and analysis of the anti-Zionist campaign, see D. Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warsaw, 2000). On selected aspects of the cam-

paign in English, see Stola, ‘Anti-Zionism as Multipurpose Policy Instrument: The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland, 1967—1968’, in J. Herf (ed.), Antisemitism and Anti-Zionism in Historical Perspective: Convergence and Divergence (London and New York, 2006; repr. from Journal of Israeh

History, 25/1), and ‘Fighting against the Shadows: The Anti-Zionist Campaign of 1963’, in R. Blobaum (ed.), Antisemitism and its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY, 2004).

2 A detailed (800-page) presentation of the events of 1968 in Poland is provided by J. Eisler in Polski rok 1968 (Warsaw, 2006) and in his earlier Marzec 1968: Geneza, przebieg, konsekwencje

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 17 Party aktyw armed with clubs brutally attacked a peaceful student rally at Warsaw University on 8 March. This event did not put an end to the rebellion but caused it

| to spread. In the days following in Warsaw and other academic centres there were numerous protest meetings, student strikes, and street riots, to which the authorities responded with police clubs, arrests, expulsions from the universities, and conscription into the army. While students were the primary agents of the rebellion, protests also took place in cities without academic institutions (in more than a hundred localities across Poland) and involved other people as well, mainly young workers and secondary school students. By 27 March the police had arrested 2,591 people, including 597 students, while more than 600 students had been drafted into the army and assigned to separate units in distant garrisons.? Many more people, mostly young, were beaten, removed from universities, blacklisted by

| the secret police, and made the object of various other forms of harassment. | Repression continued for the next few months. A related aspect of the events was the attack against dissident intellectuals, including public labelling and persecution of independent-minded writers (favoured targets were the Catholic writers Pawel Jasienica and Stefan Kisielewsk1), scholars, and artists, which evolved into a wider campaign of intimidation of the intelligentsia. Thus, the Zzonists were under fire in a peculiar company of young rioters,

: Catholic intellectuals, and independent artists. The third current was a power : struggle between party factions, groups, and leaders that went on behind the scenes. This last is central to the question posed in the title of this essay, as the anti-Zionist campaign was its instrument.

: The Zionists appeared on the March scene quite unexpectedly, a few days after | the riots had begun. More importantly, there was no need for them to have done so.

| Applying retrospective determinism (things happened as they did because they : had to) to the campaign would be wrong for many reasons; among others, it would

| deprive the actors in the historical drama of their agency and responsibility. The present essay on how the March campaign became anti-Jewish is based on

| a research project on the campaign, which included investigation of primary (Warsaw, 1991). Other major publications concerning the events of spring 1968, and _ their anti-Jewish aspects in particular, are M. Kula, P. Oseka, and M. Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968: Trzydztesct lat poéniej, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1998); K. Rokicki and S. Stepien (eds.), Oblicza Marca 1968 (Warsaw, 2004); P. Oseka, Syjontsc1, inspiratorzy, wichrzyctele: Obraz wroga w propagandzie Marca 1968 (Warsaw, 1999); G. Soltysiak and J. Stepien(eds.), Marzec 68: Miedzy tragedia a podtoscig (Warsaw, 1998); M. Gtowinski, Marcowe gadanie: Komentarze do slow 1966-1971 (Warsaw, 1991). In English see

| J. Banas, The Scapegoats: The Exodus of the Remnants of Polish Jewry (London, 1979); M. Checinski, : Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism (New York, 1982); W. Rozenbaum, “The Background of the Anti-Zionist Campaign of 1967—68 in Poland’, Essays in History, 17 (1973), 71-95, and “The Anti-Zionist Campaign in Poland, June~-December 1967’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 20 (1978), 218-36.

3 ‘Dane statystyczne dot. osdb zatrzymanych, ukaranych i wcielonych do stuzby wojskowej’, in Kula, Oseka, and Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968, 11. 237—41.

18 Dariusz Stola sources, many of them inaccessible until recently.* In particular, it deals with the early days of the campaign, when the first anti-Zionist messages appeared publicly and set the direction for the massive attack in the following weeks. Answering the ‘how?’ question will also help clarify who did it, and a few comments at the end of the article will refer to the question ‘why?’ A few introductory comments are in order here. First, on the eve of the campaign Polish Jews were a small minority, a tiny relic of the once great Polish Jewry. There were approximately 25,000—-30,000 Jews among Poland’s more than 32 million inhabitants (i.e. no more than o.1 per cent). The group was ageing and its younger

members were undergoing accelerated acculturation and integration into Polish society, which also meant the erosion of Yiddish culture and secularization. The group’s education levels seem to have been well above those of the rest of the population, which meant that they were strongly overrepresented among the intelligentsia.

This and other factors, such as the selective nature of emigration, which had touched most of the Holocaust survivors in Poland (especially those who preferred

to live elsewhere than in communist Poland), made the group overrepresented, as it seems, in the Communist Party and state administration, their upper strata in particular.® Moreover, popular perception tended to exaggerate the extent of this participation (not infrequently to paranoid proportions), following the well-rooted prejudice of gydokomuna or Jewish communism. Popular prejudice was a necessary condition for the anti-Zionist campaign to succeed, yet it alone cannot explain the campaign. In particular, it cannot explain why it took place at that given moment, why the Communist Party-state ran it (against its declared Marxist-Leninist principles), and why the regime devoted so much energy and resources to it.

Secondly, a direct context for the actions and actors presented below was the communist regime of Poland, and some basic information about the ‘Jewish question’ inside the party is needed. The origins of the tension within the communist elite which became manifest in 1968 dated back to the late 1940s, when Wladyslaw

| Gomulka, the leader of the party until that time, was accused, together with a group of other communist leaders who had likewise spent the war in Poland, of right-wing nationalist deviation; they were removed from power, and some were subsequently arrested. The group of communists who emerged triumphant was dominated by those who had spent the war in the Soviet Union, including prominent Jews. In 1956 Gomutka returned and faced the leadership of the Polska Zyednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party; PZPR), which was divided into two factions. The relatively reformist group, called Pulawy, included * The archival research for this study was made possible by a generous grant from the American Jewish Committee. > On Jews in communist Poland see M. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY, 1997), and J. Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Fewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991). On the overrepresentation of Jews in the security apparatus, see A. Paczkowski, ‘Jews in the Polish Security Apparatus: An Attempt to Test the Stereotype’, Polin, 16 (2003), 453-64.

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 19 leading Jewish communists; the other faction, known as Natolin, did not hesitate to play the ethnic card against its rival. Gomulka formed a strategic pact with the first croup, but after a while he put his own people in key positions and, under the slogan of fighting against (Marxist) revisionism, he was able to weaken the Pulawy

faction’s position. In the 1960s a new force appeared on the political scene, the Partisans, a rather loose group of party leaders and lower-level activists united by similar political backgrounds, unappeased ambitions, and a world view combin-

ing chauvinism and communism, with the unquestioned leadership of General Mieczystaw Moczar, who became the head of the Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrznych (Ministry of Internal Affairs; MSW) and its powerful secret services.°®

| The third point is that no proof of any ‘Zionist conspiracy’ behind the youth | rebellion of 1968 has ever been found. The claim was one of the factors endowing

| the campaign with its grotesque character. For its proponents, the undeniable

| proof was the relatively numerous representation of Jews, as defined by Nuremberg standards, among the leaders of the student protest. This was the ‘hard data’ for their conspiracy theory. However, the presence of several young Polish Jews (or Poles of Jewish origin) among the student leaders is a feeble argument for the claim of a Zionist conspiracy, a conspiracy powerful enough to incite thousands of young people across Poland to riot, and one that allegedly was a local branch of a wider Israeli-(West) German plot, backed by the USA, to overthrow

: the government of Poland. Even the instigators of the campaign saw this weak| ness, since they systematically tended to exaggerate, or simply invent, the presence | and role of such people, let alone their alleged subversive intentions. This does not | mean that the instigators simply were lying. Knowing the inclination to conspiracy theories (‘detectivist materialism’) among those for whom illegal activity before 1945 and/or work in the secret police afterwards had been a formative experience,

| and of the widespread prejudice against Jews, who had been the favourite subject : of such theories in Poland, we may assume that at least some of them, to some extent, sincerely believed in what may appear to be paranoid visions.

: After the riots had begun in Warsaw on 8 March, the media at first remained silent. Only three newspapers on g March carried unsigned articles about ‘disruptions in street traffic’, young people ‘for whom material worries are foreign, as are

| the real conditions of life and the needs of our society’, and an unspecified arrival | of ‘representatives of Warsaw’s working class at the University’. In reaction to these articles, written in the style of something from an Orwell novel, the slogan ‘the press lies’ and symbolic newspaper burnings became one of the leitmotifs of the rebellion. ‘The theme of Zzon1sm was absent in these first press notices. Broader

discussion of the street brawls did not appear until Monday, 11 March. Two articles in the morning press, one in Sfowo Powszechne, the daily of the PAX association of ‘progressive’ (i.e. loyal to the party and Security-controlled) Catholics, the other in the party mouthpiece 7rybuna Ludu, gave the signal for a propaganda © On intra-party struggles see K. Persak, Sprama Henryka Hollanda (Warsaw, 2006), ch. 2.

20 Darwsz Stola attack. From that point onwards the quantity and intensity of attacks against Zionism snowballed in the media and in public speeches. The articles deserve detailed examination since they contain essential information for making sense of the complex and incomplete historical puzzle of March 1968. The unsigned article in Sfowo Powszechne claimed to be a ‘responsible commentary’ on ‘the painful events at Warsaw University’. It began with praise for Polish youth, who, ‘despite modern trends towards apathy’, have ‘vivid ideological and political interests’ and ‘view further development of our country towards socialist democracy’, suddenly noting ‘with satisfaction that antisemitic sentiments are alien to our youth’. Reference to antisemitism is no longer surprising when readers reach the third and following paragraphs, where the anonymous author reveals the background, instigators, and organizers of the ‘painful events’. The alleged background is the alliance between the State of Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany, aimed at cleansing the Germans of their criminal Nazi past, denigrating the underground struggle of the Polish nation against the occupant, and shifting the responsi-

bility for the extermination of six million Jews onto the Polish nation. The instigators are ‘Zionists in Poland [who] took their political orders from the FRG

[Federal Republic of Germany] willingly, as they cannot forgive Wladyslaw Gomutka his correct . . . assessment of the Israeli aggression in June last year’. Moreover, they are a special kind of Zionist: ‘they bear the responsibility for the errors and lawlessness of the Stalinist period’; after 1956 they tried to distort the ‘patriotic and socialist dynamics of Polish society’, and when they failed they ‘openly occupied positions of Zionist nationalism’. Such instigators as Stefan Staszewski (a former top apparatchik, ex-Stalinist, Jew, and leader of an influential party faction in the mid-1950s) used their ‘spiritual and family offspring’, who ‘have been fatally shaped by their embittered and politically bankrupt fathers’, to organize riots of the students and undermine the political order. ‘The article provides a list of ten such organizers: ‘Antoni Zambrowski, son of Roman Zambrowski; Katarzyna Werfel, daughter of Roman Werfel; Maria Petrusewicz, daughter of a professor of the Polish Academy of Sciences; Henryk Szlajfer, son of a censor from the Office of Press Control; and Adam Michnik, son of a senior editor in the Ksiqazka 1 Wiedza

party publishing house; Irena Grudzinska, daughter of the deputy minister of forestry; Alster, Blumsztajn, Rubinstein, Dojczgewant’. In case the Jewish names of

the alleged organizers were not a sufficient hint, the article added that some of them used to meet at the Babel Club of the Social and Cultural Association of Jews.’

The article in Trybuna Ludu did not contain anti-Zionist accents, yet it was equally important for the campaign since it appeared in the official party organ, and in some key aspects was similar—indeed almost identical—to the Slowo Powszechne article. In particular it pointed to ‘bankrupt politicians’ hiding behind the students, and it provided a similar list of ‘rowdy delinquents’ with information about their 7 Do studentow Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego’, Sfowo Powszechne, 11 Mar. 1968.

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 21 parents’ positions as high officials. According to Trybuna Ludu, they were Aleksander Smolar, Wiktor Gorecki, Irena Lasota, Henryk Szlajfer, Ewa Zarzycka, Katarzyna Werfel, Adam Michnik, and Jézef Dojczgewant.® The two articles were largely perceived as co-ordinated signals differing only in intensity and wording. On the following day many newspapers reprinted them or imitated them, while the

radio had already begun to broadcast selections from them on 11 March. | A third text worth examining, although less well known, is a leaflet ‘Whom Are You Supporting?’, which appeared on the campus of Warsaw University the same day. It repeated the same pattern: it named ten leaders of the student protest and

emphasized, as had Stowo Powszechne, their Jewish origin (‘the son of Ozjasz

| Szechter’, ‘the son of Fajga and Szlomo’, ‘an activist of the Babel Club’), noting : that they had rich parents, well placed in the establishment, as well as an elitist manner, disdainful of students from the working class and peasantry. They were Michnik, Smolar, Szlajfer, Grudzinska, Zarzycka, Torunczyk, Dajczgewand, as

| well as Krystyna Flato (daughter of a department director in the Ministry of | Foreign Affairs), Krzysztof Topolski (son of a minister), and Krystyna Winawer

| (daughter of a high court judge).° Although the lists of the alleged instigators in these sources vary somewhat, the

basic design and information about the student leaders and their families was undoubtedly derived from the same source. A specific proof for this lies 1n their repetition of the same errors, for example the inclusion of Ewa Zarzycka among

| the organizers of the protest and the misspelling of Dajczgewand’s name. There | were not many possible sources for the information, and practically speaking there was only one: the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Comparison of the texts quoted | above with the MSW Internal Bulletin confirms that it was the source of the infor| mation, as well as the source of the concept of the Zionist conspiracy behind the student rebellion. The secret Internal Bulletin of the MSW was the basic if not the most important

: source of information about the domestic situation for the highest decision-makers in People’s Poland. Gomutka in particular placed great trust in it.1°? The supplement to the issue of 9 March presented a succinct account of the events of the previous day

| at Warsaw University in less than two double-spaced typewritten pages, but its : author found it sufficiently important to include information such as the assertion | that ‘the most active involvement in the incident came from members of the Babel Club, as well as those known for disturbing public order in the past: J. Dojczgewant, B. Torunczyk, J. Grudzinska, W. Gorecki, M. Zarzycka, W. Nagorski, and in addition K. Werfel, Osdbka-Morawski, R. Fiszer, B. Weigl, L. Konopnicki, W. Brojer, and J. R6zanski’. It also mentioned the names of Irena Lasota and Mirostaw Sawicki.'* 8 “Wok6t zajs¢ na Uniwersytecie Warszawskim’, Trybuna Ludu, 11 Mar. 1968.

9 Eisler, Marzec 1968, 226-7. 10 Interview with Eugeniusz Szyr, Nov. 1998. 11 Internal Bulletins of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Biuletyny Wewnetrzne) from March 1968, published in Kula, Oseka, and Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968, vol. 11.

22 Dariusz Stola This list of the protest leaders was to a certain extent a construction, as can be seen by comparison with a report written soon after the incident, most likely by one of the MSW agents who had been present, which gives a different list of the most active demonstrators.'* Clear proof that behaviour on 8 March was not the sole criterion for selection was the fact that Ewa Zarzycka was included even though she had not only not been involved in the protest but had been abroad for several months. She was, however, the daughter of a well-known political figure of Jewish origin, a former head of the army Main Political Authority, who lost his seat as chairman of the Warsaw National Council in autumn 1967, following the SixDay War. Also, it was not difficult to realize that the Babel Club had no connection with the incident at the University, but for the readers of the Bulletin it was known from the reports of June 1967 (when its young Jewish members protested against the distorted presentation of the war in Polish media). Reference to the club simply served as a substitute for the word ‘Jewish’. A similar treatment of the role of Jews in the disturbances, particularly the children of highly placed officials, is clear in the MSW Bulletin of 10 March. The paragraph about ‘brawling groups of students disturbing public order, in collaboration with hooligan elements’ notes that their leaders were Topolski, Rubinstein, Weintraub, Goldberg, and Swistek, who appeared in defence of Michnik and Szlajfer, and urged others to attack the authorities. The Bulletin also mentioned Antoni Zambrowski, who had nothing to do with the organization of the protests, but was a son of a former Jewish member of the Politburo whom Gomutka personally disliked.'* The issues of the Bulletin on the following days left no doubt that its authors composed their list of instigators of or sympathizers with the rebellion of persons either with Jewish-sounding names or names well known in the ruling apparatus, such as Szechter, Wistreich, Zeichner, Mokles, Rozenstrauch, Karliner, Komar, Winawer, Eisenbach, Baczko, Morawski, etc., and frequently the name of Zambrowski. Less subtle manipulations are visible in such statements as ‘a group

of students of Jewish origin—leaders of the excesses—call themselves the “Commandos” ’, ‘in information derived from the academic institutions throughout the country, it is striking that the instigators of the student demonstrations are Zionist emissaries from the capital’; ‘a group of lawyers of Jewish origin . . . osten-

tatiously expressed their delight at “the patriotic demonstration of the youth groups” ’; ‘persons known for their Zionist views support the anarchic behaviour of the student groups’, etc.'* Certain information is repeated in successive reports,

as if their authors lacked new evidence for the Jewish conspiracy. The MSW Bulletin of g March was the first note about the incidents at Warsaw University made on the political level and the first known document to imply that the Jewish origins of some students were relevant to the incidents. Thus the MSW had the 12 Unsigned note of 8 Mar. 1968, Warsaw University Museum (MUW), file 599z, pp. 17—19. 13 MSW Bulletin of 10 Mar. 1968, in Kula, Oseka, and Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968, ii. 26. 14 MSW Bulletins, ibid., vol. 11.

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 23 ‘Jewish explanation’ of the incidents ready immediately after the riots. In fact, it seems to have been ready before the outbreak of student protest. The first attempt to pin blame by linking the ferment in academic institutions in Warsaw with Jews is in documents regarding the demonstrations against the closing of the play Dzzady (Forefathers’ Eve) at the Teatr Polski. This production of the nineteenth-century national drama by Adam Mickiewicz, a Polish classic, was banned because of its allegedly anti-Russian accents, arousing understandable outrage, mostly among the intelligentsia. After the final performance on 30 January 1968, approximately 300 people formed a procession in front of the theatre chanting ‘Free Art! Free Theatre!’, then moved to the Mickiewicz monu-

ment to lay flowers. Police scattered the participants with clubs and arrested thirty-five people. The security police were already paying close attention to the. ethnic origin of those apprehended or asked them ‘Why do you let these kikes use you?’ One of the apprehended students, whose mother was a well-known Catholic journalist and her father the dean of philosophy at Warsaw University, and who came from a long-assimilated Jewish family, was informed she was Jewish.'° Thus, in January 1968 at the latest, the MSW began collecting materials supporting a theory of Jewish conspiracy behind the ferment among Warsaw students. Shortly afterwards antisemitic notices appeared on the walls of the University

and in the private mail of certain individuals. One of them claimed that the protesters were backed by Zionists and Radio Free Europe. Three students of Jewish origin were mentioned as the leaders, and it was stressed that ‘Michnik, Blumsztajn, and Szlajfer cannot and will not teach us the tradition of patriotism of our nation’.© Another referred to the ‘fifth column’ and called to action: ‘[get] Jews by their peyes and [throw them] across the ocean’.'’ Young readers of these leaflets could never have encountered a Jew with peyes in Warsaw. This minor text

is worth mentioning because of its combination of antisemitic slogans from the 1930s (the call to throw Jews ‘across the ocean’) and the reality of Poland in the late 1960s, when the Jews were a small and assimilated minority. Zionists and Zionism had been a major target of communist hate propaganda for

a long time. At least since the Slansky show trial in Czechoslovakia in 1952, the terms had become code names for Jews and Jewish, which allowed them to be attacked in orthodox Leninist language. Used in the faction struggle in 1956, they then disappeared from official discourse, yet were not forgotten. In particular, fragmentary evidence shows that the theory of a Jewish threat to socialism and a special Jewish tendency to betrayal had been ripening inside the MSW at least since the early 1960s. One may suppose that Soviet influence had contributed to its 15 A. Mieszczanek (ed.), Krajobraz po szoku (Warsaw, 1989), 25, 122; Eisler, Marzec 1968, 157-8.

| 16 ‘To studentow’, repr. in Wydarzenia Marcowe (Paris, 1968), 139. ‘7 ‘Text of the leaflet repr. in Eisler, Marzec 1968, 160. Original copies are found in Archiwum Akt

Nowych (AAN) in Warsaw, the PZPR Central Committee collection (hereafter AAN, KC), 237/ VIUI-5777, p. 130; similar leaflets are in MUW, 599a and 5ggdII.

24 Dariusz Stola development. Following the Six-Day War and the anti-Israeli campaign in June 1967, the theory acquired a new dimension, political backing, and dynamics.'®

| While conflicting positions inside the Politburo at that time prevented a shift from an anti-Israeli campaign into an openly anti-Jewish one, MSW leaders realized that the opportunity to hit the Zzonists, the moment they had awaited so long, was near at hand. Speaking to the ministry directors on 28 June, General Moczar defined Polish Jews as infected with dangerous Zionism, indicated them as a collective object for particular scrutiny, and gave priority to the struggle against Zionism as thus understood.’ Such preparations for a purge were well advanced when the ferment among students and intellectuals became visible in early 1968 and could easily be connected to it. Until 8 March this developing ‘Jewish explanation’ was no more than a tool for compromising the student leaders. Afterwards it became

part of the official MSW reports to the members of the Politburo. Then party leaders accepted it as a basis for decisions, which set the campaign on the antiZionist track.

The MSW reports alone do not explain all the factors that lay behind the unleashing of the campaign. The party reports were the second basic source of information for the communist leaders. They read in particular the secret bulletins of the Organizational Department of the Central Committee (‘Information A’). The bulletins of 9 and 10 March gave a detailed description of the events in Warsaw and the reactions to them. Named as most active in the protest were ‘J. Kuron, K. Modzelewski, E. Lasota, E. Torunczyk, A. Michnik, H. Szlejfer, Blumsztein, Dajczgewand, A. Smolar, J. Litynski. Several names are misspelled here, but these are different mistakes from those found in the MSW documents. The party bulletin reported that the workers condemned the organizers of the protests and demanded an end to the liberal treatment of the instigators; that ‘there are frequent questions about which young people get accepted at the universities, who their parents are, and what conclusions will be drawn about the parents of those young instigators’. The bulletin emphasized that more detailed information was necessary and more arguments were needed to justify the use of force.”° In contrast to the MSW reports, the early party reports on the rebellion did not emphasize the Zionist theme. Yet this was temporary; a few days later the Zionist theme began to appear with increasing emphasis, and the MSW and party reports

confirmed each other. This seems to have resulted from a feedback mechanism rather than manipulation: after the attack on the Zionists began on 11 March, the 18 Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna, ch. 3; D. Libionka, ‘Brakujace ogniwo: Sowiecka literatura antysyjonistyczna w Polsce przedi po Marcu 1968’, in T: Szarota (ed.), Komunizm: Ideologia, system, ludzie (Warsaw, 2001).

19 “Protokol nr 002/67 z posiedzenia Kolegium d/s Operacyjnych MSW’, 28 June 1967, published in Stola, Kampania, 292-313. For more details of Polish reactions to the Six-Day War see

Stola, ‘Anti-Zionism as Multipurpose Policy Instrument’. | 20 Bulletins of the CC Organizational Department (‘Information A’) from Mar. 1968 published in Kula, Oseka, and Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968, vol. 11.

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 25 voices of the activists conveyed through the party channel reflected the contents of the propaganda. The party bulletin presented the situation as more dramatic than did the MSW one. It stressed that the students intended to spread the disturbances to other institutions and to mobilize the workers; that the groups of demonstrators used sticks and stones and tried to get into the editorial offices of newspapers; that anti-Soviet slogans were appearing on walls, and that there were cries of ‘Students to their weapons’ and ‘Poland is waiting for its Dubéek’ (the reformist leader of Czechoslovakia). Such information must have sounded ominous for readers of the bulletin and encouraged decisive action. The party channel thus suggested that measures should be strong and well justified, while the Ministry of Internal Affairs suggested that the instigators would be

compromised by their Jewish origin and their establishment background. The combined influence of both sources can be detected in the article in Trybuna Ludu. It was most clearly a reaction to the criticism by ‘Information A’ about the initial silence on the part of 7rybuna Ludu and its demand for an authoritative examination of the situation. Certain features of the article can be explained (and a certain

irony appreciated) by the fact that its author was Artur Starewicz, a secretary of the Central Committee (CC) of the Polish United Workers’ Party who, because of his Jewish origin and his later criticism of the campaign, himself became an object of intrigues on the part of the MSW. He was not aware that the antisemitic article in Sfowo Powszechne was appearing simultaneously with his unsigned article in Trybuna Ludu, which proves the skills of manipulation or the very good luck of those behind the article in Stfowo.”? The question of the authorship of the article in S/owo Powszechne has not yet been solved, and may never be. More important is the question of who approved its publication. Starewicz certainly did not make this decision; shortly afterwards he complained to Gomulka that the article in Sfowo Powszechne was released as the result of some secret arrangements over which he had no control. Starewicz complained about the silent disobedience of the apparatus that he formally directed, that is of the CC Press Bureau and its head, Stefan Olszowski, unequivocally indicating who was responsible for the publication of the article in Sfowo Powszechne. The immediate decision on publication was made by a certain comrade Adamiak

from the Press Bureau, but it seems impossible that he did this without Olszowski’s knowledge.?? Olszowski’s participation in the ‘secret arrangements’ for the publication of this text seems obvious, on the basis of his function in the CC bureaucracy, his involvement in some unclear intrigues, and the role he and his apparatus played in the further course of the antisemitic campaign. Yet Olszowski was not strong enough to take the risk of acting completely on his own. At the conference of leading newspaper editors on 5 April, he summarized the 21 Starewicz to Gomulka, 7 Apr. 1968, in Archiwum Dokumentacji Historyczne} PRL, Warsaw (APRL), col. Starewicz. 22 Notes from the Politburo session of 8 Apr. 1968, AAN, KC 1739, p. 255.

26 Darwsz Stola course of the campaign as it had progressed thus far, attributing its origin to an unspecified ‘leadership decision’. Initially, he claimed, the comprehension of the political nature of the protest was insufficient and the campaign lacked an offensive

strategy. “Ihe decisions of the party leadership changed the situation radically, ordering a press campaign against the instigators and the bankrupt politicians, intending to reveal their political background—reactionary, revisionist, and Zionist forces. On the basis of these decisions, publications began appearing on 11 March supporting the party line against attempts to sow chaos and to disrupt public order, with the objective of changing the socio-political orientation of our country.’° Whom exactly did Olszowski understand as the ‘party leadership’? The term meant the collegial decision-making organs of the PZPR Central Committee: the Politburo and the Secretariat, but in early March none of them had met formally. Yet Olszowski was most likely not lying. Gomulka and Zenon Kliszko, the party’s

key leaders, sat next to him at the meeting, and thus the information about the alleged leadership decisions was not merely his invention. Moreover, it would not be

surprising if some party leaders had made decisions instead of the formal CC organs. In the second half of the 1960s, when Gomutka’s rule became increasingly autocratic, the official decision-making bodies of the Central Committee met less and less often. Gomutka made decisions alone or in a narrow circle with his closest allies—Zenon Kliszko and Ryszard Strzelecki, known as the ‘narrow leadership’. These three men—Gomulka, Kliszko, and Strzelecki—had the strongest position in the party since they were members of both the Politburo and the CC Secretariat.*4

Therefore, it seems likely that a few members of the Politburo had met and made crucial decisions in the critical days after 8 March, including the decisions about propaganda. The fact that ‘Zionists’ and ‘bankrupt politicians’ featured prominently in the propaganda was not necessarily the result of a specific com-

mand from the party leadership. The accent of the attacks in particular texts depended on the author, editors of a given newspaper, the staff of the Press Bureau, and the censors. But the ‘leadership’ had at least to refer to Zionists in its general directives, and then tolerate the tendency to focus on the Jewish theme while the campaign was developing.

The unpublished memoirs of Jozef Kepa, First Secretary of the Warsaw Committee, confirm these hypotheses. On 11 March he was reportedly summoned

to the Central Committee, where Gomulka, Kliszko, Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz, Witold Jarosinski (a CC Secretary), Starewicz, Olszowski, Andrzej Werblan (head of the CC Department of Science), Moczar, and Tadeusz Pietrzak (head of Mailicja Obywatelska; Citizens’ Militia, MO; the police) had gathered.

Kepa claims that during this morning meeting Gomulka requested a text that Kepa had prepared for an address that afternoon to a conference of party activists, 23 Minutes from the conference of editors, 4 Apr. 1968, AAN, KC 6137, pp. 3—4. 24 See Tajne dokumenty Biura Politycznego: Grudzien 1970 (London, 1991), 297. ‘Narrow leadership’ as defined by Eugeniusz Szyr, at that time a member of Politburo; interview with E. Szyr, Nov. 1998.

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 27 | and added the following fragment: ‘the time is past when the expression “antisemitism” restrained everyone’s mouth. We have stopped treating this problem as an embarrassing thing. We have opposed and will continue to oppose every expression of nationalism and racial hatred, but we will not permit anyone to blackmail us with the pistol of antisemitism’.*° If we—conditionally—believe Kepa, Gomulka neither restrained the antisemitic campaign nor was he unaware, as some maintain, of what was going on, but on the contrary he deliberately encouraged it. However, it seems that this was not Gomulka’s objective. The passage cited acquires fresh meaning if we consider it not as the encouragement of antisemitism, which would have been difficult to reconcile with Gomutka’s attitude up to that point, but as a message for those members of the party leadership whose opposition to the campaign he could anticipate, and which perhaps had already been voiced.

In this context of internal discord in the PZPR leadership, the unclear circumstances surrounding the permission to print the Sfowo Powszechne article become understandable. Olszowski could permit the article in Sfowo with the general directive from ‘the narrow leadership’, or given the lack of a decision from his superiors, without the knowledge of those members of the leadership who would definitely have been opposed to such an idea. The article could not have been successfully sneaked into one of the major papers, particularly the party organ, in a similar way. Using a newspaper of secondary political importance, such as Sfowo Powszechne, it was possible to circumvent Starewicz, the CC secretary for press affairs. Otherwise Starewicz certainly would have put up resistance, and if needed he could have strengthened his opposition with collegial support in the Politburo. Similar circumstances are obvious in the publication, on the day after the publication of the Slowo Powszechne article, of another militantly anti-Zionist text. Ryszard Gontarz, whom history would remember as one of the most odious of the March journalists, published an article entitled ‘Instigators’ in Kurier Polski. Written in a certain familiar tone, the text courageously unveiled a conspiracy: ‘the time has come to reveal the sources of evil, show the facts, and call the instigators of the incidents by name. . . the organizers of the meeting at the University of Warsaw and the later brawls are mainly students who belong to the Babel Club. It was they who chanted in various places throughout Warsaw “Zambrowski to the [ Political] Bureau!” ’ The text reveals its inspiration in the MSW: demonization of

the Babel Club; the predilection for listing Jewish-sounding names (Szafir Mendel, Maurycy Torn, Natan Tennenbaum, etc.); and numerous details about — the individuals described that evidently came from the card files of the ministry. Gontarz himself, years afterwards, admitted that the article was written on the basis of MSW materials. He had broad contacts there, above all with Colonel

Tadeusz Walichnowski, the MSW’s leading expert on Zionism. The article in , Kurier Polski was approved and reportedly even revised and enhanced in the CC 25 Memoirs of J. Kepa, manuscript in APRL, col. Keepa.

28 Darwsz Stola Press Bureau.”° As in the article in Sfowo Powszechne, the ‘Instigators’ publicly introduced a new standard for writing about Jews, and the route leading to its publication was similar, through a side door but with the consent of the Press Bureau. This time the side door was through the newspaper of another PZPR satellite, the small and Security-controlled Democratic Party. Following the example of Sfowo Powszechne, Trybuna Ludu, and Kurter Polskt,

most of the newspapers joined the campaign. The party controlled almost all newspapers and magazines: the PZPR press published nearly 60 per cent of the entire daily press run, which totalled close to 8 million copies, the rest belonging to its satellite organizations, with a few exceptions of censored Catholic publications with limited press runs. As the head of the Press Bureau noted with satisfaction, in

just the first ten days of the campaign 250 relevant articles had appeared in the central and regional press. A significant portion of this propaganda ammunition bombarding Polish readers contained more or less openly antisemitic content. If we accept that only half of the 250 articles attacked Zionists above all or among others, and multiply the number of texts by the size of the print runs, we see that Poland was literally showered with millions, and in time tens of millions, of antiZionist messages. But the press was just one part of the propaganda machine the party used. The 1968 campaign was the first hate campaign in the Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa; PRL) to exploit the power of television, a new medium that had become widespread in the 1960s: in 1968 the only, state-owned, channel reached 3.4 million households. Olszowski praised “the radio and particularly television for playing the chief role in the widespread transmission of our political argumentation in the struggle with the activities of centres of

instigation’.?/

Kepa’s account quoted above, written years later with the obvious intention of

whitewashing his role in March, cannot conceal the fact that he contributed greatly to the campaign. ‘The conference of the Warsaw party aktym led by Kepa

and the rally organized by his people at the FSO automobile factory, both on 11 March, became examples for others to imitate. It was he who first introduced anti-Zionist slogans to the party forum at the meeting, in certain respects going even further than the article in Sfowo: for example, he stressed the threat of “diseuised Zionists’ in the party. It was there that banners with aggressive slogans first appeared, including some demanding struggle against the Zionists. Television and press reports spread images from the meetings that would soon become symbols of March: ‘Above the crowd of 6,000 workers who came here directly from their

workplaces, we see slogans such as “Students to their studies, writers to their pens”... “Purge Zionists from the Party” ’.*° 26 Kurier Polski, 3 Dec. 1968; B. Lopienska, ‘Komu to stuzy?’, Res Publica, 3 (1988); author’s interview with T. Walichnowski, June 19908. 27 Minutes of Olszowski’s conference with the editors of 5 Apr. 1968, in AAN, KC 6137. 28 Trybuna Ludu, 12 Mar. 1968.

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 29 In the course of a week similar meetings were organized by every province party

secretary as well as by hundreds of party organizations at the lower levels. Speeches and banners at the meetings across Poland were similar to those in Warsaw, with certain individual and local accents. For example, the party chief in Poznan emphasized the ‘union of West German imperialism with Israeli [imperialism] which Zionist activity in our country is serving. .. . There is no place among us for ideological saboteurs, for Zionists who are working together in their struggle

against socialism’, while the First Secretary in Kielce roared about ‘the international Zionist mafia’. ‘Zionists to Dayan!’ and ‘Antisemitism—No! AntiZionism— Yes!’ were among the slogans on various banners. Hundreds and then thousands of meetings passed resolutions and sent letters to the leadership, and their tone became increasingly radical. ‘We swear in memory of those who died for power to the people, that we will expel from Polish soil, with our workers’ fists, all the instigators and leaders of the coup against the working class and peasant government. We will not permit revisionist and Zionist rioters to accuse us of antisemitism’, wrote the workers from the Polfer factories, while the workers from the

Baildon steel works demanded ‘a purge of Zionist elements from party ranks, removal from their positions, and the refusal to permit their children to continue — further university studies’.”° The reach and penetration of public meetings was immense. Some were huge

undertakings organized with the participation of crowds numbering 100,000. Such meetings were the most spectacular, but on the whole more people participated in tens of thousands of meetings on a smaller scale, organized virtually everywhere. There were employees’ rallies in workplaces, open factory and department meetings, meetings in basic party organizations (Podstawowa Organizacyja Partyjna; POP), provincial, county, and district party organizations, conferences of the akiyw, sessions of party committees and executive committees at various levels, meetings of the party satellite and ‘transmission belt’ organizations, such as trade unions, youth and women’s organizations, etc. In Warsaw alone, and in only the first two weeks of the campaign, there were more than 1,900 POP meetings, the majority with the participation of non-party members, nearly 400 rallies, approximately 700 meetings of the aktyw, and 600 meetings of party groups.°° The num-

ber of different kinds of gatherings throughout the country in the course of the three most intense months of the campaign’s activity is difficult to specify, but more than a hundred thousand seems a conservative estimate. The Army alone directed 25,125 officers and cadets to lead ‘explanatory sessions’; they took part in 42,000 meetings (including 27,000 in the countryside, 4,000 at workplaces, and 10,500 in schools), which reportedly gathered a total of 3.7 million people.*! 29 Mieszczanek (ed.), Krajobraz po szoku, 43-6; J. Nowicki [ J. Karpinski], ‘Mowi Warszawa .. .’, Kultura (Paris), g—10 (1972), 116—17; E:sler, Polski rok 1968, ch. 7. 39 Information ‘A’ of 25 Mar. 1968, in Kula, Oseka, and Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968, ii. 242. 31 J. Poksinski, ‘Wojsko Polskie wobec Marca’, ibid. i. 80.

30 Dariusz Stola Even before this nationwide wave of meetings began, a decision had been made in Warsaw that set in motion another wave that would become typical of the March events—a wave of dismissals from the party and jobs. On 13 March the basic party organization (POP) met quickly in the High Chamber of Control (Najwyzsza Izba Kontroli; NIK), one of whose members, Roman Zambrowski, had been NIK vicepresident. In his absence, without presentation of evidence and without giving him

an opportunity to defend himself, the meeting removed Zambrowski from the party and sent a request to the authorities to dismiss him from his position.** This

was the end of the political career of a man who had been a Communist Party member for forty years, a former member of the Politburo, a powerful Secretary of the Central Committee, Vice Speaker of the Sejm, a member of the Council of State, and a ministry head. Zambrowski tried to defend himself. He wrote a letter to the Politburo demonstrating that the charges were unfounded: I do not personally know a single one of the organizers of the student demonstrations who were named in the press, while with regard to the instigators either I do not know them at all, or | have not seen them for many years. . . . In the last four years I have not given a single speech on a political topic, nor have I participated in any meeting (aside from my POP), nor have I written any articles or letters about political matters.*°

The Politburo decided to leave the letter unanswered, and sent its author into retirement. The decision to remove such a figure as Zambrowski from the party by a local party cell was an unprecedented, almost revolutionary, expression of intra-party democracy—it was obvious to everyone that the highest authorities were behind it.

News of the dismissal, broadcast immediately, sent a clear message: if such a prominent figure was defenceless, any Zionist could be freely attacked. Several other high-ranking Jewish officials soon lost their posts and a nationwide purge of ‘Zionists’, ‘revisionists’, and other ‘alien elements’ from the party and their posi-

tions gathered momentum. The dismissals descended from top government officials and editors-in-chief of major newspapers to university professors, bookkeepers in co-operatives, teachers in elementary schools, and factory foremen.

We do not know how many people were affected, and how many of them were Jewish. A key moment of the campaign was 19 March, when 3,000 party activists gathered in the Congress Hall in Warsaw to listen to Gomulka. This was his first public speech since 8 March and the first time that the party leadership appeared in public. TV and radio channels broadcast the meeting directly and in full. The hall was

crowded and filled with banners with such slogans as ‘Down with the Agents of Imperialism and Reactionary Zionism!’; ‘Long Live Comrade Gomulka’; ‘We Demand a Complete Unmasking and Punishment of the Political Instigators’; 32 Information ‘A’ of 13 Mar. 1968, in Kula, Oseka, and Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968, ii. 80. 33 ‘T isty R. Zambrowskiego do wladz partyjnych’, Krytyka, 6 (1980).

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 31 ‘We Trust You Wieslaw’; ‘Everyone Has Only One Fatherland’; etc. All the Politburo members sat at the presiding table.** Gomulka’s speech was, as usual, long and monotonous, in contrast to the excite-

ment in the audience, which frequently interrupted with storms of applause and shouts. The first and longest part of his speech focused on Dziady and the writers’ protest. He delivered an especially brutal attack on two Catholic writers, Kisielewski and Jasienica, and on Janusz Szpotanski, the author of a satirical opera with allusions to Gomutka, whom the First Secretary compared to ‘a man lying in the rot of the gutter, a man with the morality of a pimp’. Next he explained the circumstances behind the student protests, maintaining the familiar thesis of the dishonest intentions of the organizers, their cynical manipulation, and their desire

| to spill blood, but he attributed the protests to reactionary and revisionist instiga-

| tion, not Zionism.

! The First Secretary did not reach the issue of Zionism until the end of his speech, after a long historical-political exposé on the superiority of the communist

| regime and alliance with the USSR. He began his justification for bringing up the | subject with the fact that some of the members of the student movement were ‘youths of Jewish background or nationality’ whose parents in many cases occupied

: high positions, and ‘this circumstance above all led to the fact that in the course of | events the slogan of struggle with Zionism emerged and it was sometimes wrongly ! understood’. Gomulka denied that Zionism was a danger for Poland. There was,

| however—he claimed—a problem with self-identity among some of the Jews, : exemplified by those Jewish citizens of Poland who were attached more to Israel than to Poland. ‘I presume that Jews in this category will sooner or later leave our country’, he prophesied, and to make the prophecy self-fulfilling, he added: ‘We are ready to give emigration passports to those who consider Israel their Fatherland.’ The second group he distinguished were cosmopolitans ‘who feel neither Poles nor

| Jews. One should not resent them. Because of their cosmopolitan feelings these : people should nevertheless avoid fields of employment in which national affirma| tion is an essential thing.” He mentioned the well-known author Antoni Slonimski | as an example of a cosmopolitan. The third group of ‘citizens of Jewish origin’ in | Gomulka’s categorization were ‘those whose every root has grown deep into the | land in which they were born and for whom Poland is the only homeland. . .. Many of them have served People’s Poland with their work and their honest struggle . . . for which the party holds them in great esteem’. Upon finishing this part, Gomulka reassured the audience that the party ‘will oppose with complete firmness every manifestation of antisemitism. . . . the sole criterion for evaluating a citizen of our nation is his attitude towards socialism and towards the interests of our state and its people’.*° 34 Eisler, Polski rok 1968, 550—8. 85 W. Gomutka, Stanowisko partii—zgodne z wolg narodu: Przeméwienie wygtloszone na spotkaniu z parszawskim aktywem partyjnym 19 marca 1968 r. (Warsaw, 1968).

32 Dariusz Stola This part of the speech departed from the tone in which the media and the various meetings had spoken and written about Zionists in the preceding week. ‘The

effort of the author (or authors) to weigh words carefully was obvious. The division of Jews into three categories was a primitive cliché (compare the division of peasants into kulaks, middle peasants, and poor peasants), yet rather subtle when

compared with the lumping of all Jews together under the name Zionist. Furthermore, in the last paragraphs Gomulka called on his audience to reject unverified tales and damaging gossip, which might result ‘even [from] the subversive activity of the political enemy’. The content and structure of the speech bear witness to the fact that it was supposed to cool down, to a certain extent, the antiZionist atmosphere and remove the topic from the audience’s centre of interest. For example, the word ‘Zionism’ occurred for the first time in a sentence about its ‘wrong understanding’, while the relevant portion constitutes only 8 per cent of the text and did not appear until the end of the speech. The moderate tendency of the speech contrasted with the audience’s behaviour, especially of the members of the Volunteer Reserve Militia (Ochotnicza Rezerwa Milicji Obywatelskie}; ORMO) in the gallery, who at that moment clearly became excited and, holding aloft anti-Zionist banners, began encouraging the speaker with shouts of ‘Bolder, bolder’, ‘Go further, Wieslaw, give names’, and when he referred to emigration, they responded with cries of ‘Now, today’.°°

The behaviour of the audience, rather than the words of the First Secretary, made a greater impression on many of those who watched the meeting on television. One memoir reads: ‘I will never forget this TV broadcast. Watching the ~ screen I saw faces marked with thirst for blood and cruelty. I was not alone in this feeling. My conversations with various people later on confirmed that mothers who were connected with the condemned people reacted to the broadcast in the same way: they locked the door out of fear of a pogrom.’ Ida Kaminska, the famous actor and director of the Jewish Theatre, wrote in her memoirs: ‘I barely managed to control myself, ran to the bedroom, took a pill, and with all my strength attempted to restrain my emotion, and screamed, “Let’s get out of here! Right away, or else I won’t survive.” ’?”

The relatively mild treatment of Zionists becomes comprehensible when placed in the context of the disarray in the leadership. Apart from the careful approach to the theme of Zionism, the speech differs from the main thrust of the propaganda in the lack of any reference whatsoever to the theme of “bankrupt politicians’ and the avoidance of the names Zambrowski and Staszewski. Although mention was made on every page of the covert instigators, only a few writers and scholars were mentioned, who were referred to as ‘spiritual’, in other words not political instigators. 36 Eisler, Polski rok 1968, 550-8.

37 Z. Raszewski, Raptularz 1967-68 (Warsaw, n.d.), 132; I. Kaminska, Moje Zycie, moj teatr (Warsaw, 1995), 254; G. Temkin, ‘Exodus 1968’, Lewy Nurt (Zbiér rozpraw 1 artykuléw pod red. J. Zmigrodzkiego), 3 (1970), 42.

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 33 The carefully weighed words of Gomutka were to a certain extent a result of collective work and compromise. Gomulka spoke not in his own name, but in that of

the party leadership. Before the meeting, the Politburo discussed, although in haste, and approved the text of the speech, to which members of the Politburo and the Secretariat made some changes.*® Attacks on the Zzonists in the press, radio, and television did not cease after the speech of 19 March. To a certain extent this can be interpreted as the result of an awakening of popular antisemitic emotions, the inertia of the propaganda machin-

ery, and further manipulation by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Yet the key factor seems to be the duplicity of the messages coming from the party headquarters. On 21 March, under the pretext of the growing tensions in the Middle East, the CC Secretariat (in the absence of Starewicz) ‘recommended a step-up of the campaign in the press, radio, and television illuminating this new act of Israeli aggression’, emphasizing ‘the need to correct and illuminate the problem of Zionism and Jewish nationalism’. It also decided to fire a group of dissident academics

(Bronistaw Baczko, Wiodzimierz Brus, Zygmunt Bauman, Stefan Morawski, Leszek Kolakowski, and Stanislaw Zotkiewski), and to conduct a relevant ‘information campaign’ in the media.*? What the party apparatus at the level just below the Secretariat understood as ‘the correct illumination of the problem of Zionism’ is shown in a plan of publications prepared at the time in the CC Press Bureau. Although the word ‘Jews’ did not appear in the guidelines of the plan, four out of seven ‘main goals of the publications’ turned out to be, to a large extent, an opportunity for attacks on Jews. Among the seventy-three ‘selected topics’ at least eighteen were geared towards the anti-Jewish campaign directly or in a slightly veiled manner. The goals of such publications as ‘Zionism and Economic Politics’, “The Changes in Cadres in the Army after the Israeli Aggression’, ‘Why the Crimes of the Rozanskis and the Fejgins [ Jozef Rozanski, Anatol Fejgin, Jewish top Security officers in the Stalin period; making them plural was a particular feature of the hate speech] are Covered up’, or ‘Jobs in which National Affirmation is Necessary’ were evident. Veiled, but in the light of previous publications obvious, was the intent of such publications as ‘Who Was Removed from their Positions and Why’

(it happened that the Jews were), “The History of One Transaction. On the Question of Vice Minister Kutin’, and ‘The Career of a Scholar. About J. KatzSuchy’ (both Jewish).*° In the meantime the Central Committee Department of Propaganda and Agitation was preparing its own brochures: ‘Zionism and West German Revisionism. Questions and Answers’ and ‘Several Problems of Contemporary Zionism’. The first of these developed Colonel Walichnowski’s claim

of a Jewish—-(West) German conspiracy against Poland, while the second elaborated on ‘how did it happen that the ranks of the communist movement were 38 Politburo protocol of 19 Mar. 1968, AAN, KC 1739, p. 180. 39 CC Secretariat protocol, 21 Mar. 1968, AAN, KC 1737, p. 307. 40 “Plan najblizszych publikacji w prasie’, AAN, KC 237/XIX-347, pp. 3-9.

34 Darwusz Stola infiltrated by Zionist elements, alien to the internationalism and class ideology of

the proletariat’. ,

On 8 April the Politburo met for the first time since the beginning of the crisis. Absent was the minister of foreign affairs, Adam Rapacki, who had requested release from his position after the anti-Jewish hunt began in his ministry; silent—

that is, neutralized—was Marshal Marian Spychalski, who had long been the object of intrigues. In the discussion on the campaign, the party leaders disagreed: Edward Ochab, Stefan Jedrychowski, and Eugenitusz Szyr, who adopted a critical

stance, faced Gomultka, Strzelecki, Kliszko, Ignacy Loga-Sowinski, Edward Gierek, and Cyrankiewicz, who praised or justified it. ‘The remainder supported the majority or refrained from taking a clear stand. In summarizing the discussion, which was the traditional way in which the First Secretary expressed the party leadership’s position, Gomutka could therefore legitimately approve the campaign thus far, with some minor reservations about its anti-Jewish excess.*! If up to this

point one could doubt who bore responsibility for the campaign, and to what degree, the Politburo decisions of 8 April make things clear. Without overlooking the individual roles played by the persons and institutions discussed above, we can

, assert that political responsibility for the campaign was with, in the sacrosanct formula, ‘the Leadership of the Polish United Workers’ Party with the First Secretary of the Central Committee, Comrade Gomulka, at its head’. It is not easy to find evidence that could explain ‘why (the Jews)?’, to learn the motivations of the officials and officers who made Zionists the target of the campaign. Lies were a key pillar of the regime, in particular of the 1968 campaign, and all those involved in starting the campaign had spent years in the school of distortion and disguise; thus their statements can serve as evidence of their motives only in a most qualified manner. It seems more reasonable to look at their deeds, which } may reveal the goals they pursued. From such a perspective we see that the campaign served several goals. First, the anti-Zionist campaign was a reaction to the student protests and dissent among intellectuals. It was a tool for fighting the youth rebellion, through compromising its alleged instigators, leaders, and goals as alien and perverse. ‘The anti-Zionist propaganda also provided a smokescreen to hide the true target of police brutality. The symbolic anti-Jewish violence that filled the media blurred the fact that non-Jewish students (and workers) were the great majority of those

beaten, arrested, and otherwise repressed. , Second, anti-Zionism was used to prevent the youth rebellion from spreading beyond the universities to broader groups, industrial workers in particular. This seems the most important motive for allowing and maintaining the aggressive and demagogic campaign. At least since the autumn of 1967, when a series of strikes and other industrial protests followed a rise in food prices, the party leaders had been 41 Notes from the Politburo session of 8 Apr. 1968, AAN, KC 1739.

The Hate Campaign of March 1968 35 seriously concerned about the possible eruption of popular unrest. Portraying the dissident students and intellectuals as aliens—Jews, bloodstained Stalinists or their sons, arrogant members of the establishment, and so forth—certainly contributed to alienating them from the masses. Jewish communists seem to have been the best scapegoat available, against whom the party could direct popular frustration and anger for its past crimes, recent misdeeds, and constant absurdities of the regime. Only someone from within the establishment could serve as such a scapegoat. Pointing at Jewish communists, their Polish (ex-)comrades could absolve themselves and imply that after the purge, a better, purely Polish socialism would come.

The third objective of the campaign was to change the political balance in the party leadership. The behaviour of Gomutka and his allies confirms what the answer to the question cui bono? suggests. The March attack on Zionists revitalized the conflict that had been ripening in the Politburo for a few years and had become

| visible following the Six-Day War, when Gomutka publicly accused Polish Jews of double loyalty and met with the angry reactions of Ochab, Jedrychowski, and a few others. Renewing the attack against Jews in March gave its proponents a strategic

| advantage over their adversaries, who were forced on the defensive and deprived of

| support from the aktyw. Within a few weeks, the latter realized their defeat. Ochab, an important figure in party leadership in previous decades, the only one

| who was strong enough to criticize Gomulka openly, resigned from his Politburo | and government positions. The campaign enabled Gomulka to reconsolidate the party leadership on his terms.

: The above political objectives acquire greater weight in the context of develop| ments in Czechoslovakia. As Gomutka claimed at the 8 April meeting of the | Politburo, the radicalism of the campaign was justified by the alleged preparations for counter-revolution in the neighbouring country and its possible spread to Poland. If that was truly his perspective, then the brutal repression, the hate | campaign, and the mobilization of the party served as a pre-emptive strike against potential followers of the Czech path, as well as a means of consolidating the entire

| party, not just its leadership. In addition, the once powerful ‘bankrupt politicians’ (Zambrowski in particular), who to some party leaders could still appear as potential challengers, were

marginalized for good. This success could first of all be credited to General Moczar and his men, yet they were not fully satisfied. Gomutka proved his tactical skills and outmanoeuvred Moczar: he made him a deputy Politburo member but at the same time deprived him of control over MSW, which was Moczar’s key power base. Nevertheless, the initiators of the campaign from MSW effectively defeated their political adversaries inside the party, muted critics, and intimidated potential opponents; last but not least, they caused thousands of Jews, whom they had so much resented and suspected, to leave Poland for ever.

A result that the top decision-makers had not necessarily premeditated but accepted and exploited during the campaign was the beginning of a greater

36 Dariusz Stola mobility of cadres, which enabled them to advance their own loyal people in particular. This was very important to many younger apparatchiks, whose frustration had been growing for several years at the old guard, who had held on to positions and blocked their career paths. ‘To many such people, the purge initiated in March offered a chance for upward mobility or at least new hope for it. Last but not least, we come to a motivation of a different nature. Explaining ‘Why Zzonists??, we should not reduce the initiators and participants in the campaign to rational agents and their motivation to a calculated pursuit of interests. At least for some of them, attacking the Jews was a primary goal, a goal in itself, not just an instrument of other goals. Poland in spring 1968 was the scene of innumerable expressions of irrational anti-Jewish resentments and prejudices. They are still visible in the recorded words and deeds of the excited participants in the hate meetings, but also of some of the officials and officers at the upper levels of the state—party power structure. Making the Zionists a key target of the hate campaign served both the political interests listed above and dark emotional inclinations. The peculiar synergy of irrational impulses and rationally defined interests seems a key feature of the campaign.

PETE TE FTF TE ETE T EFTTA EET E HEAP ERO RTT OTT TTT TE OT ETT

1968 fews, Antisemitism, Emigration JERZY EISLER THE POLITICAL crises and social upheavals that punctuated the history of com-

| munist-ruled Poland are often described using the name of the month in which the event happened. This peculiar Polish calendar includes June 1956, October of | the same year, March 1968, December 1970, June 1976, August 1980, and finally | December 1981, when martial law was imposed. It is hard to overestimate the role of these months in post-war Polish history. At the same time it is difficult not to notice that all of them involve a form of linguistic oversimplification that obscures the nature of events which usually lasted much longer than a month. In the case of March 1968, which has been a subject of my research for over twenty-five years and to which I have already devoted three books, one should instead talk about ‘Marches’ in the plural.’ March 1968 consists of several different—not necessarily connected, indeed at times mutually exclusive and contradictory—storylines, which differ radically depending on who is looking at March 68 and for what purpose. For those who were at university in 1968, the students’ experience of March was the most important. They recall the student riots, rallies, and demonstrations. Many of them perceive March ’68 as the event that in some degree determined the rest of their lives. This is the best-known view of the March events. We know that the rebellious students in Poland in 1968 stepped out under the banner of freedom using leftist, socialist rather than communist, phraseology, and fought first and foremost for the democratization and liberalization of the system as well as for the right ‘to live in truth’. These events contributed to the formation of the ‘generation of *68’. Many of its representatives were active in the 1970s in the anti-

communist opposition and, after August 1980, were among the activists and advisers of Solidarity. To those involved in culture, science, and art March ’68 remains predominantly

a pogrom against the intelligentsia. It was in March ’68 that the mass media 1 J. Eisler, Marzec 1968: Geneza, przebieg, konsekwencje (Warsaw, 1991). See also a more popular work written with young readers in mind: J. Eisler, Marzec 1968 (Warsaw, 1995). I have recently published a synthesis of my extensive research, based on archival material previously unavailable to historians: Polski rok 1968 (Warsaw, 2006).

38 Jerzy E:sler attacked individual writers and scientists with particular viciousness. When we look at the March press today, we are astonished how much was written about rebellious intellectuals. At the same time, new faces were surfacing in intellectual life; very often they owed their meteoric rise not to their skills and talent but to their political loyalty. All this was accompanied by murky factional conflicts within the leadership of the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party; PZPR):

the struggle of the Partisans under the patronage of Mieczystaw Moczar with Wladyslaw Gomutka’s group and ‘the Silesians’ surrounding Edward Gierek. Despite the passage of time and the availability of many documents, this side of the March events is the least researched. There are many hypotheses and even speculations which cannot easily be verified. Most important for our discussion, however, is the ‘anti-Zionist current’ in the

events. It is perfectly understandable that many people who left Poland after March ’68 recall this shameful, antisemitic campaign most strongly. It is interesting that a significant part of that group seemingly fell for the March propaganda that denied them their right to Polishness. Many of those who before 1968 considered themselves Polish and declared attachment to Polishness later often preferred to introduce themselves with ‘I am from Poland’ instead of ‘I am Polish’. Some emigrants from long-assimilated families, in the face of the antisemitic campaign of 1968, openly returned to their Jewish roots. Others slowly stopped considering themselves Polish, but that did not necessarily mean that they felt more Jewish. Analysing the events of 1968 in Poland, one cannot avoid discussing the question of post-war Polish—Jewish relations. This is a difficult and complex problem which has long provoked strong interest and extreme emotions. In historical treatments of the subject, facts are mixed with old myths and stereotypes and ‘uncomfortable’ events and people are often left out. Not infrequently, we can accurately predict which arguments and theses will be stressed merely by looking at the name of the author of a particular book or article.” Let me start, then, by examining some key concepts and explaining my own point of view. First of all, I need to say whom I consider Jewish and whom (and why!) a Pole of a Jewish background. However, this distinction cannot be made without some hesitation. Therefore, I will turn here to one of my scholarly mentors, Krystyna Kersten, who wrote years ago: When I say ‘Poles’ I think about all who consider themselves Polish; both those whose ancestors belonged to the Polish community and those who, coming from different roots, chose Poland and Polishness as their motherland not only in terms of a civic bond with the Polish state but also as a spiritual connection with the cultural community leading to a 2 For two examples see a book published by the Fronda Publishing House, by Marek Jan Chodakiewicz, Zydzi 1 Polacy 1918-1955: Wspotistniente—zaglada—komunizm (Warsaw, 2000), and

a book published by the Jewish Historical Institute, August Grabski and Grzegorz Berendt, Miedzy emigracjg a trwaniem: Syjonisci 1 Romunisci Zydowscy w Polsce po Holocauscie (Warsaw, 2003).

1968: Jews, Antisemtism, Emigration 39 national identification. Similarly: a Jew is someone who has a bond with the Jewish people. We should remember, however, that the rule of self-determination has a Janus face: on the one hand it means that a person chooses his or her affiliation; on the other, in the monocultural national system, it can often be used to force an identity.°

Like Kersten, I am more inclined to perceive a nation in civic rather than in narrow ethnic categories. I am convinced that one cannot establish a person’s national identity solely in terms of ancestry, unless we want to lower ourselves to the level

of the Nuremberg Laws. The key word, then, is self-definition. If someone had Jewish ancestors but declared himself a Pole, we absolutely cannot ignore it and keep saying that he/she is a Polish Jew. In this case, we should rather talk about a Pole of Jewish background. We cannot forget that for many years Poland was the only motherland for numerous Jews, many of whom had lived there for generations.

What I have written so far should come with one important reservation, suggested by Dariusz Stola. Examining the anti-Zionist campaign in Poland in 1967-8, he wrote that ‘the question how someone was perceived in ethnic terms is equally important as the question who this person considered himself to be’. One should remember, however, that ‘a tendency to define a Jew according to his background had not only deep historical roots but was also very strongly reinforced by the recent past, during the German occupation, a pivotal experience for the generations living in Poland’, when ‘Jewish were those who as such were sentenced to death regardless of their identity, religion, citizenship, or cultural affiliation’ .* At the same time, we should remember that before the Second World War the Polish and Jewish communities, even in the case of educated people, often kept their distance and led separate lives. They did not, by and large, visit each other. Marcin Kula rightly emphasized that the distance existed despite walking the same streets and despite continuous exchange of goods and services. Both groups knew very little about the other, except for recognizing a small number of symbols and myths. Even among intellectuals and artists, 3K. Kersten, ‘Marzec 1968 1 tak zwana kwestia zydowska w Polsce po II wojnie Swiatowey’, in

| ead., Polacy, Zydz1, komunizm: Anatomia polpramd 1939-1968 (Warsaw, 1992), 145. A few years earlier the same author was even more explicit: ‘When I say “the Poles”, according to my philosophy

I mean all those who consider themselves Polish, both those whose grandfathers belonged to the Polish community and those whose ancestors and sometimes living relatives, or even they themselves in the past, were Jews (or Ukrainians, Belorussians, Germans, Slovaks, etc.). Having Jewish ancestors or beginning their lives as Jews, they left the Jewish world far or not so far behind and accepted the burden of Polishness, choosing Polish, both state and national, identity. One can say that by the same token, the Jews are those who consider themselves Jewish. Under one condition though: one has to understand that both areas of belonging and bonding don’t need to be separated; on the contrary, they can overlap. The binary scheme—a Pole or a Jew—is contrary to the reality, and, let us add, to the humanistic moral order. It leads to falsification both in the context of real life and in the sphere of values. It causes humiliating and ambiguous and also fake situations.’ See K. Kersten, ‘Rok 1968: Motyw zydowski’, Res Publica, 5 (1988), 58-9. * D. Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warsaw, 2000), 25.

40 Jerzy Ensler Judaeo-Christian relations were not as close as we tend to think today. Professor Marian Malowist, who died in 1988, a man of Jewish background, still remembered, even two years before his death, that not even one non-Jewish colleague came to listen to his Ph.D. presentation in 1934.°

Those differences were intensified by the different ways the two groups experienced the Nazi occupation. For many years (and still today) this occupation has been perceived as equally or similarly affecting all Polish citizens. We know today that this perception is completely wrong and we can safely say that there existed in Poland two different forms of occupation. A Pole who was not actively involved in the Underground, who did not violate the German law, who was not arrested accidentally (during a street round-up or the pacification of a village) had a relatively greater chance of surviving the occupation. Persons of Jewish descent (even those already assimilated) were practically deprived of such a chance. Writing about Polish—Jewish relations after the Second World War, one cannot

avoid discussing one of the most persistent stereotypes from Stalinist Poland, regarding the rule of ‘Judaeo-communism’ and the ‘Judaization of the secret service’.© Many Poles (of course nobody knows how many) were and still are convinced that in our country, during the first post-war decade, communists of Jewish descent played an exceptional (meaning evil, secret, criminal) role. This stereotype obviously does not specify who qualifies as a Jew, assuming it 1s clear enough. Polish historians have an exceptionally hard time breaking this stereotype, perhaps

also because those who subscribe to conspiracy theories in history rarely read scholarly works and know best where to look for the source of evil and do not accept rational arguments. Where should we look for the origins of those stereotypes? After the Second World War, many Jews, for whom the liberation of Polish lands from the Nazi occupation was the end of true hell, started co-operating with the communists and their Soviet patrons. This was true for both pre-war communists (understandably) and those who up to that period did not have much in common with communism. ’

A relatively large number of them landed in the military and ‘the organs of security’. A large part (perhaps a majority?) of the Polish population considered

the Red Army liberation as a change of occupiers, Soviet instead of Nazi. Co-operation with the new authorities was treated as collaboration. In such cases, people often defend ‘their own’ and point to ‘the strangers’ as the perpetrators of > M. Kula, ‘Amnezja—choroba tylko czesciowo zawiniona’, Tygodnik Powszechny, 38 (2004), 8. © J have tried to analyse this problem before. See J. Eisler, ‘Mity i stereotypy w PRL’, Wiadomosci Flistoryczne, 2 (2004), 3-24; English version: J. Eisler, ‘Myths and Stereotypes in Poland under the Communist Rule’, Acta Poloniae Historica, 91 (2005), 153-83.

” See Kersten, Polacy, Zydzi, komunizm, 76-88. Compare M. Checinski, Poland, Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism (New York, 1982); J. Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford, 1991); H. Szlajfer, Polacy/Zydzi, zderzente stereotypow: Ese; dla prayjaciot 1 innych (Warsaw, 2003).

1968: fews, Antisemitism, Emigration AI all evil. It was easy to point to the Jews since at least part of the underground publications claimed that the evil was done by ‘the Judaeo-Bolshevik agents’. There was an irrational need to idealize one’s nation, even if it was contrary to historical reality.®

Yes, there were people of Jewish background employed in the Ministerstwo Bezpieczenstwa Publicznego (Ministry of Public Security; MBP) and its local | branches. There were proportionally more of them, especially in higher positions, than in the whole society. The names of higher-ranking officials, such as Antoni Alster, Leon Andrzejewski, Julia Brystygier, Jozef Czaplicki, Anatol Fejgin, Adam

Humer, Mieczystaw Mietkowski, Roman Romkowski, Jozef Rozanski, Jozef

| Swiatlo, or Konrad Swietlik, are permanently linked with the history of the : Stalinist repression apparatus in Poland.’ But Jews did not constitute the majority

: of the MBP.

, It would be helpful in analysing the national composition of ‘bezpieka’ (security forces) to separate the supervisors from the rest of the staff. This task was taken by

: Krzysztof Szwagrzyk, who, after examining the personal files of the high-ranking

| officials, stated that in 1944-54, the times of the fiercest terror and lawlessness in Poland, there were 167 people of Jewish descent among 450 people of the highest rank in the MBP (from the head of the

department up). Considering that after the war the Jews and the people of Jewish background constituted not even one per cent of the country’s population, their 37 per cent participation in the leadership of the MBP is an overrepresentation of one nationality difficult to hide. ...asmaller, but a still significant, percentage held the highest functions in the local UB

(Urzad Bezpieczenstwa; Security Office) units. Among 107 district bosses and their deputies, 22 (13.7 per cent) were of Jewish background. After taking into consideration other higher ranks in provincial UB, department heads and their deputies, we can say that proportionally the largest numbers of Jews were in the provincial UB structures in the provinces of Szczecin (18.7 per cent), Wroclaw (18.7 per cent), Katowice (14.6 per cent), Lodz (14.2 per cent), Warsaw (13.6 per cent),'° Gdansk (12.0 per cent), and Lublin (10.1 per cent). In the remaining provinces the percentage was on average about 7 per cent, with the lowest of 3.5 per cent in the province of Zielona Goéra.'+

At the provincial level the percentage of Jews was much lower. Even though

the historians from the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej (Institute of National 8 See K. Kersten, ‘Rozwazania wokél podziemia 1944-47’, in ead., Miedzy wyzwoleniem a zniewolemem: Polska 1944-1956 (London, 1993), 28—g9. See also J. Szymanderski, ‘Diably, Zydzi, komunisci (o propagandzie antykomunistycznego podziemia w latach 1945-47)’, Krytyka, 27 (1988), 105-8.

° Andrzej Paczkowski successfully grappled with this problem in ‘Zydzi w UB: Proba weryfikacji stereotypu’, in IT’ Szarota (ed.), Komunizm, ideologia, system, ludzie (Warsaw, 2001), 192—204.

*© Cumulatively the provincial Urzad Bezpieczefstwa Publicznego (Public Security Office; UPB) and the UBP for the City of Warsaw.

11 Obsada personalna aparatu bezpieczenstwa w Polsce 1944-1989, i. Obsada personalna UB 1944-1956, ed. Krzysztof Szwagrzyk (Warsaw, 2005), 63-4. See also K. Szwagrzyk, ‘Zydzi w kierownictwie UB: Stereotyp czy rzeczywistosc?’, Biuletyn Instytutu Pamieci Narodowe), 11 (2005), 42.

42 Ferzy Esler Remembrance; IPN) have been analysing for some time the personnel of local branches of the security apparatus, we do not yet have comprehensive and totally reliable figures. However, on the basis of the research undertaken thus far, we can use individual cases to make certain generalizations. Jacek Pawlowicz, for example, examining the personnel files of the Plock County Office of Public Security, calculated that in 1945-56, of 307 employees, three officers and one censor (a woman working for three months in 1945) were of Jewish background. Three of those people declared themselves of ‘Jewish origin’; the fourth person’s work application had a handwritten correction (it is unclear who did it) replacing ‘Polish origin’ with Jewish.'* The percentage of people of Jewish background in the County Office of

~ Public Security in Przemysl was similar. Here, according to the calculations of Dariusz Iwaneczko, together with the auxiliary personnel, of those who serviced the konsumy (special stores for the nomenklatura), there were five people of Jewish background out of 399.*°

From the beginning of the 1960s, the Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrznych (Ministry of Internal Affairs; MSW) became increasingly interested in the Jewish

community, even though there were no more than 30,000 Jews and people of Jewish origin in Poland. Its functionaries did not hide their antisemitic views. When Jacek Szymanderski, later an activist of the democratic opposition, was first

arrested and questioned by the security in 1965, a certain Captain Aleksy Opalinski, in an attempt to gauge the situation at the University of Warsaw, asked, ‘Do the Jews often gather in your Department?’ Szymanderski, surprised by the question, answered with a hint of irony that he did not know since he was not able to tell the difference between Jews and non-Jews. The captain reacted very seri-

ously: ‘Well, that’s not good, Mr Szymanderski, one needs to know how to do that.’'4 The MSW devoted considerable attention to the principal surviving Jewish organization in Poland, the Towarzystwo Spolteczno-Kulturalne Zyd6w w Polsce (Social and Cultural Association of the Jews in Poland; TSKZ), which in 1966 had barely 7,500 members, 20 per cent of them elderly. It was particularly interested in

the Youth Club ‘Babel’, founded in 1962 by the Warsaw branch of TSKZ. Six years later ‘Babel’ had 262 members. Subsequently it became the embodiment of the ‘Zionist conspiracy’ in the propaganda which accompanied the March events. Even years later, party publications insistently and falsely claimed that the ‘Babel’ club was ‘a propaganda forum for chauvinism and Jewish nationalism, aspiring to instil the Zionist outlook among the Club’s youth’.!° ‘2 J. Pawlowicz, Ludzie ptockiej bezpieki: Struktura i obsada personalna Powiatowego Urzedu Bezpieczenstwa Publicenego w Plocku 1945-1956 (Warsaw, 2006). I am grateful to Jacek Pawlowicz for letting me read the manuscript in advance of publication. 13D. Iwaneczko, Urzad Bezpieczenstwa w Przemyslu 1944-1956 (Rzesz6w, 2004). 14 Jacek Szymanderski’s re/acja from Oct. 1987 (pers. comm.). 15 B. Hillebrandt, Marzec 1968: Geneza t przebieg wypadkéw (Warsaw, 1983), 57.

1968: fews, Antisemitism, Emigration 43 Henryk Szlajfer, a member of ‘Babel’, stated that there was never any sign of ‘an emigration atmosphere’ in the club, neither in ‘Babel’ nor at the camps organized by TSKZ, where ‘a Jewish lay community was being formed’. On Saturdays, there

were dances in the club, frequented also by many non-Jewish young people. In addition, discussions with well-known people were an important element of the Club’s activity. Among its guests were Wlodzimierz Brus, Marian Podkowinsk1, Jerzy Putrament, and Mieczystaw Rakowski.?® On 7 June 1967, when the Six-Day War had already started, Rakowski delivered a lecture (announced and approved several weeks earlier) about the situation in the

international workers’ movement. He wrote in his Dzienniki about this meeting: ‘The mood in the room was militant. People were shouting one another down. Discussion or rather individual statements [were] very emotional. The Soviet

| Union was passionately accused of supporting this fascist Nasser. Our leaders were not spared either. It was a difficult exchange. I am afraid it will have sad consequences. ’!”

Rakowski probably meant more serious consequences, but the first victim of the atmosphere dominating the meeting was its participant Natan Tenenbaum, who lost his job at the editorial board of the magazine published under the auspices of the TSKZ. During the meeting, he referred, as he later conceded, to a particularly vicious article in Zycie Warszawy and asked provocatively: ‘Are we talking about the Sudetenland or the blockade of the straits of Tirana; are we in 1938 or 1967; and is

this newspaper in my hand Zycie Warszawy or Obserwator Ludowy? Rakowski became furious; he changed Obserwator Ludowy into Volkische Beobachter and... three days later, there was a pink slip on my desk.’!®

Interestingly, ‘Tenenbaum’s statement was criticized in a secret report written on g June by the director of Department III in the MSW, Colonel Henryk Pietka. He pointed out that ‘normally such meetings are organized every Wednesday

and no more than thirty to forty interested young people attend them. On 7 June about 200 people came to hear the lecture.’ According to Colonel Pietka, ‘the mood in the room was exceptionally happy due to military victories of the Israeli army’. Allegedly there were cries: ‘let us leave the country and you'll see how we fight’.1?

Commenting on this report, Piotr Oseka and Marcin Zaremba rightly emphasized that in it ‘for the first time there appeared a suggestion that the betrayal of the interests of the Polish People’s Republic by Polish Jews was not a function of ‘6 Henryk Szlajfer’s testimony of June 1988 (pers. comm.). 7 M. E Rakowski, Dzienniki polityczne 1967-1968 (Warsaw, 1999), 61.

18 N. Tenenbaum, ‘Chciatbym dzieli¢ wasz los’, in A. Mieszczanek (ed.), Krajobraz po szoku (Warsaw, 1989), 121.

19 Archiwum Akt Nowych (Archives of Modern Records, hereafter AAN), KC PZPR, 237/VII-5296, ‘A note regarding the meeting in the student club “Babel” by TSKZ’, pp. 246—8. See also a note of the Ministry of Internal Affairs regarding the meeting in the student club ‘Babel’, Warsaw, 8 June 1967, in G. Soltysiak and J. Stepien (eds.), Marzec 68: Miedzy tragedia a podtosciga (Warsaw, 1998), 10—12.

44 | Ferzy E1sler individual support for Israel but the result of a conspiracy’, which should make us ‘look for some leading centre’. And even though neither in this nor in the subsequent security reports was it specified ‘who this consisted of and to whom it gave orders’, still ‘in the mind of the party recipient’, it revealed a conviction that ‘the Zionists exposed so far are only the tip of the iceberg’.”° One should add that Szlajfer, who participated in the meeting, recalled years later how dramatic it was and that Rakowski tried to control an almost hysterical mood in the audience. There were very few young people in the room; the majority were older Jews and they spoke with great anxiety about their relatives in Israel. They were seriously afraid of what would happen to them in case of victory by the

Arab states. Rakowski felt obliged to tell the audience that he was required to , report what had occurred at this meeting. It was, by the way, the last meeting of this type in ‘Babel’. And Szlajfer was banned from the club.*?

The Six-Day War was the detonator of the ‘explosive material’ which had been accumulating in Poland for years, and is treated as such by all scholars writing

| about March ’68. The military victories of Israel and the real or imagined reactions of Polish citizens of Jewish descent were exploited by the Partisans, the group around General Mieczyslaw Moczar, the minister of internal affairs.?? When solid arguments were lacking, they resorted to provocations, using fabrications and denunciations.

For example, it was meticulously noted in MSW materials that among the people criticizing the authorities of the Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa (Polish People’s Republic; PRL) and ‘supporting the aggressive politics of Israel’, there was a group of individuals connected with the film industry. They included Jan Gerhard, the editor-in-chief of the weekly Forum and literary director of the Filmmakers Group ‘Rytm’, the artistic director of the same group, the film director Jan Rybkowski, a group of people working in Polska Kronika Filmowa (the Polish Newsreels), the editor Helena Lemanska, the cinematographer Wladyslaw Forbert, and the artistic director of the Filmmakers Group ‘Studio’, Aleksander Ford, who allegedly criticized the government’s position on the Middle East conflict. It was also noted that, together with Jerzy Bossak and Wanda Jakubowska, he had put pressure on Janusz Nasfeter, who, ‘contrary to his own beliefs, is making a 20 P. Oseka and M. Zaremba, ‘Wojna po wojnie, czyli polskie reperkusje wojny szesciodniowe;’, Polska 1944/ 45-1989: Studia 1 matertaty, iv (Warsaw, 1999), 223. 21 Henryk Szlajfer’s testimony of June 1988. The meeting was described quite differently by one of

the most active March propagandists, Ryszard Gontarz, in an article ‘Prawda o Klubie “Babel”’, Sztandar Mtodych, 18 Mar. 1968.

22 On this milieu, in addition to my works mentioned above, see K. Lesiakowski, Mieczystaw Moczar ‘Mietek’: Biografia polityczna (Warsaw, 1998), 214-347; P. Wieczorkiewicz, ‘Walka o wladze w

kierownictwie PZPR w Marcu 68’, in M. Kula, P. Oseka, and M. Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968: Trzydziesci lat pogniej, Referaty (Warsaw, 1998), 39-57; M. Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm: Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja wladzy komunistycznej w Polsce do 1980 roku (Warsaw, 2001), 287-08.

1968: Jews, Antisemitism, Emigration 45 movie about the denunciation of Jews during the war by Poles who were hiding them’.??

Similar responses to the Six-Day War were detected in literary circles. The MSW noted that the chairman of the Krakow branch of the Zwiazek Literatow Polskich (Polish Writers’ Union; ZLP), Stefan Otwinowski, was alleged to have said that ‘the Jews would be fools if they gave up Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan River’. Arnold Stucki and Antoni Stonimski refused to participate in the gathering of young poets in Lodz because of what Slonimski described as the

‘anti-Israeli denunciations made by the inhabitants of Lodz’. Slonimski was alleged to have said that he would not visit such people.** In those days, nothing escaped the attention of the MSW. Looking through the archival materials, one can conclude that the greatest satisfaction was afforded its officials when they were able to detect ‘disloyalty’ towards Poland and, at the same

time, spiritual ties with Israel. MSW officials cited, for example, the statement made by one of the employees of the Provincial Trading Enterprise for Domestic Goods (Wojewodzkie Przedsiebiorstwo Handlu Artykulami Gospodarstwa Domowego) ‘Arged’ in Koszalin, who on 22 June, while picking up her passport before a short trip to Israel to visit her relatives, allegedly said: ‘I’m Jewish and Israel is my homeland. Living in Poland I treat as staying abroad.’° In a different report in the same file it was noted that the director of the Polska Kasa Oszczednosci (National Savings Bank; PKO) branch in Tel Aviv, Franciszek Zapasnik, ‘agreed to put on display on the building the flag of Israel, celebrating “the liberation of Jerusalem”. The building hosts also official rooms of the PRL

embassy and trade mission.’ Zapasnik was also alleged to have made remarks which were ‘offensive towards the United Arab Republic and Nasser’. On another occasion, it was noted that Tadeusz Zabludowski, employed in the Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe (State Scholarly Publishing House; PWN), who returned from Israel in the first days of the Six-Day War, expressed his regret that he had not stayed there longer, for “he would have been able to see the whole of Jerusalem [regained]... These are the historical days of victories.’ At the same time, ‘he was

impressed with the organization of the army and the standard of living in Israel’.*°

Meanwhile the PRL authorities, in accordance with the decision of the Political Consultative Committee of the Warsaw Treaty Organization, which had met in Moscow, broke off diplomatic relations with Israel on 12 June 1967. Six days later,

the ambassador of Israel, Dov Sattath, left Poland. Within a few months, the counter-intelligence department of the MSW prepared a ‘List of the people, who had participated in the parties at ambassador Sattath’s, organized on account of — #3 Archiwum Instytutu Pamieci Narodowej (Archives of the Institute of National Remembrance,

hereafter AIPN), 01288/15, ‘The list of people who spoke with hostility in connection with the Middle East conflict’, pp. 5—6, 18, 20, 31—2.

24 Thid. 32-5. 25 Tbid. 122. 26 Thid. 4, 64.

46 Jerzy Esler | religious holidays in 1965—1967’,”" which was to prove ‘extremely valuable’ in the

political climate of the spring of 1968. It is not surprising that visiting the Israeli embassy was considered at least suspicious 1n those days. We should recall here how Andrzej Wroblewski, a journalist and a theatre critic, remembered meetings and celebrations in the Israeli embassy and the people who

frequented it:

On the anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel the whole Warsaw beau monde showed up, people from the world of science and culture, anyone who meant anything in

their fields. This was the result not only of the fact that all the embassy personnel spoke Polish, consisted of people who were born in this country, and had often graduated from Polish universities. It was also an expression of mutual respect by people of culture, a desire to make up for something that was missing before the war. ... Among the guests were also

high-ranking officers, who in the past had organized military training for the Jews in Bolkow in Lower Silesia, before the state of Israel was created.?°

From the beginning of the campaign there were cases of ‘insubordination’ and ‘breaking ranks’. The protest sent on 15 June to Warsaw by the Polska Agencja Prasowa (Polish Press Agency; PAP) correspondent in New York City, Wiestaw Gornicki, caused some commotion. The letter protested against what Gornicki described as the misguided policies of the PRL and the extremely biased propaganda campaign in the Polish mass media. Gornicki wrote: I completely disagree with our decision to break off diplomatic relations and will explain my views at the appropriate time and in the appropriate manner to the relevant offices . . . I simply want to keep my hands clean in this insane affair and not even with one word support actions that fill me with horror and disgust. Perhaps it looks different from Warsaw, but I learned in New York City that Dayan is essentially the agent of Gehlen [the head of the West German intelligence service], that the Israeli army is commanded by members of the Gestapo, and that those hateful Jews are continuing the job started by the SS 1n Lidice. How much more one can bear? . . . in six months we will be humbly repudiating the pack of lies we have invented.”°

It is understandable that gestures of protest, more or less unequivocal, increased after Wiadystaw Gomulka’s speech during the Sixth Congress of ‘Trade Unions on 1g June 1967. Simultaneously, the media were subject to extremely tight control, even in the context of real socialism. Every sign of insubordination or sabotage was meticulously noted by the security. Widely commented on was the behaviour of Irena Dziedzic, who, according to a report, on 23 June during the broadcast of the daily television news (Dziennik Telewizyjny) at 7.30 p.m., ‘arbitrarily changed one word in her text; she altered the word “aggression” into “conflict” ’.°° 27 AIPN, 01062/35, vols. 1-22, Information of MSW Department II, vol. 4, pp. 107~9. I thank Krzysztof Persak for bringing this document to my attention. 28 A. Wroblewski, Byé Zydem ... Rozmowa z Dagiem Halvorsenem 0 Zydach i antysemityzmie Polakow (Warsaw, 1992), 214. 29 Quoted in A. Garlicki, Z tajnych archiwéw (Warsaw, 1993), 327.

30 ATPN, 01288/15, ‘The list of people’, p. 27.

1968: Jews, Antisemitism, Emigration 47 By June 1967, party and work meetings began to be organized on a mass scale. ‘The Israeli aggressors’ were unanimously condemned and individual people gave their opinions about the events in the Middle East and commented on Gomulka’s speech at the Trade Union Congress. The meetings were often dramatic and those who showed a lack of sufficient enthusiasm for ‘breaking off relations’ with Israel and condemning her actions were threatened with unspecified sanctions. A woman was unable to take part, for personal reasons, in a party meeting on 25 June at which the Israeli aggression against the Arab states was condemned. Four days later, she had to explain her absence at the party executive gathering. During

the interrogation, an instructor of the District Committee PZPR attacked her: “The comrade’s hair and complexion attest to the fact that she is a Polish woman of Jewish background. The comrade cannot deny this. Poles of Jewish background

deliberately do not attend the meetings; the comrade should take this into account.’ After a while the woman sent a letter to the party Control Commission, where she said that the statement paralysed me and made me speechless. I need to add that when someone discusses my looks (I know, they leave a lot to be desired), it completely ruins me psychologically. ’ve had those complexes since childhood . . . It was spread all over the institution that I am Jewish. Facing that, I gathered appropriate documents confirming that I am a Pole of Polish background.

At the end of the letter the author remarked that it was ridiculous for the party instructor to determine her ‘Jewish background’ based on dyed hair and a tan.*! Similar examples of dealing with ‘the Zionists’ can be multiplied. However, it would be over-simple to say that the Israeli victories aroused sympathy only among people of Jewish background. The Israeli embassy in Warsaw received numerous telegrams and letters with assurances of warm feelings, even friendship. All these gestures of human solidarity were registered by the security where they were able to do so. In its objectives for the second half of 1967, the MSW Executive set down in first place: ‘control of the activities of all associations with special attention to the political, organizational, and financial situation of TSKZ’.°?

The antisemitic campaign grew in intensity. Letters were sent to people of Jewish background full of brutal insults; there were offensive telephone calls. In . such a climate, Moczar, in his speech on 7 October during an event commemorating the establishment of the Milicja Obywatelska (Citizens’ Militia; MO) and the Stuzba Bezpieczenstwa (Security Service; SB), claimed that the Israeli army in the Middle East acted towards the Arabs as the Nazis did ‘towards the Poles and the Polish Jews’, but ‘the Zionists, also those in Poland’, refused to recognize this. He expressed surprise that ‘only twenty years after the mass murder, unheard of in history, perpetrated by the Nazis on the Jews, Israel had allowed itself today to become the ally of German revisionists in a fight against other nations’.®° 31 “Od tego mozna umrzec’, Respublika, 3 (1988), 86. 32 ATPN, MSW II/49, p. 119. 33 Przemowienie Ministra Spraw Wewnetrznych gen. dyw. Mieczystawa Moczara wygtoszone na Centralnej Akademi z okazji 23 rocznicy powotania MO1 SB w Warszawie dnia 7 X 1967 r. (Warsaw, 1967), 6.

48 Jerzy E:sler In his speech, the minister of internal affairs painted an image of the enemy that, thanks to the publications of Tadeusz Walichnowski and others,** was soon to become one of the most persistent clichés of the propaganda associated with the

March events—the alliance between the Israeli Zionists and the West German revisionists. The key question here, however, is whether Moczar himself was an antisemite. Andrzej Wroblewski recalled a conversation on this question with one of his closest friends, who ‘ridiculed the accusation that Moczar is a total antisemite. Yes, he was unfriendly towards the Jews coming from Russia; he was an enemy of the people “in long [Russian military] coats” ’, but his antisemitism was the result of ‘his ambition to play a leading political role and of his anti-Russian views, in which fear was mixed with fascination’. According to Wroblewski, Moczar represented ‘a type of populist socialism, based on the primitive class hostility towards the Jews, whom he knew from his early days in Lodz, when a Jew meant a capitalist. This view was close to German National Socialism in its early phase, when antisemitism was, in a way, an expression of class hatred. Genocide

came later. These populist tendencies appealed to many people in Poland.’*° Similar views were expressed by Artur Miedzyrzecki: “The antisemitism they sub- | scribed to was only one form of envy and more general dislike of the world. No, they were not racists or anti-racists . .. Those people hated everybody, including Jews. Perhaps Jews above all. But not only Jews.’°°

Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1967, personnel changes began in the major newspapers. A former member of the ‘Pulawy’ faction, Leon Kasman, resigned as the editor-in-chief of the main party paper, Trybuna Ludu; his deputy, Wiktor

Borowski, the father of the future Speaker of the Sejm, was also dismissed. Stanislaw Mojkowski, the president of the Stowarzyszenie Dziennikarzy Polskich (Polish Journalists’ Association; SDP), became the new editor of Trybuna Ludu. Kasman’s forced resignation was understood in the context of his conflict with Moczar and Gomulka, the General Secretary of the Polska Partia Robotnicza (Polish Workers’ Party; PPR), twenty years earlier. Many signs showed that in the late 1960s Kasman had already lost Moscow’s trust.?’ These issues are, however, shrouded in secrecy due to the lack of wider access to Soviet archives.

There were also changes in the party leadership and the admuinistration. General Janusz Zarzycki, another ‘Pulawy’ faction member, the predecessor of General Wojciech Jaruzelski as the chief of the Main Political Directorate (Glowny Zarzad Polityczny; GZP) of the Polish Army, resigned as the chairman of Warsaw City Council. In December 1967, Jan Ptasinski, till then the First 34 See T. Walichnowski, [zrael-NRF a Polska (Warsaw, 1968). 35 Wroblewski, By¢é Zydem, 211-13.

36 A. Miedzyrzecki, ‘1968: Wspomnienia i dokumenty’, WieZ, 7-8 (1988), 164.

°7 On the conflict between Moczar and Kasman see L. Kasman, ‘Konflikt z Moczarem’, in T. Toranska (ed.), Oni (Warsaw, 1997), 529-662. See also P. Gontarczyk, Polska Partia Robotnicza: Droga do wladzy 1941-1944 (Warsaw, 2003), 361-71; A. Werblan, Wladyslaw Gomulka Sekretarz Generalny PPR (Warsaw, 1988), 195—200.

1968: fews, Antisemitism, Emigration 49 Secretary of the Party Provincial Committee in Gdansk and considered a close ally

of Moczar, was appointed ambassador in Moscow. This appointment had a significant meaning for the Partisans in the face of the intensifying factional fight in the PZPR. Ptasinski was replaced in Gdansk by Stanislaw Kociolek, whose post in Warsaw (the First Secretary of the Provincial Committee) was filled by Jozef Kepa. However, this was just a prelude to the real offensive by the ‘Partisans’, which occurred a few months later. This time, the enemy and the target were clearly set: the Jews! Soon, it turned out it was also intellectuals, the intelligentsia, and the students. The catalyst was missing to start the action and perhaps this is why despite targeting the views of the citizens of Jewish background regarding the Six-Day War, only 500 people had left Poland by the end of the year. But the wave of antisemitic statements and actions swelled from month to month. The date of 30 January 1968 was an important turning point for many young people. On that day, a group of students, after the last performance of Dziady in the National Theatre, organized a demonstration, protesting against the ban on Adam Mickiewicz’s masterpiece. The ‘security forces’ now intervened. The young people arrested were transferred by the MO to police stations. Natan Tenenbaum recalled later how an officer who interrogated him was diligently filling in some form. Suddenly he asked Tenenbaum about his nationality, to which the student replied without thinking: ‘Jewish’. In that moment a major peeked into the room and asked the interrogator if he had already asked about the nationality. ‘My officer’, Tanenbaum related later, ‘answered that he had. Then I thought about the major: “you son-of-a-bitch, if I informed the party control commission what you are interested in, you would be sacked without further ado from both the party and your job.” That is basically how little I knew about what was in the making.’°® Ewa Morawska, a sociology student and daughter of a philosophy professor at the University of Warsaw, was arrested not by coincidence, according to the conversation between her father and the Deputy Rector of the university, Zygmunt Rybicki. The policemen asked her provocatively if she was Jewish. This was a shocking question for a girl whose father came from a family assimilated long ago and whose mother was a well-known Catholic writer. Professor Stefan Morawski also recalled that a student arrested during the same demonstration was shown ‘a Nazi anthropological album and a photo of the writer Bronistaw Baczko, and she was asked if she could recognize a terrible “kike” [ gudfaj | in him’.*?

Matters were not any better in the case of the March demonstrations. Many people experienced first-hand the gradually growing antisemitism of the officials. According to a description of what occurred at the police station at Warsaw district

Ochota, “They did not give us any food, but it seemed a petty annoyance in 38 Tenenbaum, ‘Chcialbym dzieli¢ wasz los’, 122.

39 Stefan Morawski’s testimony of Nov. 1988. See also ‘Szok. Rozmowa z profesorem Stefanem

Morawskim’, in Mieszczanek (ed.), Krajobraz po szoku, 24-5.

50 Jerzy Ensler comparison with beating with batons. Suddenly my name was called and they took me to the Security Officer. When we were alone in the room, he yelled: “You won’t be stuffing your face with Polish bread, let Israel give you something better” and slapped me hard in the face.’ Someone else recalled his first interrogation: ‘Several officials yelled at me: “you Jew, we'll send you to kibic” (they didn’t know the word is kibbutz). Two days later, during an interrogation they solemnly apologized. We are very sorry. We’ve checked, you are not a Jew.’*° Generally, the Jews and the people of Jewish background were treated much worse than those considered Polish. There 1s no place here to describe the sequence of events in March ’68. Suffice it to say that not only Jews were accused of Zionism. Mirostawa Grabowska put her finger on this phenomenon in an important article, written under the pseudonym Helena Pobog, where she stated that in 1968 those people were Jewish who, for various reasons, were considered Jewish. The reasons were not limited to background, last name, or appearance, but also included one’s circle of friends, job, professional biography, membership in the PZPR, and participation in religious observances. None of those characteristics was crucial; none was absolutely necessary. A Jew was someone who in general understanding was supposed to be Jewish.**

This approach made the anti-Zionist current of the March events similar to the approach of the National Socialists, for whom the word ‘Jew’ became, in certain situations, synonymous with the hated notion of the intellectual. It seems that in 1968 in Poland we had something quite similar. One did not need to have Jewish ancestors to be considered Jewish. Generally, the attack was directed at people from the broadly understood establishment, well ‘positioned’, who could be removed from their posts and then replaced by the attackers or their friends. In such a context, the word ‘Jewish’ described, in addition to ‘people in power’, almost all writers who were looked upon negatively by the party—state leadership, regardless of their roots, and large parts of the academic and media worlds.

In 1968, a Jew played in Poland, to a certain extent, a symbolic role. Dariusz Stola presented this problem brilliantly in his lecture during the IPN conference on 6 March 2003.** Some of the anti-Zionist statements and acts of that time brought to mind Nazism, but sometimes such conclusions were exaggerated. For example, one writer said about March: “The persecutions typical for the era of fascism began.’4? We need to emphasize strongly that the March events were not 40 “Marcowe migawki’, Wezwanie, 14 (1988), 8. 41 H. Pobdég (Miroslawa Grabowska), ‘Spory o Marzec’, Krytyka, 1o—11 (1981), 37.

42 D. Stola, ‘Antyzydowski nurt Marca 1968’, in K. Rokicki and S. Stepien (eds.), Oblicza Marca 1968 (Warsaw, 2004), 65-72.

43 “Q co walcza ci mlodzi ludzie z Marca?’, Polskie przedwiosnie: Wydarzen marcowych, ii: Czechostowacja (Paris, 1969), 22-3. It is worth noting, though, that in spring 1968 the following joke was being repeated in Poland. A man calls Mr Nowak and introduces himself as Izrael Kowalski. He recalls that Nowak hid him in his wardrobe throughout the whole occupation. ‘Oh, yes I remember. I haven’t heard from you for a long time. How have you been?’ Izrael Kowalski answers: ‘Have you still got that wardrobe?’

1968: Fews, Antisemitism, Emigration 51 comparable to Nazism. The antisemitic hysteria in spring 1968 did not result in anti-Jewish pogroms, which was of course nothing to be proud of for the organizers of this disgusting action. At the same time, repugnant things happened; and there were cases of violence.

One well-known case was the beating, on the evening of 11 March, of Stefan Kisielewski in the Old Town of Warsaw. This respected journalist of 7Tygodnik Powszechny and former Catholic deputy to the Seym was on his way to visit Stanislaw Stomma (he rang Stomma before leaving his apartment), when he was attacked and brutally beaten by ‘unknown offenders’. The attack was generally perceived as a punishment for his speech on 29 February at the writers’ meeting, which was a bitter attack on the cultural policies of the PRL authorities. The phrase ‘dictatorship of morons’ (‘dyktatura clemniakow’), used during the speech, offended the leadership of the party, particularly Gomutka. Unfortunately, this was not the only case of an assault by ‘bandits’ at this time. Ona hot May evening, around 11 p.m., the journalist Grzegorz Jaszunski was com- ing home from his office in Zycie Warszawy accompanied by his wife, Dr Zofia Kuratowska, when he was suddenly attacked on Marszatkowska Street by two hooligans. They were shouting: “This is the Jew Jaszunski from TV’, and one of them, probably aiming at Jaszunski’s eye, cut his brow with a razor. The victim was examined in a nearby children’s hospital at Litewska Street. He then returned to his office to get a car so he could go to emergency to have his wound stitched.** The incident created quite a stir; the New York Times published a note about it.

I found a trace of this incident in the report of the British ambassador in Warsaw of 28 April. He mentioned that the journalist Jaszunski was attacked by ‘unknown offenders’, who were shouting ‘Jewish dog’ and ‘a dirty Jew’. When the ambassador asked Jaszunski directly about the incident, during the meeting in the Miedzynarodowy Klub Prasy 1 Ksiazki (International Press and Book Club), the journalist downplayed it. He said he only had ‘a black eye’.*? It is difficult to say if Jaszunski consciously minimized the significance of the event. Perhaps, for whatever reasons, it was the ambassador. Lodz was one of the Polish cities where the antisemitic campaign took the most vicious form. The Lodz Committee of the PZPR and its secretary Jozef Spychalski began ‘the cleansing action’. Alina Grabowska, a journalist from Gfos Robotniczy, who after March emigrated from Poland, recalled that the board of the Journalist Club in Lodz banned journalists of Jewish background. In the eye clinic at the Military Medical Academy, baptism certificates were demanded from the physicians. Dziennik Lodzki wrote about the trial of a 62-year-old former director of the State Rubber Industry, whose last name was Srebrnik (a silver coin paid to 44 Grzegorz Jaszunski’s testimony of Mar. 1991.

49 Public Record Office, CAB, 139/745, I. J. Rawlinson, Anti-Semitism in Poland, Restricted, British Embassy, Warsaw, 28 Apr. 1968. I am grateful to Professor Dariusz Jarosz for giving me access to this document.

52 Ferzy Essler Judas for revealing Jesus’ identity): “The accused behaved with the arrogance characteristic of the people of Jewish background.’ The article was titled ‘Counterfeit Srebrnik’.*¢

March propaganda delighted in informing Polish society how many highranking posts in Israel were filled by emigrants from Poland. This theme was taken up on 13 April by Alojzy Sroga in a radio show ‘Co dzien niesie?’ (What is the day bringing?). Sroga informed his audience that in 1965 there were fifty-three per-

sons from Poland among 120 deputies of the Knesset. Among eighteen Israeli ministers, six were from Poland. These facts prompted Sroga’s deliberations on how people of Jewish background who live in Poland do not have a strong connection with this country and sooner or later they decide to emigrate to Israel and succeed in establishing themselves in the Israeli elite.*’ The involvement of Poles in saving the Jews during the German occupation was another subject to which much attention was devoted in March propaganda. The

| twenty-fifth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising gave a pretext for many articles and programmes on that subject. The propaganda ruthlessly took advantage of a certain naivety on the part of certain people who indeed, during the war, were involved in saving the Jews and now could not see the ambiguity in recalling those admirable and heroic deeds in the climate of the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign. Not everyone was as quick-witted as Dr Jozef Rybicki, the former Commander of

the Home Army’s Warsaw District Diversion Headquarters (Kedyw Okregu Warszawskiego Armii Krajowej) and the President of the Central Region of the Freedom and Independence Association (Obszar Centralny Zrzeszenia Wolnos¢ 1 Niezawistos¢), and later, in 1976—81, a member of the Komitet Obrony

Robotnikow (Workers’ Defence Committee; KOR). Rybicki was an uncle of Zygmunt Rybicki, the Deputy Rector of the University of Warsaw, but did not stay in touch with him, ashamed of his party career. In April 1968, a young journalist wanted to interview Jozef Rybicki, who had been involved in saving Jews during the Second World War. It was obvious that at the time any public statement on that subject could become an element of current political events. Jozef Rybicki,

very aware of this, started avoiding the particular questions and finally, in an attempt to discourage the young woman from further conversation, announced that there was nothing really to talk about, and in those times it was quite normal. In passing, he said that there was nothing extraordinary in the fact that he tried to save other Jews from death, for he was a Jew and his real name was ‘Fiszman’. The announcement confused the journalist, who quickly left. Jozef Rybicki’s nephew called a few hours later. Professor Rybicki, upset and agitated, shouted into the receiver: ‘What are you doing, uncle? Are you crazy, or what? What’s with this _ “Fiszman”? The comrades from the Warsaw Committee called and they are worried; they asked me what’s with this “Fiszman”. Do you want to ruin me?’ Jozef 46 A. Grabowska, ‘L6dzki marzec’, Kultura (Paris), 4 (1969), 75—7. 47 Centralna Fonoteka Polskiego Radia (Central Tape Collection of Polish Radio), tape 3210.

1968: fews, Antisemitism, Emigration 53 Rybicki, a man of impeccable manners, answered stoically: ‘Kiss my arse!’ and he hung up.*®

_ We touch upon a very delicate question, difficult to answer without sociological research, which was not conducted at that time, of how Polish society reacted to the antisemitic slogans in 1968. We can rely on our own memory or on testimonies of various people, but in any case we will end up with a fragmented and very subjective picture. Without difficulty we can give many examples of support for the campaign by so-called decent people, but also examples of human solidarity and spontaneous acts of assistance to those who were brutally attacked. It is impossible to determine today which attitudes prevailed. Perhaps indifference and a wait-and-see attitude were the most common? In March 1981, Jan Jozef Lipski made a comment on that subject: ‘I’m deeply convinced that the majority of Polish society remained at least indifferent to the larger socio-political game . . . The purges in those days were very deep and they definitely spread outside of the apparatus. They went, so to speak, down to the bottom. People were fired from all possible places solely because they were of Jewish background or there was a suspicion of that.’*° Today, however, thanks to the access to archives produced by the security appa-

ratus, historians can say much more about the attitude of Polish society to the March anti-Zionist campaign. We cannot therefore deny that strong antisemitic sentiments were a fact in many institutions at that time. Antisemitic statements, quite often recorded in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, were multiplying. For example, the MO Provincial Headquarters in Opole informed its superiors that ‘a certain engineer’ in Kedzierzyn, during a discussion with other workmates, was alleged to have said the following: ‘Zionists should be deported from Poland and other Jews also.’°° Some individuals of Jewish background sought comfort in trying to persuade themselves that the antisemitic purge would miss them. One of the reports of the Warsaw MO Provincial Headquarters stated that Ludwik Krasucki, the editor of 7rybuna Ludu, expressed his opinion that the recent events ‘will not affect his professional career. He thinks that decent Jews are also needed.’??

Many people, if we are to believe security reports, were not certain how to relate to the anti-Zionist campaign. For example, Colonel Kazimierz Modelewski, , the MO Provincial Deputy Commander in charge of security in Bialystok, informed his superiors that ‘in the circles of the former underground, the opinions are divided. There is, on the one hand, support for the party policies concerning Zionism; on the other hand, there are anti-Soviet and anti-communist accents.’°” 48 Jozef Rybicki’s testimony of Apr. 1984. 49 J. J. Lipski, ‘Kwestia zydowska’, Marzec ’68: Sesja w Universytecie Warszawskim 1981 (Warsaw, 1981), 1. 46.

50 AIPN, MSW II/3825, ‘Meldunki zastepcy komendanta wojew6dzkiego MO ds SB w Opoluv’, p. 114.

ot AIPN, MSW II/3829, ‘Meldunki zastepcy komendanta wojew6dzkiego MO ds SB w Warszawie’, p. 82.

52 ATPN, MSW II/3815, ‘Meldunki zastepcy komendanta wojew6dzkeigo MO ds SB w Bialymstoku’, p. 14.

54 Jerzy E:sler In other words, some former soldiers from the independence underground in Podlasie experienced a certain cognitive split since in their view the sufferings had been caused above all by ‘Jew-communists’ and in particular by ‘Jew-Secret Police officers’.

Some people revived their dormant antisemitism. The new, communist antisemitism drew on the older cultural, social, economic, and religious antisemitism. The mixture was, as usual, linked with conspiracy theories. An artisan in Cieszyn allegedly said that ‘if Jews made up one per cent of government representatives, it would not have been a problem, but the situation 1s different since Jews make up 80 per cent of those in the government and high-ranking posts’.°? Of course, nobody

in the MSW was interested in the criteria of Jewishness used by the person who expressed such views. It is not even certain that anyone in Cieszyn had such views at all. More important was that in the antisemitic atmosphere of spring 1968, the MSW could invent such a person without any difficulty. According to the antisemitic MSW functionaries, people of Jewish background had a specific way of looking at the origin of the March events. In one of his

reports, Colonel Julian Wojtusik, the MO Provincial Deputy Commander in charge of security in Kielce, informed Headquarters that Krystyna Lukasiewicz, who is ‘related to the Jews’, and a legal adviser in the State Vehicle Transportation Office (Panstwowa Komunikacja Samochodowa) in Skarzysko, was alleged to have said: ‘“the events happened because the Polish and university authorities were negatively inclined towards those with Jewish connections”. According to her, the Jews have a strong position and nothing will break them because they have international support at the highest political and financial level.’ It seems that in provincial Poland antisemitism was even more aggressive, or at least the local reports sounded more antisemitic. For example, the MO County Command in Wloszczowa informed the MO Provincial Headquarters in Kielce that farmers, former activists of the Polish Peasant Party (Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe), were saying that they had finally realized who was really in power in Poland: ‘Up to now, we’ve heard that the peasants and workers ruled Poland, while in reality the Jews do.’°? Colonel Jan Pieterwas reported an equally extreme mood in the Koszalin province. He noted the following statement on 13 April: “We need

to purge the army, the Ministry of Foreign Trade, and the judicial system of Zionists with Polish last names, because in spirit and even in action they are always with their brothers in Israel.’°® Similarly, the MO Provincial Headquarters in Kielce did not mince its words.

On 11 April, it reported that, according to the workers of the cement factory in Nowiny, ‘the party and state apparatus should have long ago been purged of the Jews and Zionists’. The justification was that ‘a Jew (like a German) will never 53 ATPN, IPN 0746/20, p. 27. 54 AIPN, MSW II/3819, ‘Meldunki zastepcy komendanta wojewOdzkiego MO ds SB w Kielcach’,

p. 8. °° AIPN, IPN 0746/60, p. 1. °6 AIPN, IPN 0746/23, p. 73.

1968: fews, Antisemitism, Emigration 55 be a friend to a Pole. A German and a Jew always play up to racial superiority. A Jew was and is an opportunist, and since he does not feel Polish, he is prone to betrayal. For a Pole, a Russian who is a Slav and does not emphasize his racial superiority can be a friend.’°’ I am purposely quoting the original, and of course I will not analyse it or argue with it. The only thing I am interested in is who the real author of this antisemitic nonsense was, the workers from Nowiny or perhaps

the functionaries from the Kielce MO. Unfortunately, I cannot answer that question.

Sometimes bizarre situations stayed for ever in people’s memory. Andrzej Wroblewski remembered how ‘at a café in Hotel Europejski, a hangout for artists, a tipsy Jan Cybis, one of the most outstanding artists who did not give in to the pres-

sures of socialist realism or national socialism, took in his arms a much shorter Artur Nacht-Samborski and cried out loud: “I won’t abandon you, I?ll hide you in : my wardrobe, but I won’t give you up, I won’t let them touch you.” ’°® An emigration wave of Jews and people of Jewish background was in a way a natural consequence of the antisemitic campaign in Poland. The post-March emi-

| gration still evokes very strong emotions. For a long time we did not know precisely how many people left Poland for good. Jaff Schatz has pointed out that in

| June 1969 the PAP stated that from 1 July 1967 till the end of May 1968, 5,864 | Jews emigrated from Poland. The view has been expressed that the embassy of the

| Netherlands, which represented the Israeli interest in the PRL, issued about | 20,000 visas.°? Michael Checinski, on the other hand, states that on average 500 people left Poland monthly after September 1968. Until the end of 1969, about

| 12,000 people left Poland, and since the departures continued for another year or | two, we can assume that altogether 15,000 to 20,000 people left after March and | about 25 per cent of them settled in Israel.°° These estimates seem to be accurate. Less accurate numbers were presented by the authors of the article published in Trybuna Ludu on the twentieth anniversary of March, who wrote that ‘on the wave of the events connected with the March conflict in 1968—1971, about 13,000 people of Jewish background left Poland’.*! This number had already seemed to be too low years earlier, even though the authors gained access to the party materials and probably also MSW archives. Similarly inaccurate, but in the opposite direction, was the estimate of Zenobiusz Kozik, who claimed that only up to ‘the middle of 1969 altogether 20,000 people emigrated’.®? This number seemed to be inflated even at the time when the article went to press in spite of the fact that the author took advantage of at least the party archives. 57 AIPN, IPN 0746/60, p. 30. 58 Wroblewski, By¢é Zydem, 227. °9 Schatz, The Generation, 384-5. 6° Checinski, Poland, Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, 245-6. 61 J. Janicki and M. Jaworski, ‘Marzec 1968’, Trybuna Ludu, 2 Mar. 1988. 62 Z,. Kozik, ‘O wydarzeniach marcowych 1968’, Nowe Drogi, 2 (1988), 72.

56 Ferzy Essler It seems that the post-March wave of emigration was less numerous than scholars (myself included) had thought. Initially it was most often estimated at around 20,000. During the period of intensified departures, until the end of August 1969, ‘the passport office accepted 11,185 exit applications’.©* We should remember that not all who applied received ‘a travel document’; however, the rejections were relatively few. They affected several hundred people. The emigration wave, however, did not end in 1969 but lasted until the beginning of the 1970s, when among others Wlodzimierz Brus and Krzysztof Pomian left Poland. I was able to find a document in the IPN Archives which leaves no doubt that in 1968—72 more than 15,000 persons emigrated from Poland.™

The post-March emigration is exceptional not because of its numbers but because of two other factors. First, a high percentage of those who left Poland were educated. The Passport Office information reveals that among 9,570 adults applying for leave, 1,823 had a university-level diploma and 944 were university students. he same document stated that among people who wanted to emigrate to Israel (which was the only possible destination, even if it was not considered by the emigrants) there were 217 former academics and 275 former employees of various academic institutions.®°°

Polish culture suffered serious losses because of this wave of emigration. Primarily the members of the intelligentsia left Poland, but we should not forget that among those who left were several hundred people who earlier, in the Stalinist era, while working in security, military information, the judicial system, propaganda, state administration, and the party apparatus, committed various shameful deeds, even crimes. They avoided legal responsibility for their actions thanks to leaving Poland.

The second reason for which this emigration was unique was the climate in which it occurred. This time Jews and Poles of Jewish background were making

their emigration decisions under intense pressure. The decision to leave was always made in dramatic circumstances. Those who were leaving knew that they would probably never be able to come back. Marriages were falling apart, friend-

ships were ending; it was not that rare that only part of a family emigrated (parents or children) and the other part stayed in Poland. It was a personal tragedy for thousands of people. In extreme situations there were suicides and nervous breakdowns.

Andrzej Wroblewski recalled that after Adam Tarn had been removed as the editor-in-chief of Dialog the question arose who should replace him: The position was offered to my friend, an editor of the magazine 7eatr, a prominent writer

and student of theatre, Edward Csato. Csato was a Pole by choice; he came from °° K. Lesiakowski, ‘Emigracja os6b pochodzenia zydowskiego z Polski w latach 1968-1969’, Dzieje Najnowsze, 2 (1993), 119.

64 For the most reliable calculations see Stola, Kampania, 213-18. 65 Lesiakowski, ‘Emigracja os6b pochodzenia zydowskiego’, 119.

| 1908: Fews, Antisemitism, Emigration 57 Magyarized Germans. After the war his parents emigrated from Lvov to West Germany. Csato rejected the offer . . . on 28 April he suffered a massive heart attack and died. This was probably the first casualty of March. Was it the only one?®®

Unfortunately, today we know it was not the only one. On 19 June, a provincial prosecutor in Opole, Stanislaw Wyciszczak, informed the general prosecutor Kazimierz Kosztirko about a suicide in Kluczbork on 15 May. Fifty-six-year-old Gutman Gustaw Wajnsztok hanged himself ‘ona loop from string hooked to a pipe ...1na toilet in a main hall’. Until 1952, the deceased ‘worked in security in Opole in a rank of second lieutenant’, then, until 1958, was employed as a director of konsumy in Opole. In 1966, he left this position after a conflict with the employees and he became a manager of a local branch of the State Shipping Enterprise in Kluczbork. His wife described him as a very sensitive and nervous man, who ‘was very diligent at work’. Prosecutor Wyciszczak noted that on 4 April Wajnsztok ‘received a written reprimand in his personal record’ for not fulfilling his duties properly. This was ‘a big shock’ for him and probably it was amplified by stress caused by the March events, which, in his wife’s opinion, ‘was a distressing experience for him’. When in March Stanistawa Wajnsztok in jest suggested leaving Poland and going to Israel... he angrily said that he considers himself a Pole, also his children are Polish and he won’t allow them to live outside of Poland. The children did not know that their father is of Jewish nationality. They learnt about this fact only after his death . . . Wajnsztok was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church when he was still working in security . . . he also agreed to the baptism and communion of his children, allegedly so that his children would not in the future be accused that they are Jewish.®’

The word ‘allegedly’ is important; the prosecutor is clearly distancing himself from the thought that anybody’s Jewish background would be a problem in Poland. We have known for a long time that a fair number of Poles deny the existence of

any signs of antisemitism in our country. The more we deny it, the more frequently the accusations of antisemitism appear. It is not surprising that in 1968—9 Poland acquired an unenviable reputation in the West and was perceived as a xenophobic and antisemitic country. Even if not all the accusations addressed to Poland and Poles were justified, we cannot deny that the anti-Zionist campaign, followed by the forced emigration of the Jews, belongs to the darkest pages of post-war Polish history. The campaign played a specific role from a certain moment. On the one hand, it was a way of pressuring people of Jewish background to leave Poland. On the other, it was to justify the purges post factum. The emigration of Jews and people of Jewish background was to be a confirmation of their foreignness trumpeted by the March propaganda. If 66 Wroblewski, Byé Zydem, 226. 67 AAN, Prokuratura Generalna, 16/71—6, 47—50. I am grateful to Grzegorz Majchrzak for giving me access to the document.

58 Jerzy E:sler they felt any connection with Poland, propaganda claimed, they would never have

left it. This line of reasoning was accepted in certain groups; old Polish antisemitism was awakening. Lipski said: ‘you were given an open road to emigrate’, but this was something more. He also said: There were semi-official encouragements, both in the press and in contacts with the authorities, as well as psychological terror . . . There were telephone threats, notes in the door with threats, etc. Those people lived in constant distress .. . A fear of increasing antisemitism, uncertainty about their children’s fate, a feeling of being unsafe were usually the

strongest motivations to leave Poland . . . Often this was an emigration with hope of improving the material conditions of living; hence it remained economic emigration. Such cases happened but they were not typical in this situation. I think that there were also people who preferred to leave so they would avoid taking responsibility for things they did while in power. I think quite a few of such people left. These people are often the ones who talk about Poles and Poland in a way we don’t deserve.®®

There is a serious and delicate problem we cannot avoid while discussing the post-March emigration. Among 15,000 emigrants were also those who should have faced the judge and been held responsible for their earlier activity in security, Military Information, and army courts in the Stalinist era. We do not know how

big this group was. It was probably several hundred people, but this number should be verified. It is a difficult task, since many of them emigrated as scholars, journalists, state officials, and artists, even though they had different occupations before 1956. What happened to the several thousand apartments left by the emigrants? This embarrassing question is rarely posed. If we assume that on average four people lived in one apartment, we are talking about 4,000 apartments, often in prime locations. Someone had to move in after the emigrants left. It is hard to believe it was the proverbial Lodz weaver with six children or a worker from the Warsaw Steel Mills.

It seems much more probable that the apartments were given to those who distinguished themselves in the antisemitic campaign. This issue should also be thoroughly examined. Aleksander Wittlin brought one matter to my attention. A number of those apartments were state-owned and they returned to the state, the Council of Ministers, and appropriate offices of the Ministries of Defence or Internal Affairs, after their tenants left.°? Others were probably bought at bargain prices by those who ruthlessly decided to take advantage of the situation. Furniture, TV sets, household items were also bought for bargain prices from the emigrants. There were people who truly took advantage of this extraordinary situation.

Among the emigrants who left after March were individuals prominent in Polish culture, arts, and science. Adolf Rudnicki recalled attending a dinner at Ida

Kaminska’s apartment in 1968. One of the guests at the table suddenly said: ‘Arnold Szyfman, the creator of the Teatr Polski, did not go to the party meeting. He sent a letter instead, explaining that he was a nervous person, might not have 68 Lipski, ‘Kwestia zydowska’, 46. 69 Aleksander Wittlin’s testimony of June 2003.

1968: Ffews, Antisemitism, Emigration 59 been able to hold his tongue, and could have said what he thought about those who summoned him.’ Kaminska, who in 1967 was nominated for an Oscar for her role in a Czechoslovak movie, The Shop on Main Street, and who wrote two plays, translated fifty-eight others into Yiddish, directed sixty-five plays, and played 124 roles, emigrated from Poland soon after. She had also organized a theatre after the war, which became the Jewish State Theatre (Panstwowy Teatr Zydowski), and was its heart and soul for many years.”

It seemed strange that the Polish authorities allowed the Jewish theatre to remain active even after the majority of Yiddish-speaking people and almost all Jewish actors had left Poland. Together with the continuously active TSKZ, the Jewish Historical Institute, and the magazine Folksztyme, its objective was to prove to the West that Jewish culture in the PRL was thriving and Jewish traditions were being cultivated. It is hard to say how successful this propaganda gimmick was in the West; some politicians and journalists certainly bought it. One more issue should be explained here. Often, in the literature on the subject, information surfaces about a special unit of the MSW, headed in 1968 by Colonel Tadeusz Walichnowski, dedicated to ‘the Jewish question’. It seems there was no

‘Jewish Department’, as it was called, in the MSW. Such a unit did not exist, although a group of six people was created in Gdansk and headed by the Chief of Department IJ, Major Michal Pietras, with the purpose of dealing with ‘Zionist’ issues (I did not find corresponding information about other provincial police stations, although probably the situations were similar there, too).”* It can safely be stated that to a certain extent the whole MSW was one big ‘Jewish Department’ at that time, although antisemitism was not equally strong everywhere. According to my research, the MO Provincial Headquarters in Gdansk was definitely the worst; the least antisemitic atmosphere, relatively speaking, was in Katowice. The individuals who had decided to emigrate usually did not receive regular Polish passports but special travel documents, allowing them only to leave the country. In order to obtain such a document they had to state Israel as their final destination, even if they had loose or no connections with Jewish culture and traditions or if it was clear they were intending to settle in Western Europe or North America. Legal specialists drew attention to the illegal manner, in the context of Polish and international law, in which the emigrants were stripped of their Polish passports. The emigrants left from the shabby Gdanski Railway Station in Warsaw, a departure point for international express trains to Vienna and Paris. For several months they were accompanied by dozens of friends and acquaintances who wanted to say goodbye. Many considered this ‘a kind of a moral duty’. Therefore, I understand

very well Jacek Kochanowicz’s emotions triggered by watching the ending of 70 A. Rudnicki, Teatr zawsze grany (Warsaw, 1987), 20, 35, 59. 71 See S. Cenckiewicz, ‘Gdansk, Gdynia, Sopot’, in Rokicki and Stepien (eds.), Oblicza Marca 1966, 77) 84.

60 Jerzy Esler ‘Fiddler on the Roof’: he could not, he said, stop thinking about March.’ The departures took place in almost the exact spot ‘where twenty-five years earlier transports left for Treblinka’. This fact generated bitter and malicious remarks. Wroblewski recalled how ‘Jozef Kusmierek, a great journalist, the Polish Egon Erwin Kisch, a brave Second World War partisan of the AL (People’s Army), later a policeman who fought for democratic Poland, shouted out loud while escorting one of his friends to the station: “The next transport to Treblinka is leaving.” Of course these were extreme statements which exaggerated the reality, which cannot be compared to the period of Nazi occupation.’° In 1968, as Wréblewski observed, ‘nobody used force or packed people into train wagons. But the atmos-

phere was created which people with shattered nerves and terrible experiences could not stand.” Among those who left and who were also stripped of Polish citizenship were ‘those who only ten, twelve years earlier had returned from Soviet prisons’. Wroblewski: also noticed that at that time his ‘small motherland [shrank]. Not Poland in general, but my motherland, Poland, began to shrink, the country was getting empty. Not because it was suddenly depopulated. Several thousand of those who left were not much in over thirty million.’ One should ask who was leaving Poland then. Bogdan Hillebrandt stated, for example, that forty-two people of a seventy-five-strong group of rebellious stu-

dents left. In addition there were other people leaving Poland: the intellectuals Leszek Kolakowski, Wiodzimierz Brus, Bronislaw Baczko, Zygmunt Bauman, Jan Kott, Krzysztof Pomian, Pawel Korzec.’° Artists too were leaving Poland, among them Aleksander Ford, accused of all possible committed and not committed sins,

and writers with an extensive literary output: Arnold Stucki, Witold Wirpsza, Stanislaw Wygodzki, and from a younger generation Henryk Grynberg. How did Polish society look at the post-March emigration? I agree with Jan Jozef Lipski that one can answer that question based only on one’s own observations: Antisemites found an additional argument. Frequently, they were envious that the emigrants go where life is better. Here they were often in the party and now, here you go, they’ll

_ have a good life. Such reactions were quite common. There were also different degrees of feeling the loss of those who were leaving, sometimes based on principle, sometimes on personal friendships. These feelings were accompanied by condemnation of the perpetrators. People who were ideologically connected to Zionism had left earlier, before 1968. They did not face any obstacles; they were going to a country that would be, as they thought, their homeland. The 1968 emigration was not a Zionist one. ’° 72 “Czy istnieje pokolenie marcowe?’, Wied, 3 (1988), 11.

*3 The German editors also fell into this trap when publishing a volume of texts about the antisemitic wave and post-March emigration from Poland. In the title they used the word ‘Vertreibung’ (expulsion), which in West Germany was used to describe the deportations of the German population after 1945 from the territories claimed by Poland. B. Kosmala (ed.), Die Vertreibung der FJuden aus Polen

1968: Antisemitismus und politisches Kalkul (Berlin, 2000). 74 Wroblewski, Byé Zydem, 221.

Hillebrandt, Marzec 1968, 67. 7° Lipski, ‘Kwestia zydowska’, 47.

1968: Fews, Antisemitism, Emigration 61 _ Simultaneously, even though for the majority of the society this was probably irrelevant, Marxist ideology (whatever it meant) finally collapsed in the PZPR. Marcin Zaremba, who has examined the political and ideological legitimization of communist power in Poland, wrote that a vacuum was filled with nationalism in its most extreme form. For the first time in 1969, a space for ‘nationality’ was added to the personal questionnaire for those within the party nomenklatura. ‘Ethnic background’ was item 3 on the form, right after date and place of birth. The fact that ‘social background’ (class) was two spaces below represented a new hierarchy enforced in the party.”

| What was the real meaning of 1968 in Polish history? The answer depends on who is giving it. Michael C. Steinlauf is inclined to see 1968 as the beginning of the process of restoring the memory of the Holocaust in Poland, even though it was done 1n a falsified and hypocritical manner. A chapter in his book Bondage to the Dead 1s entitled ‘Memory Repressed’, that about the ‘March events’ ‘Memory Expelled’, a very appropriate way of describing what occurred; the next one, covering 1970-89, is called ‘Memory Reconstructed’.”® Some express the opinion that the events of 1968 are significant only because they had a special meaning for the history of a certain group (KOR, the intellectuals in Solidarity, Gazeta Wyborcza, Unia Wolnosci). The year 1968 was certainly one of the most important dates in post-war Polish history, but one cannot claim that everything changed in ’68. Stefan Kisielewski, in his typical mean, brutal but not unmerited way, wrote in his Dzienniki on 27 November 1970: I have to say that one can get furious when, for instance, some individual says that March °68 was for him the biggest trauma he experienced in People’s Poland and because of it he could see reality clearly. The biggest trauma, indeed! Not the pogrom in Kielce, not the shooting and imprisoning of the members of the Home Army, not the trials of the generals, not Rokossowski becoming the Marshal of Poland, not Gomutka’s and later Wyszynski’s imprisonments, not the Poznan events of 1956, but just March 1968. Because this is when they got their asses kicked. A great exaggeration. ” Translated from the Polish by Anna Wrobel ™ Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm, 351-2.

_ % M.C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY,

1997). 79 S. Kisielewski, Dzienniki (Warsaw, 2001), 507.

‘The March Events Targeting the fews WLODZIMIERZ ROZENBAUM THE POLITICAL and social turmoils of 1956 forced more than 51,000 Jews out of Poland. Nearly 37,000 remained, adjusting to the new situation.’ The invitation by

the Polish government extended to the American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC, popularly known as ‘Joint’) and ORT (the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training) helped to invigorate the life of the Jewish community by subsidizing training and co-operatives, which offered employment to those who had lost their government jobs. Many believed the letter of the Secretariat of the Polska Zyednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party; PZPR) Central Committee of April 1957 on combating nationalism and antisemitism. _ However, behind the facade Gomutka’s team put into motion a number of decisions that had a clearly restrictive effect on the Jewish community. They aimed at | ‘dispersal’ (rozrzedzente or rozgeszczenie) of Jews by removing them from their positions or blocking promotions in the foreign service, foreign trade, security services, the military, and other key government sectors (Gomulka referred to these attempts at the Politburo meeting on 8 April 1968 mentioned below). On the political level, Jews were gradually eliminated and barred from positions of importance in the party apparatus and government administration. In 1959, at the Third PZPR Congress several Jews were eliminated from the Central Committee under

the pretext of struggle against revisionism (the term ‘revisionist’ was routinely reserved for Jews). They were replaced by staunch Stalinists, who had suffered a political defeat in 1956. In 1964, in turn, the Fourth PZPR Congress was carried out under the banner of promotion of younger and better-educated people to the leadership. A few more Jews were affected. The antisemitic nature of these changes was publicly revealed in 1968. A high-ranking party official explained that after the arrival of younger and better-educated people in the political arena, many Poles were removed from the party apparatus, and since there was also a relatively large number of people of Jewish descent in the leadership, they had to go as well.

He pointed out that ‘important personnel decisions in this respect were made A. Stankowski, ‘Nowe spojrzenie na statystyki dotyczace emigracji Zydow z Polski po 1944 roku’, in G. Berendt, A. Grabski, and A. Stankowski, Studia z historit Zydéw w Polsce po 1945 roku (Warsaw, 2000), 132.

The March Events: Targeting the Jews 63 particularly in recent years: with regard to the Central Committee at the Fourth Party Congress, and in the central party apparatus thereafter’ .” There were other developments as well. In February 1957 at the PZPR Central Committee a special Commission for National Minorities’ Affairs was established.

It was headed by a PZPR Central Committee secretary and a deputy director of the Central Committee Administrative Department who liaised with the Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrznych (Ministry of Internal Affairs; MSW). Furthermore,

| the national minorities were removed from the jurisdiction of the prime minister and placed under the supervision of the MSW (administrative, social, and political

| matters), Public Instruction and Advanced Education Ministry (schools and educational activities), and the Culture Ministry (cultural activities). Sections for

| national minorities’ affairs were established at the People’s Councils at the provin| cial and local levels in areas where minorities resided.® | These developments were a symptom of a more fundamental change within the ! Polish ruling elite. As a noted expert observed at the time: In a curious way, [the] emerging new Polish communist elite resembles the pre-World War II extreme right-wing groups in Poland more than it resembles either its Comintern-reared

| Stalinist predecessors or the earlier, internationalist founders of the Polish Communist Party. . . . Quite striking, and characteristic of the general decay of Marxism-Leninism, 1s the fact that many of the surviving prewar neo-fascist youth activists are now to be found among the most outspoken enthusiasts of the new Polish ‘communist’ state—for the first time in centuries nationally homogeneous, allied with Russia against Germany, domestically authoritarian and increasingly nationalist.*

Gomutka’s alliance with the liberal wing of the party was a masterful tactical move to engineer his return to power. He quickly extended his hand to former prominent Stalinists, whose animosity towards Jews was not a secret. One of them, General Kazimierz Witaszewski, was rescued from obscurity and placed in charge of the Central Committee Administrative Department, supervising military and

security agencies and People’s Councils, among others. General Grzegorz Korczynski—an old Gomulka loyalist and close associate since the war years—was put in charge of the military intelligence service.” In 1964 General Mieczystaw 2 A. Werblan, ‘Przyczynek do genezy konfliktu’, Miesiecznik Literacki (June 1968), 69. See also Third Congress of the Polish United Workers’ Party, March to—19, 1959 (1959), 595 ff.; IV Zjazd Polskiej Zjednoczonej Partu Robotnicze; (Warsaw, 1964); New York Times, 20 Mar., 28-30 Oct., and 12, 15, 21 Nov. 1959; P. Raina, Gomutka: Politische Biographie (Cologne, 1970), 124 ff. 3 Trybuna Ludu, 22 Feb. 1957.

4 Z. Brzezinski, Alternative to Partition (New York, 1965), 32. His assessment was repeated much later almost equally bluntly by Polish historians, notably by an expert on Polish—Jewish relations after the Second World War, D. Stola, Kampanta antysyjontstyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warsaw, 2000), 22. See also P. Oseka and M. Zaremba, ‘Wojna po wojnie, czyli polskie reperkusje wojny szesciodniowe)’, Polska 1944/ 45-1989: Studia 1 materialy, iv (Warsaw, 1999), 207. ® Korczynski, a pre-Second World War communist and veteran of the Civil War in Spain, was one of the communist partisan commanders in Nazi-occupied Poland. After the war he advanced rapidly

64 Wlodzimierz Rozenbaum Moczar—another good friend of Gomutka since the war years—was promoted from deputy minister to the minister of the MSW and appointed chairman of the veterans’ organization (Zwiazek Bojownikow o Wolnosé 1 Demokracje; Union of the Fighters for Freedom and Democracy; ZBoWiD). One insider observed that this loyal party apparatchik, very experienced in security matters, was entrusted with the role of the ‘national policeman’ in order to help Gomutka ‘to subjugate real patriotic feelings and steer them into the party’s own channel’.® These appointments allowed the emergence of the Partisans movement within and outside the party.’ The Partisans, who shared experiences in the communist armed resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland, felt animosity towards those who had spent the war years in the Soviet Union and returned with the Red Army to occupy prominent positions in the party and administration. Many of these returnees were

| Jewish, and they actively participated in the Moscow-instigated purges of home elements in the party leadership in the late 1940s. This re-ignited antisemitic senti-

ments among the Partisans, who received a new lease of political life under Gomulka. It did not take long for purges in the military to start. They were accelerated after Wojciech Jaruzelski became the chief of the military’s Main Political Directorate (Glowny Zarzad Polityczny; GZP) in 1960. The focus was on officers of

Jewish descent and revisionists, although in most instances the distinction was blurred. The intelligence chiefs in the Defence and Interior Ministries routinely singled out Jewish defectors to the West to prove that Jews were unreliable and disloyal to Poland.® in the security services. In 1945, while he was the chief of the Gdansk Province Security Office, he was criticized by Gomutka at the party Central Committee plenary meeting for cruel treatment of German

prisoners. However, less than a year later, he was appointed a deputy minister of public security. In 1950 he was arrested for the murder of a group of Jews, who had looked for protection from his partisan unit. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was released due to an amnesty in 1956. He met with his mentor and old friend, Gomulka, who was back in charge of the party, and was appointed the chief of military intelligence shortly after. For a detailed and revealing biography see Slownik biograficzny dzialaczy polskiego ruchu robotniczego, iii (Warsaw, 1992), 292—3. See also ‘Protoko! z konferencyji Najwyzszego Aktywu MBP z listopada 1954 r.’, Ku/tura (Paris) Nov. 1992, pp. 24—5.

® Colonel Tykocinski’s Revelations (1965), 61. This is a mimeographed brochure published by Radio

Free Europe. Col. Tykocinski was the chief of the Polish Military Mission in West Berlin until he defected to the United States in 1965. See also M. Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonahzm: Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacja wladzy komunistyczne] w Polsce do 1980 roku (Warsaw, 2001), 290. Quoted in J. Eisler, Polski rok 1968 (Warsaw, 2006), 517.

” For a very revealing discussion of this group see the polemical article by one of its leading members, Jan Ptasinski, ‘O “Grupie partyzanckiej”’, Polityka, 7 May 1988, and the response on 2 July by another prominent member, Franciszek Szlachcic, ‘W odpowiedzi Janowi Ptasinskiemu’. Both writers

were high-ranking security service officials: Ptasifski was a former deputy chairman of the Committee for Public Security and Szlachcic was a deputy minister under Moczar and then minister and Politburo member. 8 (Gen.) A. Uziemblo, ‘Desowietyzacja i resowietyzacja Ludowego Wojska Polskiego po przelomie pazdziernikowym’, Zeszyty Historyczne (Paris), 94 (1990), 3-12; General J. Kuropieska, Wspomnienia

The March Events: Targeting the fews 65 The ZBoWiD became one of the major vehicles for the party to implement Gomulka’s urgent call for an ideological offensive that would lead to ‘complete victory of socialist consciousness in the hearts and minds of the working class, of all

working people, and of the entire nation’.? Its programme of patriotism mixed with nationalism won wide support throughout Poland as among its members were both former communist and non-communist members of the anti-Nazi underground. By 1968 ZBoWiD had reached 250,000 members.’® It had the tacit approval of the party leadership, whose members, including Gomutka, were on the Supreme Council of that organization.'? Gomutka’s increasing political rigidity generated growing dissent in the party

and management circles and among the cultural elite. At Warsaw University a number of professors, who were incorporating in their lectures and research the findings of Western researchers and scientists, were branded as revisionists and criticized for ‘softening’ Marxism. The party leadership was also very concerned about the junior faculty and students, who wanted to humanize the Polish political system. Under the aegis of the Warsaw City Committee of the Zwiazek Milodziezy

Socjalistycznej (Socialist Youth Union; ZMS) Committee—and with the tacit approval of the Warsaw PZPR Committee—young high school students Adam Michnik, Jan Gross, and Jan Kofman established an Inter-School Discussion Club, also known as the Club of Contradiction Seekers. Considering themselves non-conformist communists, they embarked on an ambitious series of discussions about various aspects of the communist system with the open-minded— often branded ‘revisionist’—faculty of Warsaw University, Catholic intellectuals, and writers, representing diversified ideological and political views. Their nonconformist attitude and critical views of the existing party institutions earned z lat 1956-1968: Czesé IT. Od Pagdzternika do Marca w stlach zbrojnych (Warsaw, 1994); also (Gen.) T. Pioro, “Czystki w Wojsku Polskim 1967-1968’, Wied, 6 (1998), 152-71 (also published in Biuletyn

Lydowskiego Instytutu. Historycznego, 2 (1997), 59-64); Gen. G. Korczynski, Sprawozdanie z dziatalnosca Zarzadu II Sztabu Generalnego Wojska Polskiego na dzien 1 grudnia 1961 roku (Warsaw, 1961). Tajne spec. Znaczenia, Seria ‘K’, Egzemplarz Nr 1. This is a top-secret report for the defence minister. I wish to thank Dr Krzysztof Persak for providing me with a copy. ° W. Gomutka, O naszej partit (Warsaw, 1968), 565 and 573, quoted in Jan B. De Weydenthal, The Communists of Poland: An Historical Outline, rev. edn. (Stanford, Calif., 1986), 106. In 1963 a special Ideological Commission was established in the Central Committee because Gomutka insisted on the need to create ‘an organizational forum for systematic discussion, information exchange, and ability to determine a uniform direction of activities’. See W. Janowski and A. Kochanski, /nformator o strukturze 1 obsadzie personalnes centralnego aparatu PZPR 1948—19g0 (Warsaw, 2000), 35. 10 Trybuna Ludu, 6 Jan. 1968.

11 Gomulka’s personal secretary was a co-author of a hagiographical book about more than a dozen

high-ranking commanders of the communist underground during the Second World War, including ; Moczar, Korczynski, and Szlachcic. See W. Namiotkiewicz and B. Roztropowicz, Ludzie, fakty i refleksje (Warsaw, 1961). In his review of this book on 10 June 1962 Artur Olsen, the Warsaw correspondent of the New York Times, used the term ‘the Partisan Group’ and maintained that this group intended to win power in Poland. The subsequent Radio Free Europe broadcast made it into a household name.

66 Wlodzimerz Rozenbaum them the name of the club of revisionist toddlers and brought the wrath of Gomulka, who publicly denounced Michnik. Most members of the club came from families of mid-level and high party and government functionaries. Many were Jewish, including the founders. Their spiritual leader was Leszek Kolakowski, a distinguished philosophy professor, branded a ‘revisionist’ by the party hardliners, who along with Gomutka attacked him at the party conferences. The club survived only one year, but its activities had a profound impact on its members and enemies. It helped to revive in the party circles the old antisemitic canard about a

Jewish conspiracy. Adam Uziemblo, a former victim of the Stalinist terror in Poland, suggested that antisemitism was hardly an accidental element in the party

ideological offensive: , the Jews constituted the party intelligentsia; the Jews were the element that fought for socialism for idealistic reasons; the Jews were the first who began to understand Stalin’s abuses, abandonment [of the communist ideals], and Thermidorian policies. In fact, the Jews are a liberal element in the [communist] movement the world over. Hence the conservative elements everywhere—and rightfully so—perceive the Jews as their opponents.”

According to a party historian, ‘From a historical perspective it is reasonable to conclude that in the mid-1960s the fronts of political confrontation became more pronounced. This caused increased nervousness in the political leadership. At the

same time various activities directed against the policies of the PRL [Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa; Polish People’s Republic] began to acquire a common denominator.’'? Gomulka’s closest adviser, Zenon Kliszko, warned at the Warsaw University party conference on 11 December 1966: ‘the problem of political democracy in our country is not confined to discussions and choice of variants of socialist policies .. . but to a high degree concerns the continuing struggle between the socialist and capitalist forces, who gets whom [to kogo]’.4 By 1967 the Jewish section of the national minorities branch in the Public Security

Ministry’s counter-intelligence department of the late 1940s was long gone. The MSW put in place a variety of surveillance programmes dispersed throughout several of its departments as well as at the Milicja Obywatelska (Citizens’ Militia; MO) operational divisions in the provinces (Komendy Wojewodzkie Milicji Obywatelskiej; KWMO) and special branches in the Internal Affairs Divisions of the

People’s Councils (Rady Narodowe). Most of the work was done by the Third Department (combating dissent and political opposition), the Second Department (counter-intelligence), and the Department for Civic and Administrative Affairs. Important work was also carried out at the First Department (foreign intelligence); Bureau ‘C’ (operational records); Fourth Department (religious denominations and organizations); and the MO’s Bureau for Population Records and Identity Cards (Biuro Ewidencji Ludnosci 1 Dowodow Osobistych Komendy Glownej Milicyi

Obywatelskiej; BELiDO KGMO). , 12 (Gen.) A. Uziemblo, ‘8 marca’, Zeszyty Historyczne (Paris), 136 (2001), 203.

137. Kozik, ‘O wydarzeniach marcowych 1968 r.’, Nowe Drogi, Feb. 1988, p. 68. 14 Tbid.

The March Events: Targeting the Jews 67 The surveillance was extended to all Jewish organizations and many individual Jews.© The political leadership believed—based on a special report by the MSW’s First Department—that foreign Jewish organizations and particularly Israel carried out very effective intelligence operations in Poland, drawing on wide support from the Jewish community’.'® Consequently, contacts of Polish Jews with the

Israeli embassy and Jewish organizations abroad were closely monitored. The MSW’s Third Department warned in April 1967 that ‘the penetration of the Jewish community in Poland by the “Joint” . . . aimed at disrupting stability and halting integration and assimilation processes’.'” This was a long-standing con-

| cern to the PZPR leadership.'® On 4 and 11 April 1967 the MSW Executive Board met to discuss the status of national minorities in Poland. The meeting was attended by the director of the PZPR

| Central Committee Administrative Department and his deputy in charge of national minorities. Judging from the transcript, the main focus was on the Jewish minority. All

, participants agreed that special attention must be paid to the activities of the Towarzystwo Spoleczno-Kulturalne Zydow w Polsce (Social and Cultural Association of the Jews in Poland; TSKZ) ‘because of its penetration by the “Zionist circles” ’. In

| his summation, Moczar expressed the need to create an active group, to ‘provide direction and weigh on the propriety of the Association’s activities. . .. We must find

| people who will carry out the proper nationality policy and will oppose the hostile political activity of the Israeli embassy or international Zionist organizations and home nationalist groups. We cannot allow a situation where the Joint dictates condi| tions of donations for the Association.’ Materials distributed at the meeting expressed the long-standing concern at the MSW with the harmful effects of foreign assistance to TSKZ and the unsuccessful repeated recommendations to terminate it.!° The effects of this prevailing attitude had already had very serious repercussions for the Jewish community as the supervision of the MSW went beyond the presence of its representative at the TSKZ staff meetings and reductions in the association’s budget and personnel.2° In the mid-1960s the TSKZ had about 7,000 15 For specific operations and secret police branches involved see Pawel Piotrowski, ‘Od konfrontacji do wspdlpracy: Polskie i izraelskie stuzby specjalne’, Biuletyn Instytutu Pamieci Narodowe), 11/58 (Nov.

2005), 55-7. Also ‘Protokot Nr 04/67 z posiedzenia Kolegium M.S.W. odbytego w dniach 4 1 11 kwietnia 1967 r.’ and ‘Niektore dane z protokolu z Kolegium z dnia 28 czerwca 1967 r—Ocena sytuacji | w kraju w zwiazku z konfliktem na Bliskim Wschodzie’. I wish to thank Dr Dariusz Stola for providing me with copies of these documents. An excellent study of the party combating real and imagined polit-

ical dissenters and secret police surveillance of them is the book Sprawa Henryka Hollanda by Krzysztof Persak (Warsaw, 2006).

16 “Israel. Quoted in Oseka and Zaremba, ‘Wojna po wojnie’, 208. 17 Tbid. 209. 18 Tt was expressed as early as Oct. 1955. See ‘Protoké! z posiedzenia Sekretariatu KC PZPR’, no. 79. Quoted in Oseka and Zaremba, ‘Wojna po wojnie’, 209.

19 “Notatka Informacyjna do poszczegélnych punktow porzadku obrad’. I wish to thank Dariusz Stola for providing me with a copy of this document. 20 'Y. Korman, ‘How the Job Was Done in Poland’, Jewish Currents, 24 (Feb. 1970), 26. Mr Korman was a member of the Governing Board (Prezydium) of TSKZ until suspension of its activities in 1968.

68 Wlodzimerz Rozenbaum members, who participated in cultural and social activities of twenty regional clubs in the cities. Some 25 per cent were pensioners and semi-manual workers. The intelligentsia was represented very modestly in the membership. Despite restrictions, due to assistance from foreign Jewish charitable organizations— primarily the Joint—the Jewish community in Poland was quite vibrant, with cultural clubs around the country, its own publishing house, Yidish Bukh, a newspaper, Folksztyme, appearing four times a week with a bi-monthly Polish supplement, Nasz G/os, a literary monthly, Yidishe shriftn, a professional Jewish theatre, and the Zydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute; ZIH) as well as summer camps for children and young people.*! The sudden outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East caused high anxiety in the Jewish community. The course of the Six-Day War was welcomed with relief, but its domestic repercussions in Poland gave way quickly to serious concern. Many

Poles dismissed the barrage of pro-Arab propaganda in the media and openly expressed their satisfaction with the outcome of the war. Brawo, nasze Zydki! (Right on, our little Jews!) was often heard on the street and in casual conversations.?? As one analyst observed, in Poland ‘the Israeli position was frequently pictured as similar to the historical Polish role as conceived by the romantic traditions of the country, that 1s, as a bastion of Western culture, an enclave of civilization among hostile and backward forces’.?? These sentiments were not lost on the secret police, which dutifully recorded the mood around Poland and comments of individual citizens. The job was done by special Third Department branches at the provincial MO commands. From the start the ‘Zionist milieus’ (srodowiska syjonistyczne)—a euphemism for all Jews— were an operational priority. The Third Department and other components of the MSW had easy access to the TSKZ, both officially and by using surveillance tech-

nology (interception of correspondence, wiretaps, etc.). Other high-risk groups were the intelligentsia, particularly in academia and the arts—where the ‘Zionist’ and ‘revisionist’ influences were believed to be strong—as well as the Catholic 21 ‘Informacja 0 sytuacji politycznej, organizacyjnej i finansowej w Towarzystwie SpolecznoKulturalnym Zydow w Polsce’, prepared in July 1967 by Z. Orlowski, Director, Department for Civic

and Administrative Affairs, Ministry of Internal Affairs. Also the appended report, ‘Wnioski w sprawie funduszow “Joint” ’. I wish to thank Dariusz Stola for providing me with a copy of this document; A. Kwilecki, ‘National Minorities in Poland’, Polish Round Table, 2 (1968), 150; Zycie Literackie, 3 Apr. 1966. 22 The term Zydki has been commonly used in Poland, mostly in a pejorative way. This was the first

time that the man on the street used it with a positive connotation. In fact, on 5 June 1967 I reported for the first time to work at one of the Warsaw research institutes and was greeted by my boss, who knew that I was Jewish, with the phrase Brawo, nasze Zydki! 1 was not sure how to take it at first, but I quickly understood that she was trying to sound complimentary. This Polish woman later proved to be highly critical of the antisemitic campaign launched by the Polish leaders and was very supportive of me until my last day at work.

23 J. B. De Weydenthal, ‘The Dynamics of Leadership in the Polish United Workers’ Party, 1967-1968: A Case Study’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1971), 72.

The March Events: Targeting the Fews 69 intellectuals and the Church hierarchy.?* With regard to the information collected, ‘a significant amount came from the old “rescue” network, while most of 1t was

provided by [ordinary] people voluntarily | przekazywana byla przez spote-

, czenstwo|’ .2° The outbreak of the war was a shock to the Polish leadership, and the Israeli note, sent to the Polish premier on 5 June, waited two days for an answer, which was an exact copy of the Soviet declaration in support of the Arab states, condemning Israeli aggression.”° At the 9 June summit of east European leaders in Moscow Gomulka shared his idea on waging an all-out anti-Zionist campaign at home, but Brezhnev was concerned that this could unleash antisemitic activities by extremists.*’ Gomulka had no qualms, however. Back in Warsaw he called a meeting of all provincial party chiefs and heads of the Central Committee departments. He called for an anti-Israeli and particularly an anti-Zionist campaign that would

reach every person in Poland and would isolate all those who manifested proIsraeli sympathies. ‘The former task primarily concerned the media, while the latter was the responsibility of the party apparatus. On his instructions anti-Israeli and anti-Zionist rallies and meetings were to take place in every enterprise and institution.?®

A wave of rallies swept the country, with the media repeatedly playing on the Israel—West Germany connection. On 13 June Zycie Warszawy suggested that along with military supplies from West Germany ‘the venom of a strictly defined ideology must have been exported to Israel’. Two days later Trybuna Ludu introduced a new column, ‘Polish People Support the Government’s Stand on Israeli Aggression’, which reported on rallies and meetings around Poland. The wheels of the anti-Zionist campaign started turning. The viciousness of the attacks was very disconcerting to many people and speakers had to go to great lengths to explain the meaning of Zionism and its danger to the Polish nation, as Zionism was not a very well-defined term in the party propaganda.?° 24 submitted a pejorative ‘Information Note’?”° on the intelligence services to Berman, which he had prepared behind the back of his chief.?’” On the note, Berman wrote: ‘intelligence is unmasked [rozkonspiromany|—tt is necessary to build it anew’.?”°

Okret, also a communist activist from a young age and a Polish Jew,?” had served as a political officer in the Polish army during the war. He was transferred to the post of deputy chief of the MCI branch of the 1st Polish army in January 1945

and moved to Department 7 in March 1948. As the deputy chief of Department 7, Okret warned that the intelligence services included people in top positions

at headquarters and in the residencies who came from the ranks of the ‘Dabrowszczakow [Polish communists who served with the International Brigades], the French resistance movement or PCF members’*®° and ‘emigration 271 Tt should be noted that Brigadier General (BG) Izydor Modelski, chief military attaché in Washington since 1945, defected to the USA in Nov. 1948 rather than return to Warsaw. Modelski had

served as the deputy defence minister of the Polish government-in-exile in 1940-5. Although he returned to Poland after the war, the communists never trusted him. Nearly fifty years later Leder called Modelski a ‘complete cretin’; ‘25.01.1995, rozmowa z pik. Lederem’, 5. Considering what happened to MI officers during the east European purges, the remark reveals more about Leder than about Modelski. 272 ‘95.01.1995, rozmowa z pik. Lederem’, 21. 273 “Materialy z obrady Komisji Wojskowej’, in Poksinski, Kochanski, and Persak (eds.), Kierow-

nictwo PPR i PZPR, 130. 274 Thid. 129. 275 Okret was director of the MBP-MSW archives from Feb. 1951 to Aug. 1960. 276 AIPN, BU 0290/g00, ‘Notatka Informacyjna [z 15. VIII. 194o9r.|’, k. 1-3. 277 See Poksinski, ‘TUN’ Tatar-Utnik-Nowicki: Represje wobec oficeréw Wojska Polskiego w latach 1949-1956 (Warsaw, 1992), 186. 278 ATIPN, BU 0299/g00, ‘Sprawa IT Oddziatu Sztabu Generalnego W.P. [z 1953 r.]’, k. 58. 279 The data compiled by the MSW on its personnel included a clear reference to their nationality. M. Piotrowski (ed.), Ludzie bezpieki w walce z narodem 1 Kosctotem: Stuzba bezpieczenstwa w Polskiej Rzeczypospolite; Ludowe; w latach 1944—1978—Centrala (Lublin, 2000).

280 AIPN, BU 0290/g00, ‘Notatka Informacyjna’, k. 1.

138 Leszek W. Gtuchowski groups in Belgium, Switzerland, and the like’.2®4 Okret complained that a ‘gigantic majority of these people had been active [in the communist movement] before the Second World War and during the last war beyond the borders of Poland and

the USSR. Consequently, this category of people is not thoroughly known to

us.’“8* Comrade Okret naturally concluded:

It’s not an exaggeration if we said that next to the dense group of pre-war professional officers, tied to each other by various caste-like, political knots [wezlami kastowymi, politycznymi |, and the like, our intelligence apparatus, indicates and rather clearly, the existence of a second group—Debrowszczakéw’, whose members remain on good terms [wkomitywie] with each other.?®* This camaraderie [komitywa] all too often calls to mind the previous so-called Legionnaires clique.7**

In the notes taken by Bierut during a meeting of the Military Commission in September 1949, where Komar apparently presented a report on the work of O-II, Bierut wrote the following about the intelligence union: ‘Structure—competition between Department 7 and the 2nd Department disappeared but favouritism [ kumoterstwo|*®° has taken control.’2°° Poland’s Stalinist party boss then scribbled:

‘Proposal: separate Department 7 from the 2nd Department. In [Department] 7,

separate intelligence from counter-intelligence.2°’ Don’t burden the 2nd Directorate with other matters. The foundation for the preparation of 2nd Department cadres must be illegal work.’*°°

For most of Komar’s tenure as MI chief and director of Department 7 there were three Soviet advisers attached to the Polish intelligence services. Komar’s adviser was Major General?°? Konstantin Kasznikow (Konstantin V. Kashnikov).

281 ATPN, BU 0290/900, ‘Notatka Informacyjna’, k. 1. 282 Tbid. 283 Another document, with a note by Berman, ‘received by diplomatic post [from Prague] on 21.X1.1951’, asserted that leading Czechoslovak communists arrested (and later tried and executed) during the purges there had served with the International Brigades and that they had developed very close associations with Polish veterans in Spain, including Komar. Berman was informed that the Czechoslovaks named their Polish colleagues ‘as Trotskyites’. AIPN, BU 0299/goo0, ‘Sprawa II Oddzialu Sztabu Generalnego W.P. [z 1953 r.]’, k. 58. 284 Tbid., k. 3. The ‘Legionnaires clique’ is a derogatory reference to members of the officer corps of the Polish Legions, a military formation loyal to its founder Pilsudski, notably those among them who

emerged as leading military and political figures after Polish independence was declared on 11 Nov. 1918, and especially those who took power following the military coup of May 1926.

285 Literally translates as ‘log-rolling’; it usually connotes an ‘old boy’ relationship in a group or organization. 286 “Notatki przewodniczacego KC PZPR’, in Poksinski, Kochanski, and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR1 PZPR, 142. 287 Department 7 included a section for functionary affairs, responsible for counter-intelligence or internal affairs. 288 “Notatki przewodniczacego KC PZPR’, in Poksinski, Kochanski, and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR 1 PZPR, 142. It appears that in 1948 Komar initiated an illegal network (code-named ‘N’)

in Berlin run by residents outside the Polish military mission but that the experiment failed. See Paczkowski, ‘Civilian Intelligence in Communist Poland’, 7—8. 289 The Soviet rank of major general was equivalent to brigadier general.

The Polish Mthtary Intelligence Service, 1945-1961 139 In December 1949, a month after Rokossowski arrived in Warsaw, Bierut and Stalin conspired to tip the balance in favour of the Soviet officers.7°° The Polish party boss officially asked Stalin to send four more military intelligence advisers with explicit orders to overhaul O-II.*?' Komar was dispatched to Moscow to negotiate the deal with General of the Army Matvey V. Zakharov, chief of the GRU at the time.*?* The new advisers were supposed to stay for two to three months. According to a section of the Korczynski report on the Agentura or spy ring, the period between December 1945 and November 1950, when Komar ran O-II operations, “was marked by chaos in [western European] state administrations, meagre

performance of the counter-intelligence services of the capitalist states, and the

mass movement of people, which favoured the organizing of intelligence net- | works’.*?? Moreover, ‘this period was not fully utilized for the formation of suitably placed, widely developed, and properly concealed intelligence networks in the states of the West’.?°* Of the ‘402 agents . . . recruited during this period’,?°° too many of them, Gomulka’s chief complained, were not in the right place, ‘for example, thirty-six agents in Israel’.2°© And the ‘costs connected with maintaining this spy ring in 1952 amounted to $303,238 [US] and 397,397 zlotys’.2°” Korczynski never bothered to mention that this was a little more than a year after Moscow took direct control of Komar’s agents.?°° Leder, obviously reluctant to reveal his secrets, explained that from 1946 to 1953 Polish MI was not concerned with ‘strictly military matters’,?°? such as the ‘stationing of American armed forces or other allies in Germany’.°°° This ‘was not Komar’s idea . . . It arose from the situation. Purely military armaments, let’s say, or troop locations, or operational matters . . . I don’t know, capturing [Western] operational plans—this, as a matter of fact, didn’t enter into the range of interests of Polish commanders... This was Moscow’s domain.’?°?1 Moreover, in March 1950 Kashnikov and other GRU advisers attached to O-II, such as Lieutenant Colonel Andrej Belajew (Andrey Belyaev), began shadowing Komar’s top MI deputies: Lieutenant Colonel Leder, Stanislaw Flato,°°* a highly 290 Nalepa, Oficerowie Armii Radzieckiej, 69-70. 291 “Pismo Bolestawa Bieruta do Jozefa Stalina (23. XII. 1949) z prosba o oddelegowanie radzieckich specialistow wojskowych do Wojska Polskiego [in Russian]’, ibid. 255.

292 Zakharov, GRU chief 1949-51, was succeeded by Mikhail A. Shalin, GRU chief from 1951 to

1958. 293 CAW, 525/85, k. 461. 294 Tbid.

295 Ibid. k. 462. 296 Thid. 297 hid.

298 From mid-Nov. 1950, when Kashnikov took command of O-II, to the end of 1951, or ‘up to 1952’, as noted in the first attachment to the Korczynski report. Ibid., k. 478.

299 “25.01.1995, rozmowa z ptk. Lederem’, 1. 300 Tbid. 301 Tbid. 1-2. 302 F lato, born in Warsaw, completed his medical studies in Paris. He served as a senior medical offi-

cer and military commander with the International Brigades and in 1939 was sent to China by the Comintern. In 1946 he was appointed deputy chief of O-II for operational and technical affairs. Flato was posted to the Ottawa residency of O-II in 1952, but he was recalled a year later and falsely accused

140 Leszek W. Gtuchowski experienced Comintern operative, and Lieutenant Colonel Stanislaw Bielski,*°° a former Red Army intelligence officer. In any case, the Polish experiment at unifying the military and the civilian intelligence services ended as soon as Komar lost control of Department 7 on 5 June 1950.

As of July 1950 the number of operations officers at O-II had increased to 129.°°4 Organizationally, MI had the following structure in 1950:°°°

e Headquarters: chief, deputy chief, two Soviet advisers, a Secretariat, the General Chancellery, and the Archive and Library

e 1st Branch: short-range military reconnaissance e 2nd Branch: operations against capitalist countries (Section 1—West Germany and Austria; Section 2—USA; Section 3—-UK and its Near East [Middle Eastern] colonies; Section 4—France, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland; Section 5—Italy and Yugoslavia)

e 3rd Branch: naval intelligence from the Polish coast and from Polish merchant vessels, focusing on Sweden and Denmark e 4th Branch: analysis, and the preparation of intelligence reports

e 5th Branch: manufactured, installed, and maintained technical equipment for operations e 6th Branch: responsible for the Polish military attachés in the socialist camp and maintaining official contact with the military attachés accredited to Poland

e 7th Branch: admuinistrative-housekeeping matters

e 8th Branch: financial matters e gth Branch: personnel matters; Cipher Bureau; Files—card index of personnel, records of secret O-II collaborators, and biographies of VIPs in particular capitalist countries; Reserve Personnel—tresponsible for officers not allocated of being a French spy and a Trotskyist. Rehabilitated in 1955, he was appointed muinister-adviser to

the ambassador in Beijing in 1957, serving there until 1963, when he became deputy director of Department 2 (Asia) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Flato was removed during the antisemitic purges of 1967-8. He died in East Germany. 303 Bielski, born in Vienna, completed the Vasilevsky Air Defence Military Academy in 1935, and was serving with Red Army intelligence when he was arrested in 1937. He was severely tortured, lost most of his teeth, and became deaf in one ear. In 1947 Komar arranged to have him brought to Poland, where he spent several months recovering from his injuries before joining O-II in 1948. He served as chief of the Operations Branch until he shot himself in his office on the same day Flato was arrested in Feb. 1953. His father, Maksymilian Horowitz, alias Henryk Walecki, had been a very prominent Polish communist and a top Comintern official. Bielski’s mother, Stefania Horowitz, maiden name Heryng, alias Bielska, was also a prominent Polish communist and VKP(b) functionary. Bielski’s parents (and also his maternal uncle) were falsely accused of being Polish spies and shot in 1937.

304 Pawlikowicz, Tajny front, 49. 305 Tbid. 48-9.

The Polish Mihtary Intelligence Service, 1945-1961 141 to a specific branch; Special Section—counter-intelligence;°°° and the Special Course.°°" In November 1950, on the pretext that O-II had been penetrated by enemy intelligence services,*°° the Kremlin and its agents in Warsaw engineered an extremely hostile takeover, replacing Komar and his men with cadres brought in directly from the Soviet Union. Komar’s successors were Kashnikov, who served as acting chief until 15 March 1951; Colonel Igor Suchacki (Igor Ya. Sukhatsky),°°° who served as chief until 10 April 1953; and Colonel Fiodor Wiedmied (Fedor T. Vedmed),??° who served as chief until 26 November 1956. Moscow therefore regained direct

control of O-II, upgraded and renamed Z-II on 15 November 1951 under Sukhatsky, from the end of 1950 until Korczynski took command on 27 November

1956.°!! O-II was formally under the authority of the deputy defence minister

from October 1945 to March 1950. For most of Komar’s tenure, therefore, inside the military, he reported directly to Spychalski, at least until March 1949, and then Brigadier General Ochab, who surrendered responsibility for MI in March 1950. After that, Komar and his successors reported to the chief of the General Staff, all of whom, until early 1965, were Soviet generals: Lieutenant General Wladyslaw Korczyc (Vladislav V. Korchits),*’2 a Soviet Pole who served as the chief of staff from March 1950 to December 1952; Major General Borys Pigarewicz (Boris A. Pigarevich),°*!° a Belorussian who served as the acting chief of staff until January 1954; and Lieutenant General Jerzy Bordzitowski (Yury V. Bordzilovsky),*1* a Ukrainian who served as the acting chief of staff until March 1954, and then as the 306 The Special Section of O-II reported to the GZI chief and recruited agents, residents, and informers inside MI. It was part of Branch 1 of Department 2 (upgraded and renamed in Dec. 1950

the rst Directorate) of GZI and was responsible for counter-intelligence and the security of the General Staff. 807 ‘The Special Course was located in Sulejowek, about 18 km from the centre of Warsaw. 308 “25.01.1995, rozmowa z pik. Lederem’, 20. 309 Sukhatsky is Aleksander Suchacki in Soviet Espionage through Poland, 10. 310 Vedmed is Wiedzmiedz, ibid. 11.

311 Korczyhski’s deputy was Col. Tadeusz Jedynak from Dec. 1955 to Nov. 1965, promoted to brigadier general in 1961. One source suggests Jedynak took charge of Z-II as acting chief in Dec. 1955, which would mean that Vedmed lost command one year earlier, but this has still to be docu-

mented. _ 312 Korchits was posted from the Red Army to the LWP in 1944. He was also a member of the CC PZPR in 1948-54 and in 1949 was appointed a deputy defence minister. In 1952 he was sent to the Frunze Military Academy and remained in the USSR. His last Soviet rank was colonel general. 313 Pigarevich was posted from the Red Army to the LWP in 1950. He returned to the USSR in 1957. His last Soviet rank was colonel general.

314 Bordzilovsky was a Red Army engineering officer, posted to the LWP in 1944. He was also a member of the CC PZPR and deputy defence minister in 1954-68. In 1965 he was appointed the chief

inspector of military schooling and played a leading role in the antisemitic purges in 1967-38. Bordzilovsky retired from the LWP in Mar. 1968 and returned to the USSR, where he became a consultant to the Kuibyshev Military Academy of Engineering Troops.

142 Leszek W. Gluchowski chief of staff until February 1965. Even though Gomulka returned to power and Rokossowski was back in the

USSR, and notwithstanding the fact that Korczynski took the reins at MI, Moscow continued to maintain a tight grip on its Z-IT subsidiary.*!° Z-II ‘was officially a part of the General Staff of the Polish Army’, Suvorov explains, “but it was

completely controlled by Moscow. Soviet commanders aspired only to support competition between intelligence services of individual countries, so as to ensure for itself information from different sources. Formally, therefore, all of these [Soviet bloc intelligence] structures operated independently of each other, but all the threads led to Moscow anyway. ‘This is where the actual centre commanding all these [MI] services was located.’+®

Bordzilowski was the most senior Soviet army officer to remain in the Polish military after 1956. He became the longest-serving chief of staff in the history of the LWP,?"" as well as the second longest-serving deputy defence minister in the history of communist Poland.?!®> When asked to describe ‘the mechanics of Soviet guidance and exploitation of Z-IT’,?!° Monat replied: The method the Soviets use always varies from time to time, and is dependent on the relationship between the chief of Z-II and the [G]RU. This relationship with the present chief of Z-II, General Grzegorz KORCZYNSKL, is not a good one so far as the Soviets are concerned. As a result, the [G]RU exerts much of its influence through General Jerzy BORDZILOWSKI, the Polish Chief of Staff who still holds his Soviet citizenship. The Soviets are also assisted in maintaining their influence over Z-II by the presence within Z-II of many pro-Soviet Polish staff officers.°°

SOVIET-DIRECTED PURGES IN THE POLISH MI Komar had been forced to relinquish command of O-II on 14 November 1950, ostensibly to become the new chief quartermaster of the Polish army. Jerzy Poksinski points out that ‘political aspects’??! dictated Komar’s removal, which 315 Korczynski was chief until 2 Aug. 1965, when he became chief inspector of territorial defence and the deputy defence minister. He was among those responsible for the violent military response to

the strike by workers on the Baltic Coast in 1970. Recalled from his military posts in Mar. 1971, a month later he was appointed ambassador to Algeria, where he committed suicide on 22 Oct. 1971. Korczynski’s successors at Z-II were: BG Wiodzimierz Oliwa (1965-71); Col. Boleslaw Szczepaniak

(1971-2), BG Czeslaw Kiszczak (1972-9), BG Edward Poradko (1979-81); BG Roman Misztal (1981-90); and BG Stanislaw Zak (1990-1), chief of the Zarzad I] Wywiadu 1 Kontrwywiadu SG WP (2nd Directorate Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence), which combined MI and MCI in Aug. 1990 and became the WSI in Aug. 1991 until Sept. 2006. 316 Quoted in Popowski, ‘Agentem GRU jest sie do konca zycia’.

317 Subsequent chiefs of staff: Lt Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski (1965-8); Maj. Gen. Bolestaw Chocha (1968-73); Lt Gen. Florian Siwicki (1973-83); and Lt Gen. Jozef Uzycki (1983-90). 318 There were twenty-nine deputy defence ministers from 1944 to 1990. 319 The question was asked by the subcommittee’s chief counsel J. G. Sourwine; Soviet Espionage

through Poland, 12. , 320 Tbid.

The Polish Military Intelligence Service, 1945-1961 143 means he was purged for reasons that had nothing to do with his performance, much less for whatever failures MI or the civilian service accumulated during his tenure. Poksinski compared the evaluation reports on the O-II chief prepared by the General Staff chief. About five weeks before Komar was relieved, Korczyc declared that the ‘occupied position suits him’.°2* He changed his mind, as a member of a three-man evaluation commission, following the reassignment of the O-I chief: ‘General Komar has a reckless relationship to the selection of cadres; he is unable properly to assess people.’?? Rokossowski confirmed Korczyc’s second evaluation of November 1950 1n July

1951,°"4 after the chief ideologue (and antisemite) of the KPSS, Mikhail A. Suslov, and Bierut began an exchange on Komar’s past in the spring of that year.°”° The fact that in 1932 Komar had supported the Neumann faction in the KJVD, even though he had recanted soon afterwards in Moscow, came back to haunt

him. Questions were also raised about Komar’s wartime exploits. Summarily judged to be a security risk, Komar was arrested like a ‘top gangster’®*° on 11 November 1952 at the offices of the chief of the General Staff by Lieutenant Colonel Antoni Skulbaszewski (Anton Skulbashevsky),°*’ the deputy chief of the © GZI,°28 and charged with treason. Komar was ‘deprived of sleep’®*? and eventually ‘confessed’ to being a French spy. He also told his Soviet interrogators that among the co-conspirators in his anti-party plot were Bierut and Berman.°”° The purges at O-II during the Stalin years, when Soviet officers ran MI, appear to have come in two phases. The first, in the years 1950—1, hit almost everyone at once. During this period 157 MI employees were not just dismissed from the ser321 Quoted in Poksinski, Kochanski, and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR, 142 n. 22. 322 Quoted ibid. Komar’s first evaluation was in Oct. 1950.

323 Quoted ibid. The three evaluators were Korczyc; BG Naszkowski (deputy defence minister Nov. 1950—Sept. 1952); and Col. Dmitrij Wozniesienski (Voznesensky), the GZI chief. Voznesensky had joined the organs of Soviet state security in 1921 and served there until he was posted to the LWP

in 1944. He was appointed GZI deputy chief in 1946, acting chief in June 1950, and chief in Apr. 1951. Voznesensky was recalled to the USSR in Dec. 1953.

824 Korczyc also played a part in authorizing Komar’s 1945 appointment as MI chief. AIPN, BU 0298/24 t. 3, ‘Protokolt Przestuchania Podejrzanego z 16.1V.1953-r.’

325 Poksinski, ‘TUN’, 187. 326 Komar, quoted ibid. 190.

3827 Skulbashevsky, born near Kiev, joined the Red Army in 1935 and the NK VD in 1937. He was dismissed in 1938 after his Polish father was arrested as an ‘enemy of the people’. Released in 1939, he was mobilized to fight in the Soviet—Finnish War. After being wounded while fighting the Germans in 1941, he studied hydroelectric engineering in Tashkent. Skulbashevsky was posted to the LWP in 1944 and held a series of top posts as a military prosecutor. He served as the supreme military prosecutor in 1948—50. He became deputy chief of GZI in Aug. 1950 until he was recalled to the USSR in Aug. 1954. 328 Skulbaszewski was also Swierczewski’s son-in-law. 329 Chodakiewicz, “The Dialectics of Pain’, 133 n. 10. 330 Poksinski, Kochanski, and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR, 44 n. 108. It is interesting

to note that at about the same time investigators in Moscow, according to Vladimir Naumov, ‘attempted to link the JAC to [Lazar M.] Kaganovich, Molotov, and other leading figures in the [Soviet] government’. Rubenstein and Naumov (eds.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom, p. xvi.

144 Leszek W. Gluchowski vice, most were drummed out of the military, quite a few of them were arrested and accused of spying on behalf of a foreign power, and most of those arrested were tortured and forced to confess to fictitious crimes.**! In 1950 the purge directly impacted 122 MI personnel and in 1951 thirty-five. Veterans of the interwar Polish military and veterans of the Polish forces in France or Britain during the war, along with loyal communists who had belonged to the KPP or its affiliated organizations, veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and those who had lived abroad in Belgium, France, Palestine, or Switzerland were all targeted and given the same GZI treatment. The second phase, in the years 1952-3, was a purely antisemitic affair that affected ‘about twenty officers’.?°* To supplement the Soviet officers and the remaining Poles, the PZPR leadership transferred ‘several hundred graduates of military schools, as well as about thirty-five to forty permanently employed members of the party apparatus’.*°? In the meantime, O-II became Z-II in November 1951. The 2nd Directorate, which now had 254 officers and 105 contract employees, moved its Special Course to Srédboréw.2*4 Furthermore, Leszek Pawlikowicz recently discovered that it was

at this time that Z-II expanded its operations to include ‘Norway, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and Israel’.?*° Monat observed that between 1951 and 1956, the Soviets adopted a policy of strengthening the O-II organization by the replacement of various military personnel in important positions and by the application of strict security regulations. In November 1951 about fifteen Soviet staff officers from the [G]RU were assigned to O-II ... These officers were highly qualified in military intelligence and wore Polish uniforms and assumed Polish military ranks. They were placed in every responsible position in the

O-II organization. The Soviets improved upon the O-II organization and introduced Soviet intelligence techniques into O-II operations. O-II was under the complete control of the [G]RU. Polish officers assigned to O-II were used in minor positions and were advised to take advantage of the Soviets’ presence and learn from their superior training and experience in the military intelligence field. During this period the Soviets were in a position to take over any O-II agents they wanted . . . During SUCHACKI’s tenure as chief, he continued to guide O-II from a relatively ineffective intelligence organization to a highly efficient military intelligence service.*°°

In 1955 Z-II had a staff of 1,700 officers, non-commissioned officers, and soldiers, of which 500 were operations officers.*°’ By the end of that year the new leadership in Moscow had already recalled most of their officers from the LWP to the Soviet Union. ‘Between 1955 and 1956 the majority of Soviet officers assigned 331 See Poksinski, ‘TUN’, 186—208.

382 Pawlikowicz, Tajny front, 50-1; and AIPN, BU 509—54, ‘Zeznanie FLATO z dnia 24.III.1953 r.’, k. 126-44. Flato, for instance, was forced to admit that he began spying on the Soviets in 1935. 333 Ibid.; and Poksiiski, Kochahski, and Persak (eds.), Kierownictwo PPR i PZPR, 143-4 and 151. 334 Srédboréw is near Otwock, about 25 km from Warsaw.

335 Pawlikowicz, Tajny front, 51. 336 Quoted in Soviet Espionage through Poland, 10-11. 337 Tbid. 5—6 and 37. On the organizational structure in 1955, see Pawlikowicz, Tajny front, 51-2.

The Polish Military Intelligence Service, 1945-1961 145 to Z-II were [also] recalled to the Soviet Union’, Monat testified; ‘only three or four Soviet officers remained, and they were reassigned as advisors.’*°° The three advisers were Colonels Sevastyan Polyashenko, Vasili Konstantinov, and Grigory Golovchenko.**? Colonel Lew Sergiejew (Lev Sergeev) remained in Z-II and in a

Polish uniform as deputy chief of the analysis department until December 1957.°*° From 1956, Monat acknowledged, ‘Soviet control over Z-II has been indirect rather than direct. There is now only a Soviet [GRU] Liaison officer assigned to Z-IT, Commander Igor AMOSOW [Amosov].’**?

CONCLUSIONS Considering the global success of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, the false and malicious claim of a Jewish conspiracy to gain political control of the world, John Klier posits that the actual details of most stories about some kind of Jewish plot are of marginal importance since the narrative can be twisted to fit whatever purpose is required.**” ‘As for their allure,’ Klier adds, ‘if it is true that all inter-

pretations of history can be divided into “cock-up” or “conspiracy” theories, many readers clearly prefer the latter. The perverse charm of conspiracy theories is that they offer a measure of control: if malevolent manipulation underlines world crises, rather than a random succession of events, then one can uncover the plot and resist it.°42 Andrew and Mitrokhin argue that while the level of antisemitic and anti-Zionist ‘paranoia’ inside the headquarters of Soviet intelligence ‘dropped off sharply after Stalin’s death in March 1953, it did not disappear’.°44 The Kremlin never reinstated Jews purged during the late 1940s and early 1950s from their intelligence services. In 1989 ‘Jews were still excluded (along with a number of other minorities) from the KGB’.?*° Jacek Kuron’s explanation for the prevalence of Jewish conspiracy theories among the ruling elite of the PZPR was more direct (and facetious). He told me in 1988: ‘You have to remember that they [Polish communists] were educated in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion School of History.’?4© The Korczynski report is a perfect example of both conspiracy theory and paranoia. Following a reference to the ‘tense situation regarding the Berlin matter, and the 338 Soviet Espionage through Poland, 11.

339 Nalepa, Oficerowie Armu Radzieckte), 324. 340 Tid. 112. 341 Soviet Espionage through Poland, 11-12. Sourwine asked Monat: ‘Excuse me, Colonel, but is this the same AMOSOW who was assigned to the Soviet Military Office in Washington, D.C., as Assistant Naval Attaché and declared persona non grata by our Government in 1954?’ Monat: ‘Yes, sir’. 342 John Klier, ‘Underneath the Lot’, Times Literary Supplement, 24 Feb. 2006, p. 7.

343 Thid. 344 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way, 224. 345 Tbid. 346 My interview with Kuron in Apr. 1988 during the ‘unofficial’ commemorations of the fortyfifth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, organized by supporters of the banned Solidarnos¢ trade union. See also M. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, 1997), 108—9.

146 Leszek W. Gluchowski signing of peace treaties with the GDR**’ [German Democratic Republic] ,?*° the MI chief observed first that there were ‘definite weaknesses in the current “peacetime” organizational structure of the Directorate’.**? He followed with a revelation of long-held Stalinist suspicions, that party cadres, in this case MI officers, of Jewish origin, were holding back information or were a security risk, responsible for practically every failure suffered by his service.?°° Korczynski made no explicit mention of a Jewish ‘fifth column’*?’ conspiring against People’s Poland, but the seed of that ‘Jewish plot’ was planted in his report.*°” The inference in Korczynski’s report of a Jewish conspiracy inside Z-II would have been especially vivid to

any party-—state official authorized to read it at the time. That generation was acutely aware that among the first Polish officers to hold command positions in MI were veterans of the International Brigades, among whom were Jews, such as Bryn and Adler-Trojan, recruited into the MI service directly from Palestine. To reverse the negative trends in his service, most notably a series of high-profile defections

to the West, Korczynski naturally recommended recruiting and training better officers (of Polish origin, of course) to increase the quantity and quality of (nonJewish spies and therefore) the information his service gathered from the enemy at home and abroad.?°? Treason was of great concern to Korczynski. After all, in the PRL and in the USSR, as in much of the Soviet bloc, treason was also a collective crime. The Polish comrades had been collectively accused by the Kremlin of being ‘Fascist’ spies, on and off from roughly 1925 to 1958, and purged accordingly. Their Jewish comrades were collectively accused by the Kremlin—and in time by their Polish communist allies—of being “Trotskyite’, later ‘Zionist’, but always ‘Jewish’ spies, on and off from roughly 1928 to 1968, and purged accordingly. In the collective

memory of post-war Polish communists, two perspectives about the legacy of Trotsky (and in the context of the Polish communist movement the legacy of Rosa Luxemburg)?‘ remained. The first quietly recalled romantic visions of the interna347 CAW, 525/85, k. 450.

348 See H. Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet—East German Relations, 1953-1961 (Princeton, 2003); W. Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era (New York, 2003), 396-441; D. Selvage, ‘Khrushchev’s Nov. 1958 Ultimatum’, CW/HP Bulletin, 11 (1998), 200-3; and id., “The

End of the Berlin Crisis, 1961-1962’, ibid. 218—29. 349 CAW, 525/85, k. 459. 350 The prelude to this leitmotif is reviewed in Gluchowski, ‘Gomultka Writes to Stalin in 1948’. 351 ‘Fifth column’ was coined in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War by Emilio Mola, a Nationalist general. As four armed columns he commanded moved to take Madrid, Mola said in a radio broadcast

that a fifth column of supporters inside the city would help him defeat the pro-government Republican forces. 352 At the Trade Union Congress of 19 June 1967, Gomutka said ‘fifth column’ when he questioned

the loyalty to People’s Poland of ‘Polish citizens of Jewish nationality’ who supported Israel during the Arab-Israeli War that same month. D. Stola, Kampania anytsyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warsaw, 2000), 274. The image resonated throughout Poland, still haunted by the actions of a significant pro-Nazi German national minority during the Second World War. 353 Consider P. Machcewicz, ‘Sprawa Wiktora Troscianki’, Rzeczpospolita, 18 Sept. 2004.

The Polish Military Intelligence Service, 1945-1961 147 tional proletariat revolution, and alluded to the lese-majesty of labyrinthine disputes with Lenin. The second recalled without reservation the miserable failure of postrevolution revolutionaries, and pointed out the ease with which Stalin physically _ liquidated Trotsky (and marginalized the ideas of Luxemburg). Polish communists did not need to be reminded of the Jewish origin of Trotsky (or Luxemburg).

The approach taken on the matter of treason in the Soviet bloc was revealed with remarkable clarity in 1969 by Wladyslaw Bienkowski, an intellectual, a revolu-

tionary, a former party functionary, later a ‘lesser’ Marxist revisionist and ‘erstwhile friend’**’ of party boss Gomutka. Although Bienkowski was expelled from the PZPR in 1970, he continued to publish abroad. Characterizing his contribution to the Main Currents of Marxism, Kotakowski®°® emphasizes that ‘in works published outside Poland he analyses the causes of social and economic deterioration under the bureaucratic governments’ while still appealing ‘to the Marxist tradition, but goes beyond it in examining the autonomized [spontaneous re-emergence of a sub-group such as Jews or Poles threatened by extinction] mechanisms of political power independent of the class system (in Marx’s sense of “class”)’,°°’

premised on the theory that ‘the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’. In the midst of the antisemitic purges that first gripped the basic party organizations of the LWP following the Arab-Israeli War of June 1967, and in the aftermath

of the street clashes between Polish state security forces and students in March 1968, as well as the invasion of communist Czechoslovakia by forces of the Warsaw Pact in August 1968, the leading Polish emigré publishing house released Motors and Brakes of Socialism.®°® Bienkowski, a former education minister, made the following observation on the mechanics of secret policing at the centre of the Soviet camp: The blueprint for action is always the same: it starts with an alert of a threat to the state, the regime, socialism. A real event may be used as an alert—duly stage-managed—or, in the absence, a faked and fabricated one. The alert sets in motion all measures of coercion, some sort of state of emergency is proclaimed, an atmosphere of physical and moral terror is introduced to block any expression not only of dissent but even of doubt .. . The atmosphere of terror paves the way for new people ready to reform every domain of life—literature, art, science, even the most specialized disciplines. Under a state of emergency, mass expulsions are carried out against people whose dismissal could otherwise prove inconvenient or even give rise to some kind of collective opposition.*°°

- Calls for alerts (and actions) to counter threats, simultaneously external and 8>4 Luxemburg or Luksemburg, a leading Marxist theoretician of Polish, German, and Russian social democracy, co-founded the revolutionary Spartacus League in 1916 and the KPD before taking part in the ill-fated uprising in Berlin. In 1919 she was executed by right-wing paramilitaries. 855 M. Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism (New York, 1982), 152. 356 See Gontarczyk, ‘Filozof pod lupa’, Rzeczpospolita, 4 Nov. 2006. 397 Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, 468. 358 W. Bienkowski, Motory 1 hamulce socjalizmu (Paris, 1969).

359 Quoted in Checinski, Poland, 152.

148 Leszek W. Gtuchowski internal, real or imagined, to the unity of the Warsaw Pact never had a single source. Such matters were not monopolized by Soviet bloc internal security and counter-intelligence services. Party bosses in the Soviet camp demanded input from their civilian and military intelligence services, too. MI chiefs were no less adamant in supplying their own perspectives. Warsaw Pact MI services were integral parts of the state apparatus of terror and repression. Lenin’s transmission-

belt theory of decision-making, which ‘connects the big wheel’ revolving ‘energetically down below with the little wheel up above’, obliged communist intelligence services to play a leading role in all efforts to mobilize and discipline the party and society. Feliks Dzierzynski, a humourless fanatic with boundless energy and ‘a man subsequently elevated to the stature of a Communist saint’,°©? Adam Ulam reminds us, surely had this in mind when he organized Soviet Russia’s first intelligence

- gervice—the Foreign Department—within the Vserossiiskaya chrezvychainaya komissiya po bor’be s kontrrevolyutsiei, spekulyatsiei 1 sabotazhem (All Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Speculation, and Sabotage; VChK), the prototype for the KGB-GRU and their predecessors, not to mention the special services of communist Poland. After noting that KGB officers

were always paid on ‘Chekist Day’, the twentieth rather than the first of each month, Andrew and Mitrokhin add: The KGB also adopted the Cheka symbols of the sword and the shield: the shield to defend

the revolution, the sword to smite its foes. Outside the Lubyanka, the KGB’s Moscow

headquarters, stood a huge statue of the Polish-born head of the VChk,°°! Feliks Dzerzhinsky, venerated in countless official hagiographies as the selfless, incorruptible ‘Knight of the Revolution’ who slew the dragon of counter-revolution which threatened the young Soviet state. °°

A careful reading of the Korczynski report will no doubt convince any reader

that the chief of Polish MI had more in mind than just a call for vigilance. Furthermore, I understand the intellectual and practical needs to consider foreign intelligence on its own terms, as well as the desire to exclude domestic or internal security from discussions concerning intelligence. But it is necessary to rethink the dichotomy when discussing Soviet bloc foreign intelligence during the Cold War. Soviet—east European intelligence officers and their agents were ‘hacks’—loyal party workers who served unquestioningly—part of the same service as the ‘thugs’ from security and their secret collaborators. Any attempt to divorce Soviet bloc intelligence from security will lead to bad history. These attempts insult the mem360 A. Ulam, The Bolsheviks (New York, 1965), 420.

361 Until 1989, a similar statue stood outside the MSW in Warsaw, on what was then called Dzierzynski Square. 362 Andrew and Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive, 30. Dzierzynski has also been called ‘a knight

without fear or blemish, as almost every Communist writing about him feels compelled to repeat’. Ulam, The Bolsheviks, 420.

The Polish Military Intelligence Service, 1945-1961 149 ory of the victims of communist repression. The differences between the Second World War and the Cold War are obvious. Yet any effort to provide institutions such as the foreign intelligence services of the Soviet bloc with a special or ‘honourable’ status will fail as miserably as did the attempts to portray the members of the Nazi SS as the sole perpetrators of war crimes.

‘Israel’ in the Events of March 1968 | BOZENA SZAYNOK PoLISH—ISRAELI relations, which began in May 1948 when Poland recognized the Jewish state, were not easy even before they were broken off by Poland in June

1967. Polish sympathy for the new state lasted barely a few months and very quickly turned into cool acceptance, not without its dramatic moments. Among them was, for example, the arrest of Arie Lerner of the Israeli legation and the declaration of the Knesset member Arie Kubowy persona non grata in Poland. In the second half of the 1950s relations seemed to improve, and late in 1962 the decision was taken to upgrade the respective legations to the rank of embassies. In the 1960s Polish and Israeli diplomats, in official statements, expressed their desire for good mutual relations. Behind the scenes, tension persisted. There were many causes of conflict. First, several years after the Second World War the two states found themselves in rival political camps. We also need to remember that the Polish People’s Republic was not an independent state. The Ministerstwo Spraw

Zagranicznych (Ministry of Foreign Affairs; MSZ) in Warsaw had to consider

Moscow’s Middle East policies, in which political, economic, and military rapprochement with certain Arab states was an important element. Clearly such political priorities, in the face of the Arab—Israeli conflict, were incompatible

with good relations with the Jewish state. In June 1967, during yet another war in the Middle East, the Soviet Union and the communist countries (with the exception of Romania) decided to break off relations with Israel. Poland was among them. On 13 June 1967 a bald press release in Trybuna Ludu, the official organ of the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party; PZPR), reported that the Israeli ambassador had been summoned by the Polish deputy minister of foreign affairs, Marian Naszkowski. During the meeting the Polish government’s decision to break off diplomatic relations was conveyed to the Israeli diplomat. Naszkowski stated that the Polish government was ‘ready to re-establish them when Israel withdraws from the occupied territories of the Arab states and

abandons a policy of aggression towards those states’.' The note handed to Ambassador Dov Sattath on 12 June 1967 concluded: “The Polish Government ' Trybuna Ludu, 162, 13 June 1967, p. 1.

‘Israel’ in the Events of March 1968 151 expects that the Ambassador of Israel will leave Poland together with his personnel as soon as possible.’* This took place on 18 June. The Israeli diplomats left Poland in a tense atmosphere. They were harassed by the airport and customs officers. The Polish authorities did not allow the Air France stewardesses to help carry the luggage of the embassy workers and their families even though there was a pregnant woman and an infant among them. The Israelis were shoved and abused. ‘A group of Israelis accompanied by the Ambassador of

the Netherlands had to walk through the crowd of demonstrators who pushed against them, whistled, and shouted insults and obscenities at them. Some of the Israelis were pushed and brutally treated.’? A lane of people positioned on the airport strip shouted while Ambassador Sattath was walking to the plane: ‘Down with the Israeli fascists."* The embassy of the Netherlands sent a note to the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs protesting about the events at the airport. During this ‘farewell’ of the Israeli diplomats organized by the security at the airport, Tomasz Babik, one of those present, observed that ‘whistling at such a time shows a lack of culture and manners’. According to the report, he was transported to the Warsaw Police Station (Komenda MO m. Stolecznego Warszawy). Several people, whose presence at the airport was not approved by the security, had their [Ds checked, among them Lidia and Jacek Bochenski, Andrzej Braun, and Szymon Szechter. Polish personnel from the embassy in Tel Aviv with the ambassador Jozef Puta returned to Poland on 19 June 1967. Trybuna Ludu reported this event on its front page. The newspaper also wrote that the government of Finland had been requested by the Polish government to be responsible for the protection of Polish interests in Israel. The news of the return of the Polish ambassador was supplemented by a story describing how ‘representatives of the capital’s population’ showed up in large numbers at Okecie Airport, despite the late hour (around midnight). “Those who gathered gave the returning members of the embassy a hearty welcome. There were numerous shouts expressing support for the Polish government’s policy and for breaking diplomatic relations with Israel. The aggression of Israel against the Arab states and inhuman treatment of Arab POWs was condemned.”° In its report, the Ministry of Internal Affairs described those present: ‘at 11.30 p.m. at the Okecie Airport the Polish diplomats from Tel Aviv . . . were enthusiastically greeted by the employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and bystanders’.’ Some months after the breach in diplomatic relations, issues related to Israel re-emerged on the Polish political scene. ‘Israel’ became a major element in the 2 Archiwum Ministerstwa Spraw Zagranicznych (AMSZ), Departament V, vol. 60/70, w.1, 1967, bp., Tresc Oswiadezenia rzadu PRL wreczonego 12 VI 1967 r. Ambasadorowi Izraela w Warszawie p. D. Sattathowi. 3 AMSZ, 57/70, w.3, bp., English translation of the Dutch ambassador’s note. * AMSZ, bp., A. Kepinski’s note of 19 June 1967. © Archiwum Instytutu Pamieci Narodowej (AIPN), MSW II, file 31141, 113.

© Trybuna Ludu, 168, 19 June 1967, p. I. ” AIPN, MSWIL, file 31141, 113

152 Bozena Szaynok propaganda and purges that accompanied the March events. The Jewish theme was only one of the elements in the chain of events, starting with the ban on Mickiewicz’s play Dziady, that were symptoms of a major political and social crisis in Poland. More important were the processes connected with the contemporane-

ous political struggle within the party and with the social mood exemplified in March 1968 by the rebellion of students and intellectuals. “The Jewish theme’ appeared alongside this, was incited by the authorities, and was responded to by a part of Polish society. The question of the Polish response to this renewed ‘antiZionist’ action touches upon much wider issues than the events of March 1968, among them antisemitism and Polish—Jewish relations of that time. There are different opinions on this subject. One type of response is exemplified by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski’s letter written in 1968 to Adolf Berman in Tel Aviv. Expressing his ‘deepest shame for what is being done in Poland by the communists who rule the country’, Bartoszewski wrote that ‘[f ]ortunately I do not in any way feel responsible for their actions—this is a foreign, police regime, imposed on Poland . . . But I am truly sorry that all this is happening in the name of the Poles and Poland and 1s being organized by Polish-speaking people.’® On the other hand, on the thirtieth anniversary of the events of March 1968, the writer Andrzej Szczypiorski stressed the wider responsibility of Polish society: ‘I told myself for years that it was not Poland but Moczar and his henchmen and Gomutka’s dictatorship that drove out the Polish Jews. Today I have a different opinion . . . I think that not only the party was responsible for 1968. Nothing can excuse the outburst of antisemitic phobia.”® Similarly, Feliks Tych described the Jewish aspect of March 1968 during the conference dedicated to this crisis as ‘the biggest antisemitic campaign in Europe since

the collapse of the Third Reich, not only conducted in the Nazi spirit but also based on almost literal plagiarisms from the Nazi antisemitic literature’ .*° Israel appeared among the Jewish questions of March 1968 mostly, as we have

already mentioned, in propaganda and in the purges of the administration, and was also in some part connected to the so-called post-March emigration. ‘Israel’ was only one element in these issues and that is why examining the position of the Jewish state during the March events does not exhaust the ‘Jewish theme’ in March 1968. The State of Israel was often present in March propaganda. On the one hand it was a continuation of the urge to ‘write about Israel’ started at the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967. On the other, anti-Israeli propaganda complied with the new

, official guidelines. During the meeting of the Central Committee Secretariat in March 1968 the decision was made ‘to undertake in press, radio, and TV a campaign that will expose . . . this new act of Israeli aggression. In this campaign the 8 Quoted in D. Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warsaw, 2000), 261. 9 A. Szczypiorski, ‘Marzec i Polacy’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 28—9 Mar. 1998, pp. 10-11.

10 Feliks Tych, ‘Kilka uwag o Marcu 1968’, in M. Kula, P. Oseka, and M. Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1908: Trzydziesct lat ponies, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1998).

‘Israel’ in the Events of March 1968 153 emphasis should be put on explaining the essence of the aggression executed from the position of superiority with the support of American imperialism, and on the

appropriate exposure of the question of Zionism and Jewish nationalism’.*! Zionism retained a special place in this propaganda. Before the March events, in

February 1968, during his meeting with the general secretary of the Syrian Communist Party, Wladyslaw Gomulka explained that ‘talking about unmasking Zionism—there is no need to promote that with us. We understand what Zionism is and what its goals are.’'* Piotr Oseka, in his work dealing with the image of the enemy in March propaganda, draws our attention to the simple-minded manner in which the Jewish state was described in March 1968. Israel acted as an external

enemy ‘in accordance with the rules of totalitarian . . . propaganda .. . The Zionists in the country act simply as agents of Zionism—they fulfil orders received from abroad and carry out acts of sabotage on the ideological front which

are co-ordinated with the propaganda offensive of Israel.’+® Oseka notes that the external enemy plays a much more important role in the propaganda than the internal enemy. At the same time when describing ‘the Middle East war and the financial—military assistance offered to Israel by West Germany, government prop-

agandists used a completely ossified language and the most out-dated motifs of communist propaganda’.'* The description of the Jewish state in 1968 embodied all those elements which had appeared in the press in describing the events of June 1967. Yet it also embodied even more strongly the theme of the links between the

Jewish state and those individuals who opposed the authorities of the Polish People’s Republic (PRL). This is illustrated by a fragment of a typical March text

written by Ryszard Gontarz entitled ‘Inspiratorzy’ (Instigators): ‘Many of the political friends of [Pawel] Jasienica [a historian critical of the government], fulfilling the wishes of Israeli-West German propaganda, slander our government and nation by accusing us of antisemitism . . . Similarly Antoni Stonimski, another

instigator of recent events, has placed himself among the friends of Israel.’ Gontarz also attacked the ‘Babel’ club attached to the Warsaw branch of the Towarzystwo Spoleczno-Kulturalne Zydow w Polsce (Social and Cultural Association of the Jews in Poland; TSKZ), where ‘Israeli conquests were celebrated, where youth was raised in the spirit of Jewish chauvinism and the Polish nation was slandered with accusations of antisemitism . .. Among the organizers of the rally at the University of Warsaw and the other scuffles, the alumni of “Babel” were the majority.’'°? Many March articles described how the Jewish children at the TSKZ summer camps sang to the music of Dabrowski’s Mazurka (the Polish 4) Archiwum Akt Nowych (AAN), KC PZPR, file 2229. The document can be also found in Stola, Kampanta antysyjonistyczna, 319-20. 12 AAN, KC PZPR, file XIA/18, 13. 8 P. Oseka, Syjonisci, inspiratorzy, wichrzyciele: Obraz wroga w propagandzie marca 1968 (Warsaw,

1999), 53. 14 Tbid. 15 Kurier Polski, 12 Mar. 1968.

154 Bozena Szaynok national anthem): ‘Cross the Sinai, cross the Gaza, and Jews we shall be; we’ve been shown by Moshe Dayan ways to victory.’!®

Anti-Jewish propaganda labelled as anti-Zionist certainly penetrated public consciousness. A popular joke from those days told of a child asking his father how to spell the word ‘Zionist’. The answer was: ‘I don’t know, son, but before the war it was spelled with a z [Zyd = Jew in Polish]’. In anonymous letters received by various state institutions the word ‘Zionist’ appears only in negative contexts, and similarly in letters officially sent to the party. Sometimes ‘Zionism’ was used to

settle personal accounts: for example, in the letter written by the employees of ‘Pharmacy no. 5 in Bialystok’ the authors attacked ‘our own troublemakers, twofaced opportunists, the enemies of the PRL such as the manager . . . and his deputy, a fanatic Zionist’.'’ What is interesting about the anonymous letters sent to the ministers Moczar and Strzelecki is that they were meticulously examined by the security. The letters contributed to the dismissal of many employees and led to their expulsion from the Polish United Workers’ Party. This information was also forwarded to the Provincial Committees. *®

An analysis of the contents of the anonymous letters gives us several ideas as to why they were written. Undoubtedly, on the one hand, we are dealing here with the settling of personal grievances, with taking advantage of the opportunity given by the state to ‘take revenge’ on a hated neighbour or an employer by accusing them of Zionism. On the other hand, some of the letters clearly show they were written according to the models published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in its internal directives on Zionism. ‘Thus: ‘every Jew, no matter where he finds himself, is first and foremost a Jew . . . no Jew living in Poland can be counted on. . . this solidarity has lasted for over twenty centuries and did not allow them to assimilate in any country’.?? It is hard to decide in such cases if the authors of the letters were

simply the security functionaries or citizens ‘influenced by the March propaganda’.

The Jewish state appeared in the resolutions passed ‘spontaneously’ during the

rallies in various institutions. For example, a proclamation of the Zwiazek Zawodowy Pracownikow Lesnych i Przemystu Drzewnego (Trade Union of the Timber and Forestry Industry) referred to ‘political bankers subscribing to the imperialistic aggression of Israel on the Arab states’.*° In all these resolutions the names of Israeli leaders appear together with the condemnation of Israeli ‘aggression’: ‘We insist on removal from the party and state positions of people for whom the politics of Dayan and Eshkol, who collaborate with the neo-fascists of West Germany, are more important than the well-being of the PRL’ (resolution of 16 Among others Gontarz, ibid., and A. and Reutt Z. Andruszkiewicz, ‘Bananowe jabltka’, Walka Mtlodych, 31 Mar. 1968.

17 AIPN, Materialy dotyczace anonimow, w ktérych autorzy wskazuja osoby dzialajace z pozycji

18 Thid. 24. 19 Thid. 25.

syjonistycznych badz tez prowadza inna szkodliwa dzialalnosc. 1968, file 0236/ 140, v. 2, 18.

20 AAN, PZPR Kancelaria Sekretariatu KC PZPR, file 237-V-752, 347.

‘Tsrael’ in the Events of March 1968 155 the youth and employees of the Agricultural School in Werynia); ‘we condemn the Zionists, the admirers of Moshe Dayan’s Israeli “Blitzkrieg”’ (resolution passed

by the staff of the Panstwowy Osrodek Maszynowy (State Machine Centre) in Chmielnik). In some resolutions the March events were linked to the situation in the Middle East: ‘Among the instigators of the events were Zionists, the representatives of the Jewish nationalistic bourgeoisie, unhappy with our government condemning the Israeli aggression on the Arab states. We demand their punishment, also the punishment of the indirect authors of the incidents’ (resolution of the Zaklad Remontow Sprzetu Melioracyjnego (Drainage Equipment Repair Plant) in Biala Podlaska).?? During the purges, the Jewish state was used as a pretext to expose the disloyalty

of Polish citizens of Jewish background. Loyalty was understood as having identical opinions with the party, including its stand on Israel. An analysis of twentyeight items discussed by the Wojewodzka Komisja Kontroli Partyjnej (Provincial Commission of Party Control) in Wroclaw in June 1968 reveals that the attitude towards the Jewish state was a crucial factor in making decisions about expelling party members. Among the justifications for these decisions were: abstaining from voting on the resolution condemning the Israeli aggression . . . refusal to participate in collecting money for helping the Arab states . . . spreading rumours about allegedly untrue information given by the press about the actions of the Israeli military . . . delaying the party meeting dedicated to condemning the aggression of Israel . . . taking a pro-Israeli stand during the meeting . .. making a comparison between our western territories [Ziemie Zachodnie| and Arab territories occupied by Israel . . . being absent from the meeting . . . sending to Israel . . . letters congratulating the addressees on the victory and slandering the PRL . . . visiting the Israeli embassy on 6 June 1967.77

In the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Jewish issues had a specific place. In his comment on a letter denouncing a family from Kedzierzyn, captain M. A. Kubs stated: ‘Considering the fact that the husband of the above-mentioned 1s of Jewish background, I suggest forwarding the report for further use.’?°

During the March events the Jewish nationality of the protesters was often emphasized in ministry documents. The annexe to the Biuletyn Wewnetrzny (Internal Bulletin) mentioned that in the March incidents ‘those most active were regulars from the Babel club’. In addition, ‘a group of students of Jewish back-

ground’ was described as ‘the instigators of the incidents’, supported only by ‘Zionist elements’.?4 Information of that kind was directed to Gomutka and the

members of the Politburo, and also to the First Secretaries of Provincial

Committees of the party. ,

The ministry reports from that time clearly suggest that ‘people of Jewish background’ were disloyal: 21 All resolutions are in AAN, Kancelaria Sekretariatu KC PZPR, file 237-V-749, 25, 34, 73-

22 AAN, KC PZPR, file 3015. 23 ATPN, Wroclaw, file 013/4, 106. 24 ATPN, MSW II, Informacje polityczne dot. wypadkow marcowych, file 1064 (d. 126/5a), 15, 22, 41.

156 Bozena Szaynok One should at the same time recall that many people who in Poland held important positions in the state administration and the army changed their standpoint after going to Israel and became fierce enemies of our system and our nation. We must therefore assume that among people of Jewish background who remain in our country are many who are patriots only so long as they hold lucrative positions, while in fact they have never identified with our nation or our ideals.”°

In 1968 new elements appeared in the Ministry of Internal Affairs investigation that had begun some years before and was given the code name ‘Emigrant’. In it, the Jewish population in Poland had been ‘analysed’ by the security officials using a questionnaire in which questions were asked about ties with citizens of the Jewish state, efforts to go to Israel, and the position held in Poland. The interrogation was intended to discover people who ‘betrayed Poland, had ties with the Zionists, made hostile remarks’.*° This was a continuation of an action started earlier. It should be noted that over 2,500 people were interrogated. The degree of surveillance of the mail between Poland and Israel (from January to November 1968) was significant. The director of Office ‘W’, Col. H. Palka, revealed that ‘the number of letters was 128,600 (59,200 incoming, 69,400 outgoing) and all were read in whole’.?’ In April 1968 a separate file S-1 was established to deal with the activities of Zionists. Until February 1969 all the counties of the Warsaw province were ‘investigated’ according to S-1 specifications, including people who left for Israel.?° How did the Jewish population behave under the circumstances? In March 1968 a few journalists from Folksztyme (for example, Salomon Belis) unequivocally

stated that ‘the present press action clearly moves towards provoking an antiJewish campaign and is the beginning of a rapid expulsion of the Jews from their positions’.*? At the same time it was evident that it was the authorities who decided on the tone and content of the articles about the March events. The elements of those events—antisemitism, emigration, dismissal from the workplace—were a source of depression and uncertainty. One of the security reports from that time revealed a new pseudonym of Belis. Apparently he signed his texts K. Kemes, which in Yiddish meant ‘almost dead’: ‘Belis’s new pseudonym is quite revealing, even more so since he had expressed the view that antisemitism reigns in Poland, Jewish culture is in decline .. . and that the TSKZ is a morgue [trupiarnia] .2° This information was derived from an agent within these circles. The political situation in Poland triggered the emigration of Polish Jews and Poles of Jewish origin. In the months following March 1968, the number of applications for an exit visa to Israel increased significantly: for example, in April 1967 there were twenty-nine, a year later 137,°1 and in October 1968 631.°* This rate was

29 ATPN, MSW II, 177. 26 AIPN, file 00231/229, V. 15, 3. 27 Tbid., v. 71 bp. Informacja dot. wymiany korespondencji miedzy Polska a Izraelem 1 I-30 XI 1968,

10 XII 1968. 28 AIPN, file 0201/173, v. I-12, also AIPN, file 0201/136, 7.

29 AIPN, file 00231/229, v. 38, 34. 30 Tbid. 45. 31 AAN, PZPR, file XI-568, s. 82 AIPN, MSWIL file 4515, 21.

‘Tsrael’ in the Events of March 1968 157 maintained during the following months; it was a long-term trend. According to the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the party, from October 1968 to November 1969, 11,657 persons filed applications for exit permits to leave permanently for Israel; 443 applications were rejected (251 of those rejected were filed by members of their families). However, beginning in autumn 1969 the number of people willing to leave Poland significantly decreased; for example, in August 1969 over 4,000 people tried to receive an exit permit, while in September scarcely more than 200 were

interested in emigration.*? In January 1970 332 applications were considered. Among the reasons for rejecting the applications were unfulfilled legal or financial

obligations, having access to important state information, and also mixed marriage.°* In January 1970, the Central Committee Secretariat decided to lessen somewhat the hardships for those who were refused exit permits by, for example, allowing

them to be re-employed or reinstating their benefits.*° The Ministry of Internal Affairs had its own ideas about the reasons for emigration. The security evaluation dedicated to the problem pointed to ‘economy and pride which guided persons who were discharged after the March events [my emphasis] from important positions because of their ideology or lack of qualifications’.°° According to the ministry, retired people constituted a significant percentage of the emigrants; 1,823 had a higher education®”’ and almost a thousand were students (944).°° The number of emigrants from 1967 to 1971 was 13,333.°” A significant propor-

tion, despite declaring Israel as their destination, ultimately decided to settle in the USA or in Scandinavian countries. In 1970 the Ministry of Internal Affairs issued a series of brochures entitled ‘The short biographies of some of the emigrants to Israel’. The seven volumes

contained information on about 300 people; some of them, according to the authors, had supported Zionism and imperialism, while others had played ‘a specific role as revisionist and anti-socialist elements’ in March 1968. The introduction to each volume outlined the biographies of the former employees of security and members of the central committee of the PZPR and judicial system. One volume was dedicated to scholars, journalists, physicians, and representatives of other professions. *°

According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs the topic of Israel was still under discussion in Polish society. It appeared in connection with the events from the previous year, as for example in the statements of the employees of the Medical 33 Tbid., file 50/585, 14. 34 AAN, file XI-556, 11. Also AAN, KC PZPR, file XI-568, 1-3.

35 Thid. 36 ATPN, MSW II, file 50/585, 13.

37 Tbid., file 8083, 14. The data include the applications filed between Jan. 1968 and Aug. 1969. 38 K. Lesiakowski, ‘Emigracja os6b pochodzenia zydowskiego z Polski w latach 1968-1969’, Dzveje Najnowsze, 1993/2, 119 39 A. Stankowski, ‘Nowe spojrzenie na statystyki dotyczace emigracji Zydow z Polski po 1944 r.’, in G. Berendt, A. Grabski, and A. Stankowski, Studia z histori Zydéw w Polsce po 1945 r. (Warsaw, 2000),

143. 40 AIPN, Notki biograficzne niektorych emigrant6w do Izraela, file 0821 /2-7.

158 Bozena Szaynok Academy in Wroclaw, who claimed that the Jewish state ‘was entitled to Sinai the same way Poland was entitled to Wroclaw and Szczecin’ or ‘were glorifying the aggressive policies of Israel’.*1 Security reports tracing the reactions to Gomulka’s speech emphasized people’s disappointment with the way he treated Zionism; for

example, the workers in marine enterprises in Szczecin allegedly thought that ‘Gomutka in a way withdrew from his earlier positions concerning Zionism taken after the Israeli aggression in June of last year’. Another report mentioned how the Szczecin students applauded ‘the part of the speech about the Polish authorities giving permission to leave for Israel to the Jews who had no ties with the Polish population’.*” We cannot analyse society’s reaction to only the Israeli part of the

March propaganda—the issue of the Jewish state was fused with the notion of Zionism, the latter being a smokescreen for anti-Jewish content. The issue of Israel impacted the social mood only to a certain degree, as was seen in June 1967. We should note, however, that the Israeli theme was intertwined with the March events in propaganda, in the resolutions passed during the mass rallies in the work-

places, and in the statements of members of the government. In the context of March 1968, it kept losing its separate position and was becoming one with the notion of Zionism or the Jewish population in Poland. A truly Israeli accent in the March events was a letter of the Israeli students to the Polish Students’ Association expressing support for the struggle of the Polish scholars ‘for freedom

of speech and culture . . . against the centres of oppression and violence in the police’.*?

Despite breaking off relations with the Jewish state, the Ministry of Internal Affairs closely followed Israeli reactions to the events in Poland. In the papers of the minister’s Cabinet there is a translation from the Israeli daily Maariv describing the Knesset debate on ‘the new version of antisemitic persecution and the incitement of anti-Jewish hatred in Poland’.** Israeli accents were present in the party’s policy after March 1968 due to contacts with the Communist Party of Israel. For example, in 1972 a delegation from Poland (the First Secretary of the Provincial Committee in Bialystok and the deputy director of the propaganda and publishing department of KC PZPR) appeared at the seventeenth congress of Israeli communists. This was the first PZPR delegation to the Jewish state since the Six-Day War.*® Thus in the following years the only Polish—Israeli relations were those between the communist parties of the two countries. Translated from the Polish by Anna Wrobel

41 AIPN, MSW IL, file 1064, 172, 174. 42 Tbid. 108. 43 Thid. 37. 44 AAN, KC PZPR, Kancelaria Sekretariatu, file 237-V-742, 136. 45 Tbid., file XI-493, 43.

A Community under Pressure Fews in Poland, 1957-1967 AUDREY KICHELEWSKI ‘IT IS our view that each Polish citizen should only have one fatherland—People’s Poland ... We do not want a fifth column to emerge in our country.’ This remark by the First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party, Wladyslaw Gomulka,

in his address to the congress of trade unions on 17 June 1967, a few days after Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, triggered the first phase of the so-called ‘antiZionist’ campaign that erupted in March 1968. Does this mean that the events that took place in 1967-8, which eventually led to the dismissal of thousands of Polish Jews from their positions as well as their departure from Poland, originated only as a result of the reaction of the communist bloc to the Six-Day War and the Polish government’s mastering of social unrest by designating Jewish scapegoats for the

students’ rebellion of March? Recent research on the events of 19687 has suggested that only a spark was needed for the government eventually to yield to the

long-prepared documentation, with a patent antisemitic echo to it, of the Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrznych (Ministry of Internal Affairs; MSW) against an important segment of the intellectual elite, often part of the ‘revisionist’ group. Launching this campaign fulfilled many goals at one time, or at least turned out to be handy both in solving an internal party division, ongoing since 1956, between the pro-Soviet nationalist Natolin faction and the reformist Pulawy faction, and in achieving a victory over some troublesome intellectuals who were hampering the rise of a new generation of technocrats. Above all, the exploitation of antisemitism to carry out these aims was known about and appeared to function very well in Polish society, which, at the very least, did not oppose the campaign. Yet many questions remain unresolved, not least of all: why was it at this precise moment that the Polish government decided to pay heed to what many within the ? Quoted in D. Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna w Polsce 1967-1968 (Warsaw, 2000), 274: ‘Stoimy na

stanowisku, ze kazdy obywatel Polski powinien miec tylko jedna ojczyzne—Polske Ludowa . . . nie chcemy, aby w naszym kraju powstala 5-ta kolumna.’ Those sentences were removed from the published version of the text: W. Gomulka, Przemdmienie na VI Kongresie Zwiazkow Zawodowych (Warsaw, 1967). 2 Among many works, see J. Eisler, Marzec 1968: Geneza, przebieg, konsekwencje (Warsaw, 1991);

M. Kula, P. Oseka, and M. Zaremba (eds.), Marzec 1968: Trzydztesci lat poéntej, 2 vols. (Warsaw, 1998); Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna,; K. Rokicki and S. Stepien (eds.), Oblicza Marca 1968 (Warsaw, 2004).

160 Audrey Kichelewski MSW, under Mieczystaw Moczar’s influence, were demanding? And why risk the

country’s reputation abroad, especially since the party had been very cautious about such things in previous years? Did the party believe that there was no other solution, or had the process of gradually infusing notions of defiance towards ‘citizens of Jewish nationality’ reached its peak by the end of the 1960s? The aim of this article is to explore the atmosphere within and surrounding the

Jewish minority in Poland in the years preceding the events of 1968. For many years, those who witnessed and became victims of the antisemitic campaign believed that it had emerged suddenly—as some kind of big surprise. Up until that point, those who were eventually forced to leave the country had not experienced any real danger; some were even barely aware of their Jewish background.® Yet much less is known about what was going on within the official Jewish community,

which totalled several thousand Jews and had connections with non-affiliated, more assimilated Poles of Jewish origin.* What did the Western institutions such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and Poland’s Jewish organizations learn from each other after the authorities allowed them to make contact? How did the government react to this interaction? How did it view its Jewish community in the 1960s? More broadly, I will also discuss all concerns related to the ‘Jewish question’ that came up in 1956 and then, apparently, disappeared. What were the links between what was going on within the MSW with regard to the supervision of the Jewish community and various individuals, and the policies implemented in those years by the authorities? The archives of the MSW, held by the Instytut Pamieci Narodowe (Institute of National Remembrance; IPN) as well as hitherto unexplored Jewish sources,° help cast new light on these questions.

3 See e.g. some testimonies quoted by J. Eisler in ‘Rok 1968: Zydzi, antysemityzm, emigracja’, in J. Wiyaczka and G. Miernik (eds.), Z przesztosci Zydéw polskich: Polityka, gospodarka, kultura, spoteczenstwo (Krakow, 2005), 339-40.

* To avoid any misunderstanding when referring in this article to such notions as ‘Jewish community or ‘Jewish minority’, or when trying to evaluate its population, I consider only people who acknowledge to some degree a link with a Jewish identity, even though they do not form a homogeneous community. This population is therefore broader than the registered members of the official Jewish community, but does not include Poles of Jewish origin, considered as such only by those who want to ascribe to them an identity they reject or do not consider relevant. However, I will also mention the fate of this population, which can by no means be called a community, but rather a loosely related group of individuals. ° Hereafter JDC or Joint. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee was founded in 1914,

initially to assist Palestinian Jews during the First World War. . © Namely the protocols of the Towarzystwo Spoleczno-Kulturalne Zydow w Polsce (Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland; TSKZ), the official representative secular body of Polish Jews since 1950, and the reports of the Joint’s representatives in Poland, when this organization resumed its work in the country between 1957 and 1967; they are located in the AJJDC archives in Jerusalem.

A Community under Pressure 161 THE THAW AND AFTER?

JEWISH LIFE IN POLAND IN THE EARLY 1960S 1. Liberalization The Thaw began with Stalin’s death, but its greatest impact in Poland came after the revelations of Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ in February 1956, which acknowledged Stalin’s crimes, and after the so-called ‘Polish October’ of that year, when the election of Wladyslaw Gomutka to the post of First Secretary of the Central Committee of the PZPR raised hopes of some democratization. For the official | Jewish community, whose activities had been severely restricted by 1950 with the Stalinization of the country, 1956 opened a period of limited political liberalization as well as a general renewal of its activities. Following broader trends within Polish society, previously taboo issues could now be discussed. The Yiddish daily newspaper of the TSKZ (Towarzystwo Spoleczno-Kulturalne Zydéw w Polsce; Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland), Folksztyme, took the lead by writing about the fate of Soviet Yiddish writers under Stalin’s leadership.’ During their meetings, members of the TSKZ demanded a change in the organization’s staff and a more democratic way of conducting affairs.® Indeed, the leaders who had been most implicated with the Stalinist past were downgraded. Cultural and educational Jewish life appeared to blossom with the opening of amateur choirs, theatre groups, musical ensembles, and dance bands, while the Yiddish language was reintroduced in schools, and Jewish history, which had disappeared from the curriculum of the seven Jewish schools still in existence in 1954, reappeared.” This apparent recovery of Jewish life in Poland was brought about by a combination of factors. It was first a result of the government’s more liberal policy towards minorities. A resolution adopted at the seventh plenary session of the

Central Committee of the PZPR stated that all national minorities should be granted equal rights to culture and education in their native language. Hence, the

Belorussian, Lithuanian, and Ukrainian minorities were allowed to gather in socio-cultural associations, based on the model of the existing TSKZ, and in February 1957 a Commission on Nationalities was created within the Central Committee. Second, as the new government was trying to present a better image abroad and to disentangle itself from Soviet hegemony, it established more contacts with international organizations and allowed, within certain limits, the Jewish minority to do the same. Subsequently, the TSKZ accepted proposals from the ” Folksztyme, 4 Apr. 1956.

8 See e.g. the minutes of meetings of the TSKZ local executives in Tarnow and Lodz, Oct.—Dec. 1956, quoted in A. Cala and H. Datner-Spiewak, Dzieje Zydéw w Polsce 1944-1968: Teksty Zrédlowe (Warsaw, 1997), 147-51.

° IPN, MSW II 9047, pp. 1-4: Report on the situation in the Jewish schools, not dated, probably 1957.

162 Audrey Kichelewski World Jewish Congress to resume co-operation that had ceased in 1949.'° The JDC (Joint Distribution Committee), which had been active in Poland until its eviction 1n 1950, as well as the Organization for Rehabilitation through Training (ORT) returned at the end of 1957, opening professional schools and giving financial support to the community. But those Jewish charity organizations had come back mostly for one purpose: to help the 18,000 Jewish repatriates (among 267,000 Polish citizens) who em1grated from the Soviet Union between 1957 and 1959, after Gomulka’s negotiated agreement with the USSR."! Those people were often very poor and in ill health, and the younger ones, born in the Soviet Union, could hardly speak Polish. ‘This influx of ‘new blood’ within the Jewish community served temporarily as an impetus to develop new social and cultural activities. Yet from the very beginning, the various groups involved had contradictory desires. While most old members of the

secular Jewish organization saw in this immigration an opportunity to revive Jewish life in Poland and sought financial support from the Joint in order to make them stay, the latter was initially more inclined to listen to the newcomers and their desire to leave Poland (or the Soviet bloc) as soon as possible.

2. The Wave of Emigration: A Reshaping of the Jewish Population The political changes initiated after the Polish October led to a partial lifting of the

ban on emigration for some segments of the population on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. The Jewish minority thus took the opportunity to leave, and between 1956 and 1959 more than 50,000 Jews left Poland. This number included the vast majority of the repatriates (around 12,000). Those who remained were people who had decided to commit their lives to the new Poland after the war.!* Why did more

than half of the existing Jewish community decide to leave after 1956? Simply to say that they were able to do so at that time does not seem to be a sufficient

answer. ,

The climate that accompanied the Thaw in Poland brought the ‘Jewish question’

back to the foreground. The political infighting between the two factions in the 10 For more details, see G. Berendt, ‘Starania organizacji dzialajacych w Polsce 0 przystapienie do

Swiatowego Kongresu Zydowskiego, 1945-1961’, in G. Berendt, A. Grabski, and A. Stankowski, Studia z historti Zydéw w Polsce po 1945 roku (Warsaw, 2000), 9—66.

11 On Polish repatriation from the Soviet Union in the second half of the 1950s, see K. Kersten, Repatricja ludnosci polskie] po IT wojnie Swiatowej (Warsaw, 1974), A. Skrzypek, ‘O drugiej repatriacji z

ZSRR (1954-1959), Kwartalnik Historyczny, 4 (1991), 67-74, and M. Ruchniewicz, Repatriaga ludnosci polskie] z ZSRR w latach 1955-1959 (Warsaw, 2000).

‘2 For more data on Jewish demography and emigration, see A. Stankowski, ‘Nowe spojrzenie na statystyki dotyczace emigracji Zydow z Polski po 1944 roku’, in Berendt, Grabski, and Stankowski, Studia z historu Zydéw, 103-51. The breakdown between ‘native’ Polish Jews and repatriates among emigrants is given by the Joint data in AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 127A, Poland, Charles Jordan (General Director of AJJDC for Europe), Reports, 1958—65. Chart dated 8 Nov. 1961 on Jewish emigration from Poland since 1956. See also, for comparison, IPN BU MSW II 10884, File on the Jewish population in Poland, 1946—64, dated 8 Apr. 1966, from the Glowny Inspektorat MSW, pp. 1-8.

A Community under Pressure 163 party brought with it anti-Jewish attacks during party debates. ‘The Natolin faction

linked their political enemies with the prevailing negative stereotypes attached to Jews (whom they believed formed the majority of the Pulawy group), namely disloyalty to the country and collusion with Stalinism. Some leaders called for a ‘national regulation of cadres’, 1.e. the removal of the overrepresented Jews from the top ranks of the party. In this very tense context, Gomulka temporarily sided

with the Pulawy faction, resuming the official discourse when the Central Committee issued a condemnation of antisemitism in April 1957. This became urgent because a strong current of antisemitism penetrated not only the lower levels of the party, but also large parts of Polish society.’ Many Jewish workers were dismissed from their jobs under various pretexts, and there were several cases of verbal and physical threats against the Jewish population, including schoolchildren. In this situation, although a large part of the intellectual elite protested against this hatred, which was interpreted as the re-emergence of reactionary attitudes, and the government, after some wavering, took a clear stance against a wave of emigration brought on by what was officially called ‘an unjustified atmosphere of panic’,'*

the remaining members of the Jewish community found themselves insecure enough to want to choose to leave. It is important to note that, for the first time and to a significant extent, emigration affected not only a significant number of ‘Jewish Jews’, who strongly felt their Jewishness, but also Poles of Jewish origin who stated they were ‘Polish’ when asked about their nationality (narodowos¢). Among them

were former employees of the army or the police, or public administration and party members.!° Many of those who left had to renounce their Polish citizenship, cover their own travel costs, were allowed to take only a limited amount of their own belongings with them, and were issued with visas valid only for Israel.'® In the early 1960s, when the Jewish population stabilized at around 35,000," its

shape had changed considerably. Repatriates who had desired and managed to integrate into Polish society felt compelled to maintain a distinctive Jewish milieu 18 For an overview of the 1956 events, see P. Machcewicz, Polski rok 1956 (Warsaw, 1993). Chapter

10 focuses on antisemitism in Polish society in 1956. For the English version of this chapter, see P. Machcewicz, ‘Antisemitism in Poland in 1956’, Polin, 9 (1994), 170-83. 14 Circular Letter of the CC PZPR to all local committees, 10 Apr. 1957, quoted in English translation in M. Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism (New York, 1982), 268—71.

15 A classification of different types of emigrants was established according to the questionnaires they had to fill in before departure, and annotated by the MSW staff in a document dated 4 Feb. 1957: IPN, MSW II 826, ‘Informacja dotyczaca emigracji do Izraela’, pp. 5-9. The report underscored the ‘painful experience’ for old party members when having to apply for emigration. 16 The same report explains that since Nov. 1956, some former party members, as well as other former workers in the army and the police, had been issued regular passports, enabling them to return.

Yet this remained exceptional and ceased shortly thereafter. Stankowski’s statistics on emigration from Poland (‘Nowe spojrzenie’, 130-1) show that no more than 15% of the emigrants went to countries other than Israel. 17 34,000, according to Grzegorz Berendt, who bases his evaluation on sources given in the American jewish Year Book; see G. Berendt, ‘Emigracja Zydow z Polski w latach 1960-1967’, in Wijaczka and

164 Audrey Kichelewski and culture, and expressed their ideas within the TSKZ, where they played a larger part after the departure of many local leaders after 1956. The wave of emigration had led to a decrease in the number of those in the population who had a strong attachment to their Jewish identity. This widened the gap between the older ‘Jewish Jews’ and the younger generation, whose link to the Jewish world faded quickly with the process of assimilation.

3. Jewish Organizations: A Revival of fewish Life? At the beginning of the 1960s Jewish community life continued to be centred in two main organizations created in 1950: the TSKZ and, very much on the margin, the Zwiazek Religiyny Wyznania Mojzeszowego (Religious Union of the Jewish Faith; ZRWM). The ZRWM/’s function was to take care of the religious needs of the community, mainly providing kosher meat and matzot for Passover, celebrating high festivals, and arranging religious burials. Yet as we shall see, its social functions tended to become more central to the activities of the community during the 1960s, which helped to make the ZRWM more influential among the Jewish popu-

lation. By 1966 its membership had also increased to 5,500 in eighteen local branches, not that many fewer than the 7,000-plus members of the TSKZ.!8 The TSKZ was a secular socio-cultural organization, whose aim was to promote a progressive Jewish culture in line with the ideals of the regime. By 1967 it had twenty-six local branches and 7,782 registered members—including 1,715 children.!° The importance it attached to its younger members was reflected in its developing educational work and in the introduction in the 1960s of summer camps and youth clubs. Overall, every aspect of cultural activity increased greatly during the 1960s. The TSKZ organized lectures and celebrated national holidays as well as Jewish cultural events and anniversaries marking historical events such as ghetto uprisings. A few examples can be cited to illustrate this multifaceted activ-

ity. Major Yiddish writers were celebrated, such as I. L. Peretz on the fiftieth anniversary of his death; amateur theatre, music, dance, and choir groups regularly appeared on stage during festivals organized to celebrate minority cultures and Polish national holidays, such as the one in Wroclaw in 1964 marking the twentieth anniversary of the creation of the Polish People’s Republic.2° Merging Jewish

and national history was always advocated, notably during the Millennium cereMiernik (eds.), Z przesztosci Zydéw polskich, 301. Stankowski, ‘Nowe spojrzenie’, gives the number as

36,800 in 1961. However, a summary report of Joint activity in Poland dated 1966 estimated 20,000 Jews (and non-Jews married to Jews) registered in any Jewish organization, while if the ‘marranos’, those Jews unaffiliated and not acknowledging any Jewish identity, were added, the total number would amount to 50,000. 18 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76A2, no. 15, Meeting on Poland, Sept. 1966, p. 7. According to this report, the real membership of the ZRWM amounted to 7,500, but the figures were lowered after ‘a gentleman’s agreement with the government’ in order to conceal that they were higher than those of

the secular organization. , 19 IPN BU MSW II 829, TSKZ, Gabinet Ministra, pp. 11-16. — ®° Protokoly TSKZ 1964, no. 33, Posiedzenia Prezydium ZG TSKZ z dnia 8 XII 1964, p. 1.

A Community under Pressure 165 monies in 1966. For this occasion, a gathering of Jewish youth was organized in Krakow to place a commemorative plaque in the Old Synagogue to remember Tadeusz Kosciuszko’s call to the Jews of Krakow to defend the city and join the national uprising in 1794.71 This period also saw a sharp increase in Holocaust commemorations. Apart from the long-established homage paid each year to the Warsaw ghetto fighters, which was especially important on the fifteenth (1958) and twentieth anniversaries (1963) of the uprising, monuments were erected on the Belzec (1963), Treblinka (1964), and Sobibor (1965) sites. The TSK Z also had an important role as an employer and set up a dozen Jewish co-operatives.”” Other important aspects of the Jewish cultural landscape were the Jewish theatre, which had been a national theatre since 1950; the Jewish Historical

Institute, which conducted research on Polish Jewish history and issued journals in both Polish and Yiddish; the publishing house Yidish Bukh, which edited classic works in Yiddish as well as contemporary authors, commissioned translations from other languages; and a monthly literary journal, Yidishe shrifin. At the beginning of the 1960s nine Jewish schools were still operating, including three high schools still teaching Jewish subjects in Yiddish.”° This recovery of Jewish life in Poland owed much to the help provided by the Joint. From 1958 to 1967 the Joint allocated a total of $5.6 million to Jewish organizations.** It was distributed through a newly created body, the Centralna Komisja Zydowska Pomocy Spolecznej (Central Jewish Committee of Social Welfare:

CKZPS), whose executive was initially composed of six members, equally representing the TSKZ, the ZRWM, and the repatriates.2> Some fourteen local

branches were opened throughout the country to help distribute the money evenly.”° Practically all fields of Jewish life benefited from funding by the Joint for a welfare programme providing individual support, a medical programme, an oldage programme, a cultural and educational programme, and support for vocational training—-with the implementation of thirteen vocational ORT schools and cooperatives.*’ Moreover, the Joint directly supported the religious congregation. However, it should be stated at this point that the impression of Jewish recovery is probably strongly biased by the available documents, First, one has to keep in 21 IPN BU MSW II 7238, TSKZ, Cultural life, 1966, pp. 1-3.

22 According to the JDC, there were ten co-operatives in 1958 and sixteen in 1966. (AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76B, Samuel Haber, Reports on Poland, 1958—59, Trip to Poland, 14—22 August 1958, p. 4; ibid. 76A2, no. 15, Meeting on Poland, Sept. 1966, p. 14). 23 Numbers for 1961, quoted in A. Kwilecki, ‘Mniejszosci narodowe w Polsce Ludowej’, Kultura 1

spoteczenstwo, 4 (1963), 96. 24 TPN BU MSW II 829, TSKZ, Gabinet Ministra, pp. 11-16. 25 After 1960, when the arrival of repatriates ended, a new allocation was decided: three members of TSKZ and three of the ZRWM, although some local committees were reluctant to apply the new law,

often to the detriment of the religious congregation. AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 127A, no. 7, Reports to Poland, 1958-64, Report to Poland, 18-25 Apr. 1961, p. 8. 26 Ibid. 12B C 61 oo0. 27 A description and evaluation of those programmes after nine years was presented in a report of the Joint meeting held on 27 Apr. 1966; ibid. 76A2, no. 15, Meeting on Poland, Sept. 1966, pp. 1-72.

166 Audrey Kichelewski mind that the wave of emigration cut in half the total number of Jews in Poland, thus making it difficult to speak about a revival in this context. Second, the Jewish organizations needed, for propaganda purposes, to emphasize their activities among the Jewish population. The JDC also tended to overstate the community’s vitality in order to legitimate its work and not alienate donors, although its financial help was significant. The fact that these activities also brought about a significant number of changes and conflicts within and outside the Jewish community led to a variety of problems, all of which need to be explained, and which qualify this impression of Jewish recovery.

CHANGES AND CONFLICTS:

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN THE 1960S 1. The Economic Background It should first be remembered that the Joint arrived in Poland at a time when the country was undergoing a sharp decline in its economic situation. Shortly after the Thaw, new priorities were given to economic sectors that had up to that point been neglected, such as consumer goods and light industries. However, this readjust-

ment led to an economic crisis, not only in Poland, but throughout the Soviet bloc.?° In 1959 the very poor results in Polish agriculture led to a significant rise in food prices, without any compensation in wages. Samuel Haber, deputy head of the JDC for Europe, who was regularly sent to Poland to report on the situation, noted in November 19509: There has been a substantial worsening of the economic situation all along the line. . . While the wages and income have thus been drastically reduced, prices have been increasing and some rather sharp increase in food items has taken place . . . I was told that a real inflation spiral is under way, and most people are unable to make ends meet.”°

By the mid-1960s the crisis had become structural, rooted in the rigidity of socialist economic planning. It aroused social unrest, all the more as the news of economic growth in the West devalued the ‘socialist road’ in the eyes of most — Poles.°° Subsequently, although unemployment officially did not exist, the labour force was reduced in some sectors, and people did in fact lose their jobs.*! 28 For a general overview of the Polish economy, see Z. Landau and J. Tomaszewski, The Polish Economy 1n the 20th Century, trans. W. Roszkowski (New York, 1985).

29 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76B, no. 4, Samuel Haber, Memorandum, Field trip to Poland, 19-27 Nov. 1959, Pp. 4.

30 M. Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm: Nacjonalistyczna legitymizacga wladzy komunistycznej w Polsce do 1980 roku (Warsaw, 2001), 271-2; id., ‘Spoleczenstwo polskie lat szesCdziesiatych—miedzy “mata stabilizacja” a “mala destabilizacja” ’, in Rokicki and Stepien (eds.), Oblicza Marca 1968, 27-51. 31 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 127A, no. 6, Akiva Kohane, Report on Poland, 22-9 Jan. 1964, 15-25 Feb. 1964, p. 1: “The economic situation in the country is deteriorating.’

A Community under Pressure 167 Moreover, since 1956 cutbacks had been made in the staffing levels in the state administration and the party. Between October 1956 and March 1957 some 8,565 employees of local and regional party committees had been dismissed, 1,000 of whom had not yet found another position.*? In addition, the reorganization of the Ministry of Public Security, first into a Public Security Committee, then into the Ministry of Internal Affairs, was accompanied by a cutback in its staff. The Polish army was also downsized after the departure of Soviet advisers. The depressed mood resulting from these developments had important repercussions for the Jewish population. The staff cutbacks and changes that followed the political changes of 1956, as well as the unofficial stance against the presence of Poles

of Jewish origin in the nomenklatura called for by the Natolin faction in the party, affected first and foremost many of the most assimilated Jews. What is interesting to note is that this process continued in a more discreet way throughout the 1960s, even after Gomutka took over and after the official condemnation of nationalistic and antisemitic postures within the party.*° By the mid-1960s, an estimated 450 people had been dismissed from various executive positions in the party—state administration.** It is very difficult to establish with certainty the extent to which their Jewishness was the main motive for their dismissal or the reason they left. For the years 1957—9, the liberal emigration policy may account for many departures. In the 1960s, the ‘quiet’ removal of party—state employees of Jewish origin may have come as a result of the so-called ‘fight against revisionism’ after the thirteenth plenary session of July 1963. A key issue among those who had been made redundant was re-education to find a new job. This was the main goal of the ORT vocational schools. And while

they were first and foremost aimed at assisting the repatriates, former highranking party-state officials were also admitted. Max Braude, the general director of ORT in Geneva, said publicly at a conference that ‘two former Jewish Ministers are now taking ORT courses’. This statement was reproduced in the Yiddish press and reached Poland’s Jewish leaders, who confirmed it. But they feared that this ‘most unfortunate statement’, which caused a ‘certain degree of unpleasantness in government circles’, might have a negative impact on the Joint’s future work.®°

Still, the problem of unemployment affected mainly repatriates and former factory managers and executives. With the economic crisis, the Jewish cooperatives that had been created became increasingly attractive. After a description

of the hardships in economic life, the Joint’s representative explained that ‘a 32 AAN, 237/VII-2726, PZPR, KC, Wydziat Organizacyjny, Notatki, 1954-8, pp. 27-30, Note on the cutback of party workers, 6 Mar. 1957. 33 “Nie moze byc w partii miejsca dla ludzi, ktérzy gloszqa poglady nacjonalistyczne, szowinistyczne i antysemickie 1 wystepuja przeciwko ludziom z racji ich pochodzenia narodowego’ (AAN, KC PZPR 2414, p. 41a, quoted in Zaremba, Komunizm, legitymizacja, nacjonalizm, 260). 3¢ Berendt, ‘Emigracja Zyd6w’, 302. He does not state his source for this figure.

8° AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76B, no. 4, Samuel Haber, Memorandum, Field trip to Poland, 8-17 Nov. 1958, p. 5. He is quoting a conversation he held with Hersz Smolar, editor-in-chief of the

Yiddish newspaper Folksztyme. :

168 Audrey Kichelewski number of people would like to be admitted to the co-operative, but it is very difficult to obtain government permission to employ new workers. To some degree, the Committee [of Social Welfare] found a solution with the “take home” work’ pro-

gramme.°*° The support offered by the Joint at a time of economic depression proved helpful and attractive to many Jews, especially those who had earlier been indifferent or even reluctant about joining the organized community. At the same time, these programmes created tensions and envy among the broader Polish population as well as within the Jewish community itself. 2. Conflicts with Polish Society and Authorities Against a background of economic depression, combined with a climate of antiJewish stereotyping, frustrations and jealousy emerged among the surrounding population, who saw with a bitter eye some of the achievements enabled by the support of the Joint—even though it should be mentioned that after 1956 other Western

charitable organizations, such as CARE International?’ or the World Church Service, were allowed to work in Poland as well. For instance, according to Hersz Smolar, head of the TSKZ headquarters, government officials in L6dZ told him that textile workers in the city had complained about the ‘very high standard’ of living among the Jews in old-age homes when compared with the non-Jewish sick and poor of that city.°° This is particularly striking since the Joint representative who had visited Lodz a few months earlier had noted that conditions for Jews were bad and the food inadequate. That is why the Joint had decided to give the Jewish community an immediate relief grant of 10,000 zlotys with 16 zlotys each for Jews in old-age homes receiving the daily food supplement from the government.** Owing chiefly to these problems, the government made sure that no support

from the Joint could be granted that would privilege Jews over non-Jews. For instance, it did not allow the Joint to help poor workers with additional money since it would have been ‘discriminating’ against Polish workers who had no way of receiving extra money. However, the Joint managed to circumvent the law by giv-

ing a one-off grant instead. In this way, some 650 people earning less than 1,500 zlotys ($15 in 1966) monthly received some support in 1966.*° On a more general level, the relationship between the Joint representatives in Poland and the authorities was twofold. On the one hand, the American charity had been invited to become involved by the Polish government and the state was relieved not to have to 36 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 127A, no. 6, Akiva Kohane, Report on Poland, 22—9 Jan. 1964, 15-25 Feb. 1964, p. 2.

37 CARE (Co-operative for American Remittances to Eurcpe) was founded in the USA after the Second World War, initially to help needy families in Europe by sending packages of food aid and

basic supplies. |

38 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76B, no. 4, Samuel Haber, Memorandum, Field trip to Poland,

8—17 Nov. 1958, p. 7. 39 Tbid., Memorandum, Field trip to Poland, 14-22 Aug. 1958, p. 6. 4° Tbid. 76Az2, no. 15, Meeting on Poland, Sept. 1966, p. 14. The average monthly wage at this time amounted to 2,000 zlotys per month—according to the black market rate, around $20.

| A Community under Pressure 169 take care of the thousands of repatriates. Among those in the Jewish community, at a time of economic hardship the Joint’s money was welcome, and more than compensated for the Polish welfare deficit. As explained by the 1966 summary report, since funds for old-age, family, and invalid pensions were insufficient to cover all

the needs of the population, municipalities often tended to send the Jews who came to them straight to the Welfare Committee, where they would have a better chance of getting the support they were entitled to by law.*! On the other hand, the government never failed to let the Joint know that it was not a free agent and could be kicked out at any time. It has to be remembered that the presence of an American organization in a socialist country was not a comfort-

able issue to cope with in terms of propaganda during the Cold War, when ‘American imperialism’ was constantly being denounced. The Joint was never allowed to have its own office in Poland so it was forced to work through the Welfare Committee, completely under the control of the communists running the TSKZ, who took their orders from Warsaw and, at times, went beyond what was required by their superiors to ensure they had a tight grip on who got what from the Joint. Having no permanent representative meant that the Joint had to comply with the government’s visa policy, which tended to become more restrictive as time went by.*” Another matter of dispute between the two bodies was the

exchange rate set by the government to buy Polish currency. The government attempted to reduce the part of the Joint’s budget allocation for welfare purposes, which had the highest exchange rate (72 zlotys to one US dollar), and argued that the Joint’s allocation for the religious community and for administration (wages for the Welfare Committee employees) fell into other categories with less attractive exchange rates, which reduced the total amount actually granted.*°

3. Conflicts within the Jewish Community In the 1960s Jewish institutions were obviously eager to get a share of the money distributed by the Joint. Although the government continued to give Jewish institutions some financial support, the Jewish community became almost completely dependent on the financial resources provided by the Joint. For instance, until the Joint was forced to cease its activities in Poland after the Six-Day War of June 1967, 175 of the 275 employees of the TSKZ owed their jobs to activities funded by the Joint, mainly the welfare committees, or to the ORT vocational schools.** 4) Tbid. 17-18. 42 Tn Oct. 1964, the JDC representative Akiva Kohane complained to Minister Rabczynski that he had to wait for a month in order to get his visa, and another ten weeks for the previous one, while every tourist paying $10 got it in five days. Cf. ibid. 127A, Poland, Charles Jordan, Reports, 1958—65, Visit to Poland, 5-15 Oct. 1964, p. I1. 48 For one example of this debate see ibid., Geneva II, 251B/252, Kohane to Jordan, Poland, Visit to Poland, 13-15 Oct. 1965, p. 1: ‘Mr. Fiszgrund [head of the Welfare Committee] has been notified confidentially by a very high-ranking official of the Polish government that there were “plans to apply the rate of 24 zlotys to the dollar to the full program of [JDC’s] work in Poland”’.’ 44 IPN BU MSW II 829, TSKZ, Gabinet Ministra, p. 9.

170 Audrey Kichelewski Nevertheless, throughout the entire period in which the Joint operated in Poland, its most ardent opponents were TSKZ members. The Joint’s archival record and the protocols of the TSKZ meetings contain endless acrimonious discussions about how the money should be spent. The secular Jewish Jews in Poland persistently pushed for such funding as loans to artisans, vocational training, or the erection of any new building for whatever purpose.*? The Americans focused on the social and welfare needs of Poland’s Jewish community. The TSKZ was essentially determined to delay or stop community members, especially the repatriates, from emigrating and they hoped that these efforts would help reverse the economic cri-

sis in Poland. A JDC representative also suggested that the TSKZ wanted to become a self-sustaining organization so that it could support its own social and cultural endeavours and thus free itself from dependence on the Joint, which it found humiliating.“ But even after the co-operatives started to earn some profits,4”7 the TSKZ continued to increase its dependence on the Joint, continually asking for more money and complaining each year about receiving less. Moreover, a cut-throat competition emerged between the secular and the religious organizations for the control of the Jewish population, each trying to outdo the other in its handouts. The TSKZ tried to fight against the establishment of kosher soup kitchens by the ZRWM.*° The repatriates were more inclined to go to the religious congregation because they offered more attractive free meals.*? The fight between the two organizations also took place within the CKZPS, which theoretically worked ona parity basis with the TSKZ and the ZRWM after the removal of the repatriates’ representatives. The TSKZ tried to assert control over the CKZPS: in order to have more influence on the redistribution of money by increasing the number of members it had on the executive from six to twelve while insisting that the number of ZRWM members remained at three.°° It also strove to hinder the JDC’s financial support to the religious community through the CKZPS. The American organization had to circumvent the problem by funding the ZRWM directly, which ended up costing more because the government imposed a higher exchange rate in this case.°! 45 See, for instance, as early as Feb. 1958, the letter of the Secretary for the TSKZ head office, Dawid Sfard, to Charles Jordan, AJJDC (New York), 55/67, file 449, 1958, p. 5. 46 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76Az2, no. 15, Meeting on Poland, Sept. 1966, p. 13. 47 ‘Their production amounted to 300 million zlotys in 1965. Ibid. 50.

1958, pp. I-2. .

48 Tbid., 76B, no. 4, Samuel L. Haber Reports on Poland, 1958-9, Field trip, Poland, 8-17 Nov.

49 AJJDC (New York), 55/67, file 449, 1958, Ch. Jordan’s letter, 2 Dec. 1958: the TSKZ wants to limit access to the fourteen kosher soup kitchens in the country because it fears propaganda from the religious people.

90 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 127A, Poland, Charles Jordan, Reports, 1958-65, Visit to Poland 5—15 Oct. 1964, pp. 1-3. Eventually the TSKZ had to accept that the six new members should be chosen in common agreement with the ZRWM; cf. AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva IT, 251B/252A, Poland, 1958-68, Report on Poland, 22-7 Feb. 1965, pp. 1-6. 51 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76B, no. 6, Samuel L. Haber Reports on Poland, 1960—4, Visit to Poland, 4-19 Mar. 1960, pp. 4-6.

A Community under Pressure 171 It is also important to note these conflicts because the Polish authorities exploited them. At times the government favoured the ZRWM over the TSKZ in order to maintain its control over the secular organization, especially when it felt more secure in taking an independent position, but the TSKZ continued to pin responsibility for all decisions on the Joint. Overall, the changes within the TSKZ, less inclined to follow government orders than during the Stalinist years, and more ready to represent the interests of the Jewish population, illustrate one aspect of a more general evolution in the way Polish Jews viewed their Jewishness.

4. A Reshaping of fewish Identity? Other than the conflict discussed above, which influenced how the government gradually perceived the Jewish minority, the subsequent recovery of Jewish life also had an impact on Jewish identity. Joint representatives, for instance, believed that Jewish identity had indeed been strengthened. In the summary of a report prepared in 1966, Charles Jordan and Akiva Kohane argued that their measures, particularly those directed at young people, had made a great difference in the

struggle against further assimilation.°” The record indicates that, at the youth clubs and summer camps, young people were introduced to Jewish life and an atmosphere of Yidishkeit, where Jewish songs, stories about Jewish history, and information about Jewish culture helped many participants develop, or more often discover, their Jewish identity, often concealed from them by their parents.°°? This was especially the case among the young people who attended Jewish schools and the Jewish summer camps and youth clubs.°4 The TSKZ leadership was aware of

the renewal of Jewish life, and the communists among them also saw in that renewal growing ‘nationalistic tendencies’.°? However, in the debate on Jewish culture at its fifth congress in 1966, many TSKZ delegates defended it, including efforts to teach the Yiddish language to young people. In addition, delegates criticized the government because in September 1965 it had dropped Jewish history °2 Ibid. 76A2, no. 15, Meeting on Poland, Sept. 1966, pp. 34, 40-3. 53 Cf. J. Wiszniewicz, ‘Dzieci i mlodziez pochodzenia zydowskiego w szkolach srédmiejskich Warszawy lat szescdziesiatych XX wieku (O sposobach doswiadczania zydowskosci—na podstawie wywiadow przeprowadzonych trzydziesci lat pozniej)’, in Zydzi Warszawy: Matertaly konferencjt w 100. rocznice urodzin Emanuela Ringelbluma (Warsaw, 2000), 259-312. This article was based on ninety

interviews conducted in the 1ggos of Poles of Jewish origin born between 1944 and 1953, who were therefore teenagers in the rg60s. They tell a lot about the importance of summer camps and youth clubs in the formation of their identity. °4 IPN BU MSW II 7242, Kolonie, 1966-7, pp. 19-20, 14 Aug. 1967, Report on the Dziwnow summer camp: ‘hardly one-third of the children go to a Jewish school’. 55 See, for instance, the remark made by the activist Dimant from L6dz during a meeting of the

executive of the women’s section of the TSKZ: ‘trudnosci sa u dzieci zydowskich, u ktorych musimy | zwalczac nacjonalistyczne odchylenia 1 pewne kompleksy’ (‘we have problems with Jewish children, among whom we must fight against nationalistic deviation and certain complexes’); Protokoly TSKZ 1963, Protokol narady aktywu kobiecego przy TSKZ, ktora odbyla sie w Lodzi w dniu 13 VI 1963, p. 6.

172 Audrey Kichelewskt from the Jewish schools’ curriculum and integrated it with general history courses.°° It was these critical voices of protest that made the authorities suspicious of their secular ally, the TSKZ, whose social-work policies were more often attacked by the government as ‘nationalistic’ and in conflict with what the party considered appropriate for the Jewish community. However, neither the cultural revival nor the JDC’s financial support seem to have been enough to hamper the Jewish emigration that continued throughout the 1960s. This emigration, smaller than the wave between 1956 and 1960, still saw more than a thousand Jews leaving Poland annually. Although they went to various

countries, the majority went to Israel thanks to the visas issued by the Polish authorities.°’ Most of the travel was facilitated by the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society (HIAS).°° Some simply left Poland on tourist visas and stayed abroad. Grzegorz Berendt argues that this wave of emigration was mainly motivated by a lack of prospects in a country in crisis where, in the first place, being Jewish precluded access to certain jobs.°? Another factor was the Western world’s attractiveness in a community which often had family abroad with whom they exchanged letters, and which was informed by visitors from the Jewish Diaspora, who, in some cases, urged them to leave. If we acknowledge that there was some kind of Jewish reawakening this may have fostered some of the decisions to emigrate, with some Jews thinking that there was no future for them in Poland; it may also have increased their sensitivity to expressions of antisemitism within Polish society. In any case, this emigration was significant since it represented 7—8 per cent of the total Jewish population, increasing the general image of an ageing community, hardly renewed by the new generation. In general, when one examines Polish Jewish community life throughout the 1960s, the prevailing impression is that behind its apparent vitality, the community 56 On this theme, see Jankl Gutkiewicz’s speech criticizing Michat Mirski’s position in his article ‘On Assimilation’ (published in Folksztyme), where he explained that language assimilation was not a

danger. The discussion is reproduced in AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76A2, no. 15, Meeting on

Poland, Sept. 1966, p. 36. .

©” ‘The table on Jewish emigration presented in Berendt, ‘Emigracja Zydow’, 308-9, gives only

departures made possible by government visas for Israel. The JDC data always indicate higher figures since they include people who left with HIAS—around 5,000 between 1957 and 1967. In the summary

report of 1966, Jordan states that around 1,200 to 1,500 Jews had left Poland each year since 1961

(ibid. 45, 54-6). |

58 The Hebrew Immigration Aid Society is the oldest international migration and refugee resettlement agency in the USA. It is worth noting that it could be freely contacted by every Jew in Poland and it helped to get invitations abroad, especially for those who had some family. 59 Berendt, ‘Emigracja Zydow’, 301-9. 60 The demographical issue was often raised concerning Jewish schools, threatened with closure since the number of children was decreasing each year (AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva II, 251B/252A,

Poland, 1958-68, Report on Poland, 17-22 Mar. 1966, p. 2). The number of elementary Jewish schools decreased from ten in 1960 to five in 1967 (IPN, MSW II 9047, Informacja 0 szkolach z dodatkowa nauka jezyka zydowskiego, 14 IV 1967, p. 16).

A Community under Pressure 173 was in fact mostly living on the support of the JDC. The organization’s financial

support surely brought relief, but it also nurtured many conflicts within the community, and this acted as an excuse for the Polish authorities to cut back their support to the Jewish minority.

THE GOVERNMENT’S POSITION REGARDING THE JEWISH MINORITY This analysis is primarily based on the views expressed by the JDC representative on the general situation in Poland and its impact on Jewish life. Those views are

supplemented by material gathered at the time by the MSW. Together, these sources help to chart the evolution of the relationship. At any rate, it is still difficult to define a clear official policy towards the Jewish minority, much less a consistent one. The impression that is left is blurred. Some decisions were obviously based on

the international political scene; others had a purely local context, including Warsaw’s concerns about Poland’s image abroad. There is also no doubt that some key state institutions, notably the MSW, and certain individuals, greatly influenced

_ the government’s position towards the Jewish minority. , 1..A ‘Blowing with the Wind’ Policy At first glance, it is very difficult to detect a unilinear direction in the stiffening of the government’s policy with regard to the Jewish minority; rather, there were periods of tension and détente, alternating depending on external and internal events and not always in tandem. For instance, at the end of 1957, when the Polish government signalled that it had had enough of internal dissent and ordered that the widely read weekly Po prostu, which routinely published articles critical of the eovernment, be shut down, it also welcomed the JDC to Poland on rather liberal terms. When the government signalled further its displeasure at the end of 1959

with the reforms in the party-state apparatus and dismissed a number of them, including Jerzy Morawski,°! the government’s liberal policy with regard to Jewish emigration continued unabated. In 1960 more than 5,000 exit visas were issued. A

| very tense period occurred in 1960—1. Many key personnel of Jewish origin® and others who supported them in the party—state apparatus were either demoted

or dismissed from their posts, such as the secretary of the Commission for Nationalities at the Central Committee, Aleksander Staw, and the labour and welfare minister Stanislaw Zawadzki, who was forced to retire. This was also the period when the Polish military intelligence service faced a series of high-profile 61 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76B, no. 4, Samuel L. Haber Reports on Poland, 1958-9, Memorandum, Field trip to Poland, 5—10 Jan. 1959, p. 3.

62 Tbid., Geneva I, 251B/252A, Poland, 1958-68, Letter from Akiva Kohane to Charles Jordan, 1 Feb. 1961: ‘last week, 40 people fired from the MSW, all Jews, 25 fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of External Trade, :dem’.

174 Audrey Kichelewski defections to the West by officers of Jewish origin. Moreover, at a time when the loyalty of officers of Jewish background became suspect, reaching its highest point since the early 1950s, the attaché responsible for emigration at the Israeli embassy in Warsaw, Israel Zohar, was expelled from the country in December 1959 on charges of spying.® In any case a link was made by many observers between the crackdown on dissent and the dismissal of reformers inside the party—state apparatus. Suspicions on both sides reached their peak when the Holland case hit the press.°* In December 1961 security forces arrested Henryk Holland, a journalist

and scholar of Jewish origin, and accused him of passing secrets to the West. During a subsequent search of his home it was alleged that he jumped out of the window of his high-rise apartment. His death was officially ruled a suicide. Many, including prominent party members, attended Holland’s funeral, which quickly became a protest against the growing repression in intellectual and cultural life.

More important, rumours persistently began to circulate that Holland had been pushed to his death by officers of the MSW because he was a Jew.

During those tense years, the accounts of Jewish organizations were closely examined, involving inspectors of the MSW for the first time. This was also when the TSKZ’s budget was severely reduced by the government, which cut 45 per cent of its funding. The cuts forced the TSKZ to reduce its staff by half, although most of those who were let go found employment in other Jewish institutions financed by the Joint, such as the ORT co-operatives or local welfare committees.®°° Nevertheless, after this a period of détente, a clear improvement in the relationship, began in the spring of 1962. In the international arena, a period of ‘peaceful

coexistence’ improved the relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. Polish—Israeli relations also improved when Warsaw softened its line against Tel Aviv. In November 1962 both countries upgraded their diplomatic missions to embassies. The Polish economy had also strengthened, providing Warsaw

with another reason to improve its relations with the Jewish community and its representatives. The relationship was at its peak when the JDC celebrated the fifth anniversary of its work in Poland. Indeed, the JDC even got favourable reviews from the Yiddish newspaper Folksztyme, which normally avoided making any reference to the American organization. In 1962 Michal Mirski, member of the editorial board of the PZPR’s ideological journal Nowe Drogi and a Jewish leader who was among the most hostile to the presence of the JDC in Poland, not only accepted an invitation from the JDC to speak at its anniversary meeting, but he also actually praised the Joint and its work. The head of the Welfare Committee, °° IPN 0140/2, t. 28, pp. 73-4. 64 For more details on Holland’s case, see K. Persak, ‘Wladyslaw Gomutka a tak zwana sprawa Hollanda’, in A. Friszke (ed.), Wladza a spoteczenstwo w PRL: Studia historyczne Profesorowt Andrzejowm Paczkowskiemu w 65 rocznice urodzin (Warsaw, 2003), and Sprawa Henryka Hollanda (Warsaw, 2006).

65 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76B, no. 6, Reports on Poland, 1960—4, 18—25 Apr. 1961, p. 7.

A Community under Pressure 175 Salo Fiszgrund, on good terms with the Joint, explained to the JDC representative Kohane that Mirski was strictly following the new policy towards the Joint dictated by the party leadership.°® Yet Wladyslaw Gomutka’s speech at the thirteenth plenary session of the party in July 1963 launched an official fight against ‘deviationism’ and further expanded

repression of the more liberal thinkers and critics of the regime. In protest at the measures then being taken against cultural freedom, such as the closure of journals like Nowa Kultura and Przeglad Kulturalny, a petition signed by thirty-four intellectuals was sent in March 1964 to Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz. Some of the signatories were subjected to repressive measures, but that did not greatly affect the general situation. A protest by the intellectuals Jacek Kuron and Karol

Modzelewski in an ‘Open Letter to Members of the Polish United Workers’ Party’, in which they condemned the party for elitist practices and ‘central political bureaucracy’, led to their expulsion from the PZPR and their arrest. In this critical ideological climate, many former allies of Gomulka among the Pulawy

group were demoted or sharply criticized in the party by an opposing group, among whom were those who did not hide their antisemitism and attacked the Jewish origin of their opponents. When Roman Zambrowski was forced out of the Politburo in 1963, his Jewish background was noted, and this caused a lot of anxiety among the Jewish minority.°’ Another event showing that almost all internal political fights involved an anti-Jewish argument was the 1965 debate that surrounded Adam Schaff’s book, Marksizm a jednostka ludzka.©* At the time, Schaff

was one of Poland’s leading Marxist theorists and the director of the Higher School of Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the PZPR. His work was condemned as ‘revisionist’. Yet the sharpest criticism was provoked by the fact that he had dared mention—in only a few lines—that antisemitism still existed in Poland. The fact that Schaff himself had a Jewish background probably prompted the intensity of the criticism. Nevertheless, in the months preceding the radical turn of Polish policy in June 1967 it was difficult to distinguish clearly between an ongoing trend towards increasing defiance against the Jewish minority or simply a coincident political tension involving the recurrent appearance of antisemitism. The Jewish organizations continued to carry out their daily activities, although under closer control, but this control was probably no stronger than that exercised over any other social group essentially deemed to be suspicious: the Church and intellectuals also experienced harassment. This may be why, in their summary reports of September 1966, the 66 Tbid. 127A, Poland, Charles Jordan Reports, 1958—65, Report on Poland, 21—7 Nov. 1962, p. 2.

67 See e.g. IPN 0236/85, MSW Dywersja ideologiczna w osrodkach zydowskiej mniejszosci narodowej w Polsce, sytuacja w TSKZ, 1962-9, pp. 33-4. This document, based on an informer spying on the TSKZ, also reports that for some leaders of the TSKZ, such as Dawid Sfard and Michat Mirski, he had not been fired ‘only because of his Jewishness’ but also because he was a opponent of Nikita Khrushchev in 1956-8, and moreover was quite unsociable. 68 On this question, see Eisler, Marzec 1968, 79.

176 Audrey Kichelewski Joint’s representatives did not seem overly worried about the current situation, although they had clearly noticed the presence within the party of a faction strongly opposed to them and knew that they should remain very cautious.®’ They had also long since understood that the question of the image the country wished to project abroad was central to its attitude to the Jewish minority. As Akiva Kohane put it, the

TSKZ was not ‘a reliable or important tool of the party. If they tolerate it, it is because of the Jewish tragedy in the war and because of the deep interest of the Jews abroad for the well-being of their remaining brethren in Poland.’”

Discourse |

2. The Polish People’s Republic’s Image-Building Policy: A Twofold

How can we explain what seems to be an inconsistent policy of the regime towards the Jewish minority during the 1960s? All the examples described above show that, whenever action was taken against a person of Jewish origin, or any other figure or institution hovering around the Jewish minority, the issue of Jewishness causing contempt was never raised. On the contrary, as the Schaff case shows, the question of antisemitism in Polish society remained taboo. At an official level, and since the establishment of the Polish People’s Republic, the regime granted equal rights and protections to all its citizens, even specifically mentioning the Jewish minority,” and actively fought antisemitism. An official condemnation of antisemitism was issued in 1957 and the vice-minister of internal affairs, Zygfryd Sznek, confirmed it at the fourth congress of the TSKZ in December 1961: ‘the Polish government protects the principles of equal rights of all its citizens and will fight against any expression of discrimination and antisemitism’.’” But what was the real situation regarding manifestations of antisemitism and the government’s response to them? The IPN archives provide many examples of cases of day-to-day antisemitism

during the 1960s.’° They involve problems at school for children, but also questions of unneighbourly behaviour. In the majority of these cases the Jewish plaintiff saw his complaint dismissed. Very often he was not given any credit and the local authorities claimed that he was making it up’* or using the argument of antisemitism when it was not the actual source of the dispute with his neighbour. ’° 69 AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva I, 76Az2, no. 15, Meeting on Poland, Sept. 1966, pp. 71-2. 70 AJJDC (New York), 55/67, file 447 (1960-5), Report on Poland from Kohane to Jordan, 15-28 July 1960.

71 “Zydom po bestialsku tepionym przez okupanta zapewniona zostanie odbudowa ich egzystencji

oraz prawne i faktyczne rownouprawnienie’ (Manifesto of the Polish Committee of National Liberation (PK WN), Appendix, Dziennik Ustaw Rzeczpospolitej Polskiej, no. 1, 1944, p. 2). 7 Quoted in Berendt, ‘Emigracja Zydéw’, 300. 73 See e.g. IPN, MSW II 9027, DSA Zydzi, Stosunki pomiedzy Polakami i Zydami. ™ Tbid. 65-72. Mrs S.A. from Bialystok, Aug. 1963. ® Tbid. 50-2, Mr T:M. from Olsztyn, 1966. His complaint against his neighbour, whom he accused of antisemitic insults, was dismissed, the local authorities pointing out that the real conflict lay in the

common use of the kitchen and bathroom; they advised T.M. to contact the Housing Office if he wanted to get other accommodation.

A Community under Pressure 177 In the few cases where the investigation led to a condemnation of the neighbour as

a bigot, it was generally not on the basis of antisemitism itself. For instance, a schoolteacher in Szczecin taught her pupils that Jews were all thieves, that they used the blood of Christian children for matzah, and other antisemitic clichés. The mother of a Jewish child complained, after which her daughter was scorned by her

classmates. The complaint was even backed up by a letter from the TSKZ. However, officials chose to believe the teacher’s version of events: she was actually explaining in class how a Jewish child was saved by Poles during the war, when the discussion turned to those clichés. In the end she was reprimanded by the adminis-

tration, but the mother was berated for ‘her attempt to turn a pedagogical issue into a political one’.”° The IPN archives also show that in this period many Jewish buildings and sites were defaced, and even cemeteries desecrated: more than a hundred cases of graffiti and neo-Nazi leaflets were found near Jewish sites in one month alone, January 1960,”” and in 1965 the TSKZ wrote a letter of protest to the minister of internal affairs, Mieczystaw Moczar, referring to the desecration of four Jewish cemeteries in the previous few weeks, without anything being done by the citizens’ militia. ’®

Their investigation into those cases and the general orders given by the MSW to local branches to fight against those ‘expressions of revisionism, nationalism, and antisemitism’’? did not actually signify a real will to recognize the existence of anti-Jewish feelings, as those acts were always said to have been committed by idle hooligans on the fringe of society or by ‘fascist enemies’ of the regime, while the anti-Jewish character of the offence was often denied in order not to give it a political meaning. The official Polish stance was to deny the existence of any anti-Jewish feelings in Poland, as expressed in its internal propaganda and that for the Western world. The main task for Jewish leaders was to spread this message to an increasingly worried community.®° However, sometimes it was hard for some, even those most loyal to

the regime, such as the TSKZ, not to express anxiety about expressions of thinly veiled hostility to the Jewish minority. For instance, when the editor-in-chief of the leading literary journal Zycie Literackie, and a friend of Moczar, Wladyslaw Machejek, wrote an article in June 1965, in which he stated that defectors like Pawel Monat or Jozef Swiatlo were, as Jews, ‘strangers’ to the Polish nation, and in that % bid. 1-8. “ IPN BU MSW II 484, Gabinet Ministra. Informacje, 1960 T. 1. (Jan.—zo Feb.), no. 1-33, Sytuacja spoleczno-polityczna i gospodarcza w Polsce i na arenie miedzynarodowe / m.in Wystapienia antysemickie, pp. 33-42.

78 MSW II 9049, Cmentarze, pp. 18-19. 77 IPN BU MSW II 484, pp. 33-7. 80 See e.g. Dawid Sfard’s speech to the TSKZ meeting of the women’s section, 13 June 1963: ‘nalezy zwalczac tendencje zamykania sie jedynie w srodowisku zydowskim, nie zrazac Sig przejawami antysemityzmu’, Protokoly TSKZ 1963, Protok6! narady aktywu kobiecego przy TSKZ, ktora odbyla sie w Lodzi w dniu 13 VI 1963, p. 3.

178 Audrey Kichelewski sense not true, patriotic communists.*! In the end, although Machejek was challenged by more liberal-leaning intellectuals, such as the chairman of the Polish

Academy of Sciences, Professor Tadeusz Kotarbinski, and eventually partly retracted his former stance, the Fo/ksztyme was not allowed to reprint Kotarbinski’s letter or Machejek’s new statement. The best example of Poland’s concern about its image abroad is probably the turmoil caused by the arrest of the Yiddish writer Naftali Hertz Kon in December

1960 on charges of ‘anti-national propaganda’ and spying for Israel.22 When the Western world became aware of his arrest, complaints from human rights and Jewish organizations piled up in Polish embassies throughout the world. Subsequently, and clearly out of concern that the country’s image would suffer,®° the accusation of spying was dropped for lack of evidence and, after at least fifteen months in prison and in a psychiatric hospital, Kon was found guilty of the lesser

charge of subversive writing. He was released in March 1962 and left shortly thereafter for Israel. Yet trying to present the best image sometimes led to extreme

measures against Western journalists who dared to write about antisemitism in Poland. For instance, the correspondent for the New York Times, David Halberstam, was expelled from the country in January 1966 after he wrote some articles on this issue that displeased the regime. Before him, Abraham Michael Rosenthal, from the same newspaper, had also been expelled from the country in 1959 for probing too deeply into Polish politics.°* This also shows the extent to

which the Polish authorities took Western public opinion into account when imposing limits on freedom of expression.

3. Remembering the Holocaust and Polish—fewish Relations during the War The camouflaging of the issue of anti-Jewish tendencies in Poland, central, as we have seen, to the Polish government’s management of public relations, also led to a 81 Zycie Literackie, 20 June 1965. On Machejek’s relationship with Moczar, see E1sler, Marzec 1968,

72. On the discussion concerning this article at the TSKZ congress, see AJJDC (Jerusalem), Geneva II, 251B/252A, Poland, 1958—68, Report on Poland, 17-22 Mar. 1966, pp. 3—4. For the TSKZ’s letter of protest sent to the Press Department of the Central Committee of the PZPR and to the Union of Polish Writers, see IPN, MSW IT 9027, DSA Zydzi, Stosunki pomiedzy Polakami i Zydami, pp. 32-5.

82 IPN 00231/209, t.1~15. K. Auerbach, ‘The Fate of a Yiddish Writer in Communist Eastern Europe: The Case of Naftali Hertz Kon’, paper presented at the 36th Annual Conference of the Association for Jewish Studies, Chicago, 19-21 Dec. 2004. I should like to thank Karen Auerbach for giving me access to her paper; see also her chapter on p. 243 below. 83 An analysis of the situation by an MSW official concluded that ‘the most sensible decision would be to speed up investigation and trial, or to hush up the case’. IPN 00231/209, folder 4, 18 July 1961, p. 269.

84 Tygodnik Powszechny, 2 (1966). The Jewish origin of both American journalists and Halberstam’s love affair with the Polish actress Elzbieta Czyzewska, though never publicly mentioned,

were clearly stated in MSW documents as ‘aggravating circumstances’ for their expulsion. On the supervision of foreign correspondents, see also Biuletyn IPN, 11/46 (Nov. 2004), ‘Kontrwywiad 1 dziennikarze’.

A Community under Pressure 179 twofold policy on the memory of the Holocaust and the question of Polish—Jewish relations during the Second World War—both of increasing interest in the Western world after Eichmann’s trial in 1961.°° The official stance was that this memory was honoured and fully respected. But inside the country tight censorship was established over what should or should not be said on these burning issues. The 1960s marked a turning point in the memory of the Second World War in Poland. After a period when the official line was to consider the war only as a fight against fascism, leaving aside every event that did not fit this pattern, such as the non-communist resistance of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army; AK) or the specificity of the genocide against the Jews, the de-Stalinization of the country altered this historical interpretation. A monument to the fighters of the AK was erected in the Warsaw cemetery in 1957 and discussions of its role during the war increased, while books and films with more accurate depictions of wartime conditions and of the Holocaust in Poland appeared.*®° It was also a time when the Holocaust became more internationalized. Officially, it was presented as a way to take into account Western opinion and desire for involvement in the commemorations—for instance with the establishment of an International Committee for the Auschwitz Museum in May 1954. For the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camp in 1955, no

fewer than 150,000 people attended the ceremonies, among them many foreign delegations, whose presence, previously limited and not announced, was publicly discussed in the media.®” As a whole, throughout the 1960s, every important commemoration of ‘round numbers’, such as the fifteenth or the twentieth anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, was prominently celebrated with a sizeable international attendance. In order to help build the Treblinka monument erected in 1964,

the Polish authorities even accepted money from the Claims conference, which they officially did not recognize as a legitimate organization because it had emerged from the broader context of negotiating reparation payments from West Germany. On this issue, high politics took precedence over internal protest on the part of the leaders of the TSKZ.°8 However, this internationalization always remained under very tight control. For instance, it was agreed that Claims money would not be publicly mentioned in 85 For the evolution of memory of the Holocaust and the impact of Eichmann’s trial, see A. Wiewiorka, L’Ere du témoin (Paris, 1997).

86 Except during the immediate post-war period, when many testimonies and works of various kinds and orientations were published, the topic of the war had been highly censored and taboo since 1950. The Thaw brought a change, especially in the cinema: see e.g. Andrzej Wajda’s films Pokolenie (1955) and Samson (1961), or Andrzej Munk’s unfinished film Pasazerka (1963), about a former Auschwitz prisoner who many years later meets the woman who was her Kapo in the camp. 87 The history of the Auschwitz museum is presented by Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945—1979 (Athens, Ohio, 2003).

88 On this question, see the correspondence exchanged between the Claims conference, the JDC,

and Polish authorities in AJJDC (New York), 55/67, file 473, Treblinka, 1962—4. ,

180 Audrey Kichelewski Poland for reasons of internal policy.2? In the same way, the International Auschwitz Committee had in fact no power to decide on what was to be exhibited

at the museum.® In the event, the internationalization of Holocaust memory served the ideological purpose of enhancing the ‘resistance and martyrdom of Poles and citizens of other nationalities’. This tended to blur the specific fate of the Jewish people.®! For instance, at the ceremony unveiling the Treblinka monument, clearly identifying this place as an extermination camp for Jews, surrounded by thousands of stones bearing the names of destroyed Jewish communities, Prime Minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz referred nonetheless to the victims as ‘800,000 citizens of European nations’.?” The ‘two weights two measures’ policy, with active propaganda aimed at the Western world on the one hand, and a distorted discourse and partial toning down of those commemorations for Polish society on the other, is demonstrated by the fact that those ceremonies, apart from the ‘round numbers’ of anniversaries, did not involve major Polish political leaders. No First Secretary of the party ever attended any of them.?* Moreover, Jewish leaders had to cope with a growing tendency towards their marginalization during the celebrations, while the Zwiazek Bojownikow o Wolnosé 1 Demokracje (Polish Organization of Fighters for Freedom and Democracy; ZBoWiD), an organization controlled by Moczar’s Partisans, took the lead and tended to ‘reduce expression of specific Jewish martyrdom’.*4 Closely linked to the Holocaust narrative, the theme of Polish—Jewish relations during the war emerged as central in the public sphere in Poland, initially as an 89 AJJDC (New York), 55/67, file 473, Treblinka, 1962-4. 9° See, for instance, discussions on the issue of a Jewish pavilion in Auschwitz, Nov. 1964, corre-

spondence between Jozef Pietrusinski, head of the Rada Ochrony Pomnikow Walki 1 Meczenstwa (Council for the Preservation of Monuments dedicated to Fight and Martyrdom), and the World Jewish Congress. WJC archives at Washington Memorial Museum, RG 68.045 M, reel 135, 1243, WJC Geneva Correspondence, Poland. 91 For an example of ‘polonization’ and ‘dejudaization’ of Holocaust memory at the commemoration of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, see J. Leociak, ‘Zraniona pamieC (Rocznice powstania w getcie warszawskim w prasie polskiej, 1944-1989)’, in A. Brodzka-Wald, D. Krawczynska, and J. Leociak (eds.), Literatura polska wobec Zaglady (Warsaw, 2000), 29-45. 92M. M. Checinski, Running the Gauntlet of Anti-Semitism: From Polish Counterintelligence to the

German/ American Marshall Center (Jerusalem, 2004), 117; M. C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust (Syracuse, NY, 1997), 73.

93M. Mirski and H. Smolar, ‘Commemorations of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: Reminiscences’, Soviet fewish Affairs, 3/ I (1973), IO. 94 Protokoly TSKZ 1963, no. 9, 28 Mar. 1963, where Mirski and Smolar described the ZBoWiD as

the ‘actual organizer’ (of the Warsaw ghetto uprising commemoration) and the summary report in Protocol no. 13, 8 May 1963. Sfard’s remarks: ‘dajaca sie tu 1 Owdzie zauwazyCc w prasie tendencja oslabienia momentow specyficznie zydowskiej martyrologii, mimo Ze byla ona najwyzszym wyrazem faszystowskiego bestialstwa.’ He also mentioned the isolation of Jewish representatives and speeches: ‘tendencja niektorych dzialaczy ograniczenia slowa zydowskiego w czesci oficjalnej 1 artystyczne] akademiv’.

A Community under Pressure 181 answer to the issue raised in the Western world after Eichmann’s trial, where some testimonies highlighted Polish indifference to or even approval of the Jews’ tragic fate. In the beginning, the main aim was patriotic, recalling Polish resistance to the Nazis’ new order when saving Jews.?? The Jewish minority actively took part in this new trend, for instance by publishing many testimonies of Jews saved by Poles

in the journal of the Historical Institute.°° Solidarity between the two groups— Poles and Jews—was also underlined when in 1963 a member of Zegota,®” Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, asked, through the Catholic newspaper Tygodnik Powszechny, that Polish rescuers send him their testimonies for publication.?® Yet as the years went by a more vengeful tone was adopted to reply to memoirs and novels published in the West dealing with Polish indifference to Jewish martyrdom—to quote but one example, the campaign launched against Jerzy Kosinsk1’s book The Painted Bird, published in the USA in 1965. It is interesting to note that

the first reviews of this book—banned from publication—in Poland were quite enthusiastic, apparently before orders were given to the press to condemn it.”? This brief analysis of the major trends in the Polish view of the ‘Jewish question’ clearly shows that the apparent concern for the Jewish minority and its past suffering was deeply connected with the political need to preserve a relatively good image abroad. Yet by the end of the 1960s the consensus was beginning to crack under the growing influence of some members of the party and with the active role of the MSW.

4. The Ministry of Internal Affairs: A Major Source of Inspiration and Pressure The MSW and its minister from 1964, Mieczyslaw Moczar, have already been mentioned several times for the increasing role they played in creating a pernicious climate around the government’s attitude towards the ‘Jewish question’.

Who was Moczar and what was his real influence on the MSW and other major Polish institutions throughout the 1960s?!°° Born in 1913, he was in the 9° As early as 1958, the National Council decided to honour some Poles who had saved Jews during

| the war. |

9° See e.g. BZIH, nos. 29, 30, and 31 (1959), publishing excerpts from Emanuel Ringelblum’s diary on Polish—Jewish relations—although it appeared later that the text had cautiously censored all negative statements on the Poles. %7 The underground organization created in 1942 to help Jews in wartime Poland. Bartoszewski was granted Yad Vashem’s medal of Righteous among the Nations in Apr. 1963. 98 The book, co-written with Z. Lewinowna, Ten jest % ojczyzny mojej: Polacy z pomoca Zydom 1939-1945 (Krakow, 1966), was diverted from its original aim during the March 1968 ‘anti-Zionist’ Campaign.

99 Jerzy Kosinski was born in L6dz in 1933. He survived the war in Poland as a child and emigrated to the USA in 1957. His book was seen as fictionalized autobiography. For its reception in Poland, see M. Adamczyk-Garbowska, “The Return of the Troublesome Bird: Jerzy Kosinski and Polish—Jewish Relations’, Polin, 12 (1999), 284-94.

100 For a complete biography of Moczar, see K. Lesiakowski, Mieczyslaw Moczar ‘Mietek’:

182 Audrey Kichelewski Soviet-occupied zone when the Second World War broke out, where he was recruited by the NK VD and sent on a mission to the German-occupied zone. There

he joined the communist underground resistance. After the war, he entered the Public Security Office in Lodz, but was demoted along with Gomutka in 1948 for ‘right-wing nationalist deviation’, which probably fostered his hatred of Muscovites, those Polish communists formed in the USSR during the war, many among whom were of Jewish background. With Gomulka’s return to power in 1956, and although he was a member of the Natolin faction, as a long-standing friend of Gomutka he was appointed deputy minister of internal affairs, becoming minister in 1964. He built an image of himself as a brave partisan fighter through his memoirs, which achieved wide circulation and became obligatory reading in schools. His charisma also increased when he was elected chairman of the mass organization ZBoWiD, which he turned into a force promoting his political ideas of nationalism, authoritarianism, and anti-elitism, theories often blended with anti-Jewish clichés, as Jews were branded as intellectuals, traitors, and cosmopolitans. He also managed to gain some influence among certain media outlets and promoted some of his followers in key state institutions, hence gathering around him a heterogeneous group often called ‘Partisans’.

When Moczar entered the MSW, he strengthened its powers of surveillance over Polish organizations and individuals deemed suspect by the regime. The Jewish minority was one of the first in line, although Checinsk1’s claims that the MSW was obsessed in those years with flushing out Jews may be overstated, at least to judge from the available documents of this ministry. For instance, I found no trace of a specific ‘Jewish section’ in the MSW: Department III was in charge of

all national minorities. Moreover, the supervision of Jewish organizations had started well before the arrival of Moczar at the MSW. The wave of emigration from 1956 to 1960 had been under close supervision, for fear that people previously employed in strategic jobs would disclose secret information,'°! and the same with the repatriates from the Soviet Union on their way to Israel.!°? Even more suspicious was the activity of the Israeli embassy in Poland, under supervision since its establishment, as well as the people having contact with it, in a rather classical mission of espionage and counter-espionage.'°® Individuals of Jewish origin coming to Poland also came under the MSW’s observation.1 Biografia polityczna (Warsaw, 1998). For an inside and incriminating testimony from a former member of the security apparatus, Checinski, see Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, 147-73. 101 MSW II 2936, Obywatele polscy narodowosci zydowskiej, wyjazd do Izraela . . . 1959—60. 102 TPN 00231/209, 32 vols., Przerzut obywateli zydowskich z ZSRR przez PRL do Izraela.

103 To quote but a few examples in the 1960s only, see IPN 00231/295, Contacts with Israel and activities of the embassy in Poland, 3 vols., 1960-7; IPN 0140/2, MSW pracownicy wywiadu w ambasadzie Izraela w Wiedniu w latach 1955-63, krypt. ‘Misiek’ i ‘Alfa’, 37 vols.; IPN BU MSW II 4260, Emigration to Israel and contacts with the embassy, 1962-7. 8% TPN 00231/265, 16 vols. Cudzoziemcy narodowosci zydowskiej przyjezdzajacy do Polski lub starajacy sie o przyjazd. Krypt ‘Mekka’.

A Community under Pressure 183 Yet the amount of documentation trying to point out a Jewish danger in those years and to put pressure on the political authorities to act against the Jewish minority and its ‘allies’, for instance the Claims conference,’°° HIAS,'°° or the JDC, is impressive. As early as 1958, reports were regularly issued on ‘the danger of Zionism in Poland’, on the negative impact of the Joint among the Jewish population, or on its alleged tax evasion.!°” A closer look at one of those reports proves very interesting. In September 1965 the Glowny Inspektorat of the MSW issued a fifty-page study on ‘Zionism, its negative influence on the Jewish national minority and its action against

the PRL interests’.1°° This report consisted of documents from different departments of the MSW: Department I (in charge of the intelligence and spy networks in foreign countries, among which was Israel, but also among international organizations, Jewish ones included); Department II (in charge of intelligence on diplomats and foreigners coming to or staying in Poland—here, spying on the Israeli embassy in Warsaw); and Department III (in charge of the activities of various organizations and groups in Poland, including Jews as a community but also as individuals). It started with a description of Zionism’s initial goals (‘the opening of a state that would gather all Jews in the world’) and new goals (‘reinforcing the world Jewish nation’, in other words, using a Jewish Diaspora that would not emigrate to serve Israel’s interests). It

then set out to show how this goal was put into practice against Poland, through Israeli intelligence, active not only in the embassy but also among the Jewish commu-

nity. The link was hence obviously made between the national enemy—Israel and ‘world Zionist organizations’—and a national minority—the Jews. Also, an argument was constructed that the JDC was an incarnation of ‘American imperialism backed up by Zionist-Jewish cosmopolitan interests’, an argument that would prove very efficient in the March 1968 campaign.

The anti-Zionist orientation of the regime, following the USSR, was of course not new. Many documents in the police files show clearly how the Soviet secret services provided their Polish counterparts with information on individuals, but also general information about the spy network, especially the Israeli one.'°? What is more striking is that the authors of these reports did not hesitate to accuse Jews straight out, not only the part of the Jewish community deemed to be hostile, such as the religious Jews of the ZRWM, but also the allies and puppets of the government, the secular Jews of the TSKZ, who were accused of criticizing the USSR 105 TPN 0236/117, Organizacja ‘Claims’ w USA, 1966-9. 106 IPN 00231/268, HIAS, 324 pp. 107 See e.g. IPN 0149/20, Information on Joint, Mar. 1960—Dec. 1963, pp. 7-13; IPN 00231/285, t.2 vol. II, “Tres¢ wspolczesnego syjonizmw’ b.d; MSW I 96/367, Mniejszos¢ narodowa w Polsce— dzialalnosc Joint-u na terenie Polski, 15 XII 1965, 7 pp.

108 TPN BU MSW II 1088s, Glowny Inspektorat MSW. Zionist operation within the Jewish ~ national minority in Poland, 30 Sept. 1965, pp. 21-78. 109 TPN 00231/209, folder 32, pp. 116—50, translated from Russian, 24 VIII 1963, ‘Notatka dotyczaca sytuacji agenturalnej w Izraelu i dziatalnosci organow wywiadowczych 1 kontrwywiadowczych’;

pp. 157-66 translated from Russian, 25 II 1966 ‘Notatka dotyczaca niektorych form 1 sposobow dziatalnosci wywiadu izraelskiego’.

184 Audrey Kichelewski and of falsely insinuating that there was some antisemitism in Poland. In general, a simmering antisemitic tone infuses the contents of the majority of these reports. What were the MSW’s achievements in this period? It should be noted first of all that the personnel of the security service very often complained in their reports that their conclusions were not being accepted by the party and the government. A closer look at the documents prepared by the MSW, especially the secret observa-

tions on individuals and organizations, made possible by the use of 250,000 to 300,000 informers,'’® shows that very often the information gathered was very meagre and not useful, that monitoring did not work, that the conversations could not be recorded, and so on. Department III admitted in a June 1967 report that there was room for improved efficiency.''' It has already been said that the Jewish organizations had to accept increasing control of their functions throughout the 1960s.1!* It might be argued that this tightening of supervision was not aimed specifically at Jewish organizations, but resulted from a more general political and administrative orientation towards increased efficiency: the main aim was to detect corruption and tax evasion, which indeed existed in those institutions (which paid

some of their staff with social funds or when allocating grants gave priority to those with good connections), though no less than elsewhere. However, this administrative logic often was accompanied by widespread anti-Jewish prejudice among the officials in charge of those inspections, as their reports and comments show.'!° The recommendations expressed in the MSW’s reports were not always followed, for example when it advocated refusing travel visas for Jewish officials going abroad for professional purposes, or when its criticism of officials participating in

international conferences did not lead to their sanction or removal.''* As regards the work of Jewish institutions, the MSW’s very negative conclusions as early as 1960 did not lead to radical changes until 1967. Yet it achieved success in several cases, notably in more tense periods, when its voice was heard more favourably. The security service claimed, for instance, to be responsible for the expulsion from 110 Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, 151.

111 Quoted in Stola, Kampania antysyjonistyczna, 295-6. 112 Reports on inspections of the TSKZ and CKZPS in 1960—1 in IPN 00231/285 folders 1 and 2. 113 Akiva Kohane from the JDC mentions ‘antisemitic remarks during the work of the investigators’ at the inspection of TSKZ in Jan. 1960: AJJDC (New York) 55/67, file 447 (1960-5), Report on Poland from Kohane to Jordan, 15—28 July 1960. Those inspectors also noted cynically that ‘some people who are in high party and governmental positions have received either assistance or medicaments’. 114 TPN 0236/76, Contacts with foreigners, 1960-3, pp. 168-78. Secret note on UNESCO confer-

ence, Feb. 1960. Iwo members of the Polish delegation are mentioned—including their Jewish origin—for their negative statements about the Soviet Union and for their ‘exaggerated eagerness’ in voting a resolution condemning antisemitism. Those members were Gustawa Kaminska, depicted as a stranger to Poland since she had spent her childhood in France, and also as a nymphomaniac, always trying to seduce men; and Adam Schaff, described as a ‘centrist’ (although he was still a close friend of Gomulka).

A Community under Pressure 185 the country of the permanent JDC representative Harry Burger in 1959 on charges of ‘taking advantage of his stay in Poland for Zionist operations’.*'° Likewise, the lowering of the regular exchange rate, the closing down of one of ORT?’s programmes in 1965, or ZRWM’s withdrawal from the Welfare Committee in the same year on grounds that a religious organization should not be involved in

social occupations can be seen as MSW victories, its recommendations being partly carried out. By the end of the 1960s the MSW was supervising not only Jewish institutions such as the ZRWM?!6 and the CKZPS,1"" but also many individuals. It kept personal files on all of them, including details about the help they received from the Joint,!+® their visits to the Israeli embassy, and their requests for travel visas. If we add to this material the growing influence of the Moczarites in the media, and the discreet purges of ‘liberal’ officers, often of Jewish origin, carried out in the Polish People’s Army from 1962 onwards,'?” it would not be wrong to suggest that all the instruments that would be used against the Jewish minority after the Six-Day War of June 1967, and in March 1968, had already been established.

CONCLUSION Moczar and his Partisans, and many others who shared his ideas, used the powerful

security apparatus to take control of the mass veterans’ organization, the ZBoWiD, cultivated contacts in the media, and promoted supporters to key positions in the party and the government. The Partisans certainly paved the way for the radical change in the government’s attitude towards the Jewish minority, as well as the antisemitic tone of the March 1968 campaign following the student

demonstrations. However, talk of a plot prepared long ago and inspired by Moscow, as Checinski inferred,'*° appears to have no basis in fact. In any case, other matters helped to shape the government’s policy towards the Jewish minority. Among the factors that influenced the decision of the Polish authorities to provide a handy Jewish scapegoat to a larger public convinced that the Jews were privileged was an economic crisis, which was engendering social unrest, a less tolerant Soviet neighbour, and further conflict with intellectuals, frustrated and upset at the regime for interrupting the ‘democratization’ process launched with the Thaw. Moreover, political opponents who had won in 1956 were gradually being 115 MSW II 96/367, Mniejszos¢ narodowa w Polsce—dzialalnosé Joint-u na terenie Polski, 15 XII 1965, pkt. III. 116 TPN 00231/254, Zwiazek wyznania mojzeszowego w Poisce, 1961-3. 117 TPN 0236/100, MSW, Centralna Komisja Zydowska Pomocy Spolecznej, 1957-67.

118 TPN 00231/244, 10 vols.: lists of people receiving grants from the JDC, for each region of

Poland. 119 Checinski, Poland: Communism, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, 195-208. 120 Tbid. 171: “The Soviets were using Moczar and others to overthrow Gomutka and his team, and nationalism and anti-Semitism became, ironically, the instruments by which to extinguish the last vestige of national independence.’

186 Audrey Kichelewski replaced by a new generation of bureaucrats, including those who were receptive to nationalism and those who were less preoccupied by ideology and simply pragmatic. This may explain why the issue of Poland’s image abroad, which had earlier

played a crucial role in the country’s more tolerant policy towards the Jewish minority, placed in a particular position within the Eastern bloc, was occasionally played down and then simply dismissed during the events of 1967-8. The domestic imperatives of antisemitism, to appease political factions, calm social unrest, and promote new leaders, trumped the inconvenience of tarnishing the country’s image.

Changes within the Jewish community also had an impact on the attitude of the authorities. Government circles played one Jewish organization against another in order to increase their control over them. The JDC’s presence, as an American organization, was a rather uncomfortable issue for a country in the socialist bloc during the Cold War. So it was deemed necessary to keep tight control over an

organization that provided some propaganda needs. Lastly, repressive policy towards opposition was increasing. The government could not tolerate voices of protest emerging from a Jewish minority, small as they were (but unprecedented since the establishment of the socialist regime), especially a community that was beginning to feel more secure about expressing its perspectives and no less aware that the image the regime wanted to promulgate abroad prevented it from bold acts of repression. For all these reasons, the Jewish community felt the effects of the Polish government’s fluctuating and incoherent policy towards it. With the help of the Joint,

a certain Jewish life continued to exist, although its importance was overemphasized by various organizations—the JDC for its donors, the TSKZ to ensure its survival, and the MSW in order to demonstrate an alleged Jewish negative influence in Poland. However, the possibility of some kind of Jewish life in Poland raised the complex question of Jewish identity in a secular and socialist country among the remnants of Polish Jewry. Staying in Poland meant believing in the government’s goodwill and protection, and blending Jewishness—when not already abandoned—with the implications of communist ideologies and the politi-

cal agenda. Opting for emigration was difficult but still possible. Yet, for an increasing number of Polish Jews, it was getting harder not to feel worried about a simmering climate of hostility. Anti-Jewish prejudice was felt all the more as their Jewishness increased, though for the most assimilated Jews there was no need to dwell on such issues. The picture of Polish Jewry in the 1960s is that of different, at times competing, groups, with cloudy skies above the heads of some, and with genuine, if blind, hope for others. For all of them, however, March 1968 would be

the crucial spark, revealing with violence and sorrow an identity forgotten, negated, or simply put aside.

Facing Antisemitism in

Poland during the Second World War and in March 1968 MALGORZATA MELCHIOR ANTISEMITISM IS usually analysed by sociologists as an attitude characterized by dislike or hatred of Jews. It is expressed by the public voicing of negative opinions about them. Such beliefs can be accompanied by discriminatory behaviour towards and violence against Jews themselves, people considered to be Jewish, or unspeci-

fied individuals and communities who, in the minds of antisemites, symbolize or personify the conceptual, mythical ‘general Jew’. When treating antisemitism as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon, sociologists attempt to define the

spread of such antisemitic approaches and attitudes in a particular society, the sources of the phenomenon, and the dynamics of antisemitic attitudes and the transformations they undergo in conjunction with changes in socio-economic, political, or cultural conditions.? I am interested here in a completely different aspect of the problem, namely

how antisemitism is experienced by those towards whom such attitudes are expressed. Furthermore, I wish to present the particular case of the personal experience of Polish Jews who managed to survive the war by assuming a non-Jewish identity and using ‘Aryan’ documents. This experience will be discussed in reference to three particularly clear-cut and dramatic periods in their biographies: (1) the period of the German occupation after escape from the ghetto, when these people hid on the ‘Aryan’ side as non-Jews and when revealing their Jewish identity would have caused a direct threat to their lives; (2) the first years after the end of the war; and (3) the year 1968, in particular the ‘March events’. Each of these periods will be discussed in turn. During the war and the German occupation, antisemitism could easily lead to the death of these people. In the first years after the war, it could still be lethal. In the late 1960s, it constituted instead a political tool for exclusion and discrimination.

1 I. Krzeminski, Czy Polacy sq antysemitam? Wyniki badania sondazowego (Warsaw, 1996); id., Antysemityzm w Polsce ina Ukrainie: Raport z badan (Warsaw, 2004).

188 Matgorzata Melchior I. EXPERIENCING ANTISEMITISM DURING THE GERMAN OCCUPATION During the German occupation, partly as a result of the impact of Nazi propaganda, antisemitic attitudes were widespread in Polish society, as is confirmed by almost all the accounts and memories of Jews hiding under a false identity at the time. The survivors talk about situations on the ‘Aryan’ side where they were confronted with the antisemitic views of their neighbours, passers-by, or other Poles. Sometimes such antisemitism consisted in the suspicion or unhealthy curiosity as to whether the person they met was or was not a Jew. Antisemitic comments referred to Jews in general, or particular Jews, and were expressed in the presence of people who were considered non-Jews. In this way, ‘environmental’ antisemitism could form either an indirect or a direct threat to the Jews who had adopted an ‘Aryan’ identity in order to avoid extermination. In his essay ‘ ““Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej . . .”, ale go nie lubie’ (‘ “He is from my homeland”, but I do not like him’), Jan Tomasz Gross touches on the problem of the attitudes and behaviour of Polish society regarding the extermination of Jews. He expresses the opinion that ‘szmalcowntk behaviour [Poles turning Jews over to the Germans in return for money] was a marginal phenomenon’. Yet he poses the question: ‘Why then was there the ever-present threat to a hiding Jew?’ The reply, according to Gross, leaves no room for doubt: ‘it was the generally sensed hostility towards Jews that was the reason why hiding outside the ghetto (the only way to avoid death from the Nazis) was so difficult for a Jew’. He continues: unfortunately, it was a tragic truth of the occupation that an ever-present danger to the Jews in hiding (and for the Poles who concealed them) was posed by Polish neighbours. Memoirs from this period and the memory of the survivors leave no doubt in this respect. . . . the concierge, a neighbour, a child playing ball in the yard, or any passer-by, could report the fact to the police.”

When Gross’s book, from which the above quotations are taken, was discussed in the pages of the monthly WieZ, the historian Dariusz Stola expressed a similar opinion: A Jew hiding on the Aryan side had to be extremely sensitive to each sign of threat from the surroundings. Those who were not so sensitive did not survive unless they were extremely lucky. Each manifestation of an antisemitic approach, of such readiness to harm a Jew, had to be read at once. Such a ‘radar’ had to operate continuously. The survivors are the people

who had the special ability to sense this Polish resentment. The people who did not perceive an antisemite in time did not survive.® 2 J. T. Gross, Upiorna dekada: Trzy eseje 0 stereotypach na temat Zydéw, Polakéw, Niemcéw i komunistow IQ 39-1948 (Krakow, 1989), 48-9. 3 “Polacy i Zydzi w upiornej dekadzie’, discussion, WieZ, 7 (489) (July 1999), 13.

Facing Antisemitism in Poland 189 Living on the ‘Aryan’ side, among Poles, was peppered with dangers. Certainly, it was the Germans who were responsible for the existence of such threats and dangers, yet their effectiveness depended ‘on the Poles who were ready to help and the Poles who eagerly aimed at annihilation’ .* Many survivors recall that they mainly had to watch for Poles, as they could recognize a Jew in a stranger passing by or a neighbour more easily than could the Germans. Among the Jews hiding with ‘Aryan’ documents there was a popular conviction that ‘Poles could easily recognize Jews’. As my interlocutors recall:° ‘I was not afraid of the Germans. I was afraid of the Poles’ (K-25, 1921). ‘It was the people you meet by chance in the street, who pass you by, who sit next to you on a tram, or the people you live with—it was they you had to hide from’ (K-12, 1926). Each stranger or passer-by could prove to be an enemy to the hiding Jew: ‘In the situation of hiding Jews, everyone you could not be absolutely sure about, every stranger or passer-by, was a potential killer. It could also be this young woman who watched us with her piercing eyes, although it was possible she could be doing so just out of her usual female curiosity.’® The antagonism, the distance, and the contempt certainly did not always lead to giving Jews away. Some people, as for example one of my interlocutors, wondered about the sources of such a resentful attitude of Poles towards Jews: I wondered about this [attitude towards Jews], as the community in a particular town at first probably felt compassionate towards Jews, when there were these round-ups and actions. When they learned how their acquaintances were shot in the street, as such things happened. Yet simultaneously this entire propaganda and manhandling—this changed the attitude to these people. They did not even know when they started treating them as something worse. I could hear it in the conversations in queues, in conversations. For example, they said: ‘She is a good girl, although she is Jewish.’ Or something like that. This was a daily routine among the so-called good people. Not to mention the fact that after some time the contempt escalated, and there was a conviction these were worse people. This became increasingly widespread. Increasingly more [people] accepted this. Brainwashing is very easy. You don’t even know when you pick it up. (K-13, 1921)

Michal Gtowinski similarly analyses that phenomenon of the widespread antagonism towards Jews: 4 N. Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Fews in Nazi-Occupied Poland (New York and Oxford, 1986), 39. > V. Meed, On Both Sides of the Wall: Memoirs from the Warsaw Ghetto (New York, 1979), 89. ® T personally conducted twenty-six narrative interviews of the ‘life story’ type in the years 1996—9

in Poland with survivors of the Nazi occupation who had hidden on the ‘Aryan’ side on ‘false papers’. Cf. M. Melchior, Zaglada a tozsamosé: Polscy Zydzi ocaleni ‘na aryjskich papterach’. Analiza dosmiadczenta biograficznego (Warsaw, 2004).

” Quoted statements refer to a particular interlocutor with whom I conducted the interview. In parentheses I provide the following information necessary to identify a particular interlocutor in subsequent statements: gender (K for females and M for males), the chronological number of the interview, from I to 26, and the individual’s year of birth. 8 M. Glowinski, Czarne sezony (Warsaw, 1998), 81-2.

190 Matgorzata Melchior I believe it was pure, perhaps completely thoughtless hatred, related to the spirit of the time or resulting therefrom. Yes, I refer to it on purpose. It was the spirit of the time that sanctioned the conviction that someone revealed as a Jew, identified as a Jew, was in advance sen-

tenced to death, designed for killing. Jewish life not only became cheap, it just did not matter, it was deprived of any worth. What is more, a person, even if he or she did not belong to the master race, could believe that helping someone lose their Jewish life was not a sin, was not anything evil at all; perhaps it was even a commendable act.”

The survivors—like one of my interlocutors—had to learn to recognize threats: ‘I then somehow learned to look around, looking people in the eyes. I wondered what look they gazed on me with. I learned to read what they thought about me’ (M-8, 1927). ‘Aryan’ Jews!® particularly feared szmalcowniks and informers, and their fears were certainly justified, as Jews betrayed were taken to the Polish or German police, or straight to the Gestapo, where they were shot on site or sent toa death camp." Almost every survivor recalls circumstances where they experienced an attempt to uncover their identity or to blackmail them. Situations that were particularly dangerous to Jews in hiding were those when they were directly or indirectly asked whether they were Jews or not. In one of the testimonies in the Jewish Historical Institute, submitted soon after the war, its author describes how, living on ‘Aryan’ identity papers, she tried to find a job as a dentist. She addressed a local physician, who responded ‘ “And maybe you are Jewish?” . . . My heart sank. I felt the pulse on my neck was beating so fast that everyone could recognize it, and I knew that my life depended on how I behaved. I got outraged that he could suspect me of such a thing. I showed him my documents, but I felt that all this did not clear up his doubts.’!4

Another survivor recalls a scene in a tram when he was asked by a stranger: ‘You are surely a Jew, aren’t your” I pretended I could not understand his question. Only when he repeated it twice, I declared he was mad and did not know what he was saying. I was truly somehow strangely calm. This made him lose his nerve

slightly. After seeing my document he apologized and went away.’!° All those who can recall the suspicions they aroused, the attempts to reveal their Jewish identity, or finally the attempts at blackmail, somehow managed to deal with these situations and, moreover, to survive the war and the Holocaust. That is why we can now write about their ways of dealing with suspicion and blackmail. We do

9 Glowinski, Czarne sezony, 116. |

10 The term is taken from the article by Maria Susulowska ‘“Aryjski” Zyd’, in Tygodnik Powszechny, 38 (1990).

11 The historian Gunnar S. Paulsson, in his work devoted to Jews on the ‘Aryan’ side in Warsaw, estimates that out of the total number of 27,000 Jews remaining in Warsaw between the annihilation of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 and the beginning of the Warsaw uprising in August 1944, 17,000 survived and 10,000 were killed; see Secret City: The Hidden Jews of Warsaw, 1940-1945 (New Haven, 2002). 12 AZIH, 301/2167; Rebeka Peste, b. Warsaw, 1925, profession: dentist. 13 AZTH, 301/4900; Mieczystaw Rotsztejn, b. Lwow, 1926.

Facing Antisemitism in Poland IgI not, however, know anything or know next to nothing about similar situations that happened to those who died as their result. In the above examples, the people, when asked directly whether they were Jews or not, denied it. Ignoring such comments, reacting with outrage to a suggestion that perhaps one was a Jew, defence by

attack—these were methods used frequently by ‘Aryan’ Jews to deal with the threat of being revealed as Jewish. The testimonies of the survivors recall various situations, episodes, and events from their life on the ‘Aryan’ side during the occupation, which also to a certain extent restore the climate of social relations of the time (that is the social attitudes,

approaches, and stereotypes among Polish society at the time). Almost all elements in the life of ‘Aryan’ Jews related to their social interactions and mutual relations in the world on the other side of the wall. These social contacts were of various types: consensual, intended, and conscious, but also casual, enforced, and unwanted, which were avoided as much as possible because of the possibility of losing cover and the ever-present threat that Jews in hiding had to deal with. Some contacts could prove helpful, or even salutary to their survival. Other meetings with people could prove lethal, since by creating situations of suspicion, ambiguity, or indefiniteness those meetings intensified the threat and the difficulties of life on the ‘Aryan’ side, which was already peppered with dangers and problems. In order to understand the climate of social relations of the time it seems important to consider the memories of all types of interactions between the Jews in hiding and the Poles among whom they had to live on an everyday basis. These included the people they had known, but also completely anonymous people met in the street, in a shop, at work, or on a tram or train. A threat could be present anywhere, such was the climate of social relations at the time. Even a slight detail of appearance, an improper outfit, an unconscious gesture, a behaviour slightly different from the habitual one—all this could lead to the revelation of the Jewish identity of a person in hiding. This was mentioned by Natan Gross in his post-war testimony: ‘A gesture, a frown, a word, a bad mood, the failure to return someone’s smile, and thousands of other trivial details were very important to our feelings. In particular, I perfectly sensed when the suspicions of the concierge’s daughter, Maria, intensified and took on dimensions that were dangerous to us.’!* If this was so, the resent-

ment towards Jews, antisemitic attitudes, prejudices, and stereotypes were widespread in Polish society, and to a large extent impacted on the climate of Polish—Jewish relations at the time.

What was particularly difficult psychologically and morally for the Jews in hiding were the situations when other people expressed antisemitic opinions publicly and in their presence, including joy at what ‘Hitler was doing with Jews’. In my interlocutors’ testimonies one can find descriptions of various ways of reacting to antisemitic comments or statements they witnessed. Some just remained silent and tried not to react, pretending they could not hear, although such comments were 14 AZTH, 301/429; testimony by Natan Gross (b. Krakow, 1919), submitted in 1945 in Krakow.

192 Matgorzata Melchor painful: ‘I spent nights at various houses in the countryside, and everywhere there were strange conversations on the subject of Jews, sometimes terrible conversations. I could hear such conversations’ (M-8, 1927). ‘They started telling antiJewish jokes. I could not bear it and they sometimes realized it was hard for me. I could not bear it’ (K-4, 1913). “There were such moments when one had to hide what one felt. When you heard these antisemitic comments . . . This is why I do not feel a Pole’ (K-2, 1922). Anti-Jewish jokes or comments, particularly during the uprising in the Warsaw

ghetto, could not go unnoticed by the Jews in hiding. They experienced them painfully, although most frequently they did not show it in order not to betray themselves: ‘Listening to the in fact innocent Jewish or anti-Jewish jokes—as if this did not refer to you—it was awful’ (K-7, 1930). ‘One. . . had to smile and not to react to comments by Poles: “Look how those Jews are burning, lady.” .. . I only gritted my teeth and thought about them, about my kin, perhaps dying just then in those flames and in this smoke’.'° The impossibility of reacting to antisemitic comments, particularly in the face of the tragedy of the burning ghetto, when one could not even show compassion _ for the people dying behind the wall, evoked a feeling of helplessness among the Jews hiding under false identities: ‘I could only look how the ghetto was burning. I

took the tram here and back, [ listened to conversations of some passengers. Although my throat was sore, and I was hurt by the words of contempt and hatred, I had to keep quiet so as not to betray how painful this was. I was helpless.’!® Some ‘Aryan’ Jews, in order to lend more credibility to their adopted identity, believed they had to join people in their comments. It was a costly element of their masquerade, of entering a role of another person. For example, Leah Silverstein

recalls: ‘ “Look, her hair is red as if she is Jewish”, and they all laughed, and | laughed the loudest. Yet inside I was terrified.”!’ Yitzhak Sternberg wrote in his memoirs about the necessity of adopting the ways of the people on the ‘Aryan’ side, of assuming the attitudes presented (including antisemitic ones): ‘At work one could hear many antisemitic comments. I had to talk and laugh with them. I bore my mask all the time.’'® Chawka Folman-Raban too recalls similar situations: ‘When my travel companions started talking about Jews, I also had to take part in the conversation. [ could not remain neutral. I used offensive terms, just as everyone did. It is still a heavy burden for me.’'? According to Natan Gross, there were cases where an ‘Aryan’ Jew, in order to avoid suspicion or be more credible as a ‘true’ Pole, also expressed antisemitic opinions or confirmed such comments heard 5 'Y. Brandwajn-Ziemian, Ne’urim vetushiyah bemilhamah: zikhronot mimeit hasho’ah (Tel Aviv, 1994), 88. The author of these memoirs was also my interlocutor: K-2 5, 1921. 16 S. Kowalska-Glikman, ‘Gdy zdjeligsmy opaski’, in Losy Zydowskie: Swiadectwo zywych, ii (Warsaw,

1999), 150. 17 Leah Silverstein, born in 1924; USHMM Archive, sign. RG.-50.030.363. 18 T. Sternberg, Under Assumed Identity (Kibbutz Lohamei Hagetaot, 1986), 58. '9 C. Folman-Raban, Mie rozstatam sie z nimi... (Warsaw, 2000), 63~4.

Facing Antisemitism in Poland 193 from others.*° One of my interlocutors describes a particular situation of this type: ‘This man [in the dormitory |—he came from Poznan—started a conversation with me. And said: “Whatever one may say about Hitler, one has to agree that he liberated Poland from Jews.” “Yes, you are right.” What could I say? I could not enter into a discussion’ (K-15, 1913). There were also individuals who tried to oppose antisemitic comments. They had the courage to risk highly dangerous reactions to such opinions: I tried to oppose that. I was really in such an artificial situation. . . . I took the risk. Yet perhaps it seemed to me that people would never think that a person in danger could speak that way and stand in defence of Jews, that one could be ashamed of Poles who thought that way.

, And I was right. This was another proof that I was so-called OK; I just did not share such antisemitic views. (K-13, 1921)

Such forms of behaviour and reaction, according to Natan Gross, were a psychological indulgence, and were exceptional. The defence of Jews and voicing Opposition to antisemitic opinions by a Jew who had to conceal his or her Jewish identity were considered not only risky, but were ‘treated as complete madness, unnecessarily drawing attention and interest of the environment’.*' In most cases, antisemitic opinions were not reacted to; people tried to remain quiet when faced with offensive comments, and not to reveal their true emotions. At such moments the adopted identity was a particularly heavy burden to the ‘Aryan’ Jews. And increased their feeling of loneliness.

2. AFTER THE END OF THE WAR One of the key post-war life decisions facing the Jews who had survived the Holocaust was whether to emigrate from Poland or to remain there.*? Subsequent developments led the Jews living in Poland and the Poles of Jewish origin to pose this question to themselves on many occasions.”? Those who decided to stay after

the war tried to find their roots in Jewish communities or lived mainly among Poles. This latter group usually adopted one of two possible postures towards Polish society: either they revealed their Jewish origin or they tried to conceal it. 20 N. Gross, ‘Days and Nights in the “Aryan” Quarter: The Daily Worries of a Jew Carrying “Aryan

Papers”, Yad Vashem Bulletin, 4—5 (Oct. 1959). 21 Tbid. 2 According to various estimates, in the years 1945—6, approx. 120,000 Jews left Poland (out of the total of approx. 245,000), and in the next three years a further 40,000—50,000, of which in the period ‘between September 1949 and December 1950 almost 30,000 people left for the newly established state of Israel’. See Dzieje Zydéw w Polsce 1944-1968: Teksty Zrédtowe, ed. Alina Cala and Helena Datner-Spiewak (Warsaw, 1997), 174.

23 The wave of emigration in the period of the Thaw (1956—60) caused a drop in the number of Jews by approx. 17,000 (including Polish Jews from the USSR repatriated to Poland, but most of them emigrated immediately). The last wave of emigration of Polish Jews in the years 1968—71, after the

events of March 1968, caused by the antisemitic campaign started by the government authorities, affected approx. 20,000 people (see Dzieje Zydéw w Polsce 1944-1968, 175-6).

194 Matgorzata Melchior Irena Hurwic-Nowakowska’s research on the Jewish community in Poland in the first years after the Holocaust (begun in 1947 and completed in 1950) also deals with the decisions made by Jews on whether to emigrate or to stay in Poland. The questions of the survey prepared in 1948 by the Sociological Seminar of Warsaw University asked: ‘What country do you consider your homeland?’ and “Do you intend to remain in Poland? If not, why and what are your plans for the future?’** According to Hurwic-Nowakowska: The survey was sent to the Jews registered in Jewish committees, i.e. the Jews who by an act of voluntary registration declared themselves to be Jews. People who registered were the ones feeling Jewish, and in many cases those considered as the Jews by Nazism. People very often registered for utilitarian purposes, or because of an opportunity to obtain some material aid; therefore our survey also reached assimilated people.”°

The research investigated the Jewish community in Poland as a whole (not only those who had survived on ‘Aryan’ documents) and described the awareness and attitudes of individuals at a specific historical moment. ‘The community—as compared to the period immediately after the war—was already diminished by waves of emigration. Describing the population of the sample, Hurwic-Nowakowska states: ‘A great number of the Jewish survivors emigrated from Poland immediately after the war. Another wave of mass emigration occurred after the pogrom in Kielce, which took place on 4 July 1946. Mass emigration of the Jewish population certainly had serious effects on the others.’”° On the basis of replies to the two questions of the survey quoted above, the author draws attention to an interesting phenomenon observed in the sample: The number of people considering Poland as their homeland is greater than the number of those who wish to remain in Poland. There are, therefore, people who, despite considering Poland as their homeland, show emigration tendencies. The main reasons for this include the effects of the occupation, as well as all traumas, complexes, and antisemitism of a part of Polish society, as well as the notion of Polish antisemitism, etc. Moreover, an important cause of emigration tendencies is the awareness of the process of the vanishing Jewish community in Poland.?’

Among the people surveyed in 1948 there were 41.7 per cent who survived in Poland and 57.4 per cent who survived in the USSR. It is impossible to say what percentage of the sample was formed by people who managed to survive by concealing their Jewish identity. It seems that their share in the survey was rather marginal. Therefore, the question remains in the background about the decision on emigrating or remaining in Poland in reference to the post-war life of my interlocutors and other ‘Aryan’ Jews. 24 1 Hurwic-Nowakowska, Zydzi polscy (1947-1950): Analiza wiezi spolecznej ludnosci Zydowskie;

(Warsaw, 1996), 169.The text of the original survey is given in an appendix. The questions quoted were numbered 14 and 22.

25 Tbid. 21. 26 Ibid. 25. 27 Tbid. 87.

Facing Antisemitism in Poland 195 Biographies of Jews surviving on ‘Aryan’ documents whose testimonies are stored in the archives of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington seem to reveal various motives for their post-war decisions to emigrate from Poland. Important causes included both the nightmare of the war experiences and the loss of family, as well as the still present feeling of threat due to antisemitic attitudes prevailing in Poland (also after the war). Some of my interlocutors remained after the war with their false identities and documents from the occupation. What was the reason for that, and how do they now describe their decisions of years ago? Usually, there were several reasons at the same time. Among the important reasons for not returning to their true names were such factors as the continuing fear from the time of the occupation, the burden of war experiences that was hard to bear, and the fear of antisemitism from Polish society: I had no intention of leaving Poland.”° I did not want to return to my former name. I was still afraid. This fear in me remained from the time of the occupation. I still keep hiding something, I am not honest. I remained with the name of Stefania S—kowska and I feared my own shadow, I changed nothing. There were two ladies from my husband’s workplace who went to court with me and stated my name was Stefania S—kowska, and I still have this certificate. (K-6, 1921)

I did not want to return to my name from before the war, I had no need [of doing that]. There [in Krakéw], I had nobody in this community [from before the war]. My mum did not want that either. She was still very much afraid, still long after the war she was constantly affected by the war experiences and hiding. She was afraid to talk about it. I did not talk about it either, and I moved about among people who knew me [only] partially, and I preferred it to stay that way. I changed the name formally [to the one used during the war]. (K-17, 1909)

The fear of antisemitism after the war pushed some people to emigration, but others to refrain from returning to their true names and Jewish identity. People were so greedy . .. Everything was stolen. Not by the Germans. In this background antisemitism grew. And people developed this [wartime] antisemitism, as Hitler gave them such a right. (K-18, 1911)

My interlocutor who points to antisemitism as one of the reasons for remaining with the name ‘from the identity papers’ simultaneously gives other motives for that decision. In her case it was not only getting accustomed to the identity from the war years, but also her pre-war assimilation in Polish society and loose relations

with her Jewishness. Other testimonies of the survivors mainly pointed to the sensations of fear and danger, which persisted long after the war because of the experiences of the occupation and hiding. The survivors were also thoroughly convinced that antisemitism was pervasive among Poles. Previously quoted results 28 The interlocutor (K-6, 1921) emigrated from Poland in 1968 and currently lives in Israel. She regularly visits Poland on holidays.

196 Matgorzata Melchior of the poll by Irena Hurwic-Nowakowska seem to confirm this opinion among the Jews surveyed: “The central theme in the statements by survey participants is the problem of antisemitism among Poles.’2° Antisemitism experienced during the war and also after the war, the persistent feeling of danger despite the end of the war, and tragic experiences—all these affected decisions made by the survivors about their post-war life and identity (not only on the part of the Jews surviving the Holocaust on ‘Aryan’ papers). The relationship of surviving ‘Aryan’ Jews with Poles, as a result of their war experiences and due to the fear of antisemitism, could still exhibit distrust, caution, and lack of full honesty and openness years after: Am I easy-going towards Poles? Haven’t I got a trauma? I have a big trauma. I try to fight it,

but I am faced with various [antisemitic] comments, even [on the part of] very close friends. In my working environment, among Poles only, I never betray this [my origin]. In no discussions with strangers—certainly not. This alertness remained. I am not always honest, I keep hiding something. (K-14, 1914)

Individual post-war choices (particularly related to the decision of continuing one’s ‘Aryan’ life and hiding one’s Jewish origin from others) were often justified, considering the antisemitism people faced in Poland at the time. An important element of the post-war decisions of some ‘Aryan’ Jews—those who did not wish to reveal their Jewish identity or to return to their war-time or pre-war identity—was the resolve to conceal the truth about their experiences and

Jewish origin also from their children. Some decided to baptize their children and to bring them up in the Catholic faith in order to efface their Jewish origin and avoid any contrast between their children and Polish society at large: After the war, antisemitism never vanished. After Krysia was born, I said to myself that my children will not pay for the religion I did not feel in myself. And Krysia has been baptized. I said to myself: If Iam to live here, let it end, this being a Jew that I am not, as I did not feel anything in common with this community. I belong to the small group of the Jews who have nothing in common with Jewishness. My family has been assimilated for generations. (K-18, 1911)

In the first years after the war, the survivors made further individual decisions. Some, such as the decision to emigrate and the selection of the country to go to, or to remain in Poland, could impact on a large part or even the entire later biography of a person. Yet not all identity decisions made then had to be irrevocable. And not all choices made then remained unchanged. In many cases, further events could modify such choices.

3. FACING THE ANTISEMITIC CAMPAIGN OF MARCH 1968 In post-war Poland there were events and moments that could particularly affect the life of Holocaust survivors and their changed attitude towards themselves. In 29 Hurwic-Nowakowska, Zydzi polscy, p. xi.

Facing Antisemitism in Poland 197 this context, in the interviews I conducted, the most frequent references were to

March 1968. The events and the accompanying antisemitic campaign (stateorganized propaganda under the slogan of opposing Zionism)*° seem to be the most dramatic period in the post-war biographies of the Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust. ‘They were then brutally reminded of their Jewish roots. For many, questioning their Polish identity and real ties to Poland was painful, and led them to decide on emigration. One of the survivors writes about this period in her later memoirs: Everything started collapsing then. I lost hope that a Jew would ever be able to live in Poland without the stigma of his or her origin. The feeling of the pre-war humiliation returned. I was put down by the awareness of the intensifying isolation and loneliness. Fear

that had been suppressed for years was now revealed. Embittered and disillusioned, I decided to emigrate from Poland. I was parting with all my nearest and dearest, I was leaving behind everything I had achieved. I was going to strangers in an unknown world. I felt

the burden of responsibility for my and my son’s life. The story from the past was repeated.?+

Among the small sample of my interlocutors, there were three people who, under

the influence of those events, decided to emigrate from Poland. One of the interlocutors (M-19, 1921) emigrated to Israel with his Polish wife and a teenage son. Another left for France with her two children, while her husband stayed in Poland. The third interlocutor decided to leave Poland with her three children and, persuaded by her second husband, went to Israel. From today’s perspective, they all confirm they did this mainly out of concern for their children and their future: I wasn’t thinking at all about leaving Warsaw. My [second] husband wanted to go to Israel very much, as he knew Hebrew. If at all, I wanted to go to America. We spent two weeks in Vienna. My little daughter cried. I broke down and finally agreed to go to Israel. I arrived in Israel on 6 September 1968. There was khamsin.°? How much I cried then. . . (K-6, 1921)

My kids were hurt then [in 1968], I myself—not as much. Yet when a child says that he doesn’t want to be called ‘F-man’ or ‘shit’, and when a son—whose father is a decent man—-says that this man is not his father, it means it is bad. I did not lose my job, I was just refused the degree of doctor habilitatus. But this is not as terrible as to leave Poland. (K-2, 1922)

This was a hard time for many families. It often happened that the adult children of the survivors decided to emigrate by themselves. One of my interlocutors tells me about her son, who survived the war with her as a small child, and after March ’68 was forced to emigrate from Poland: 8° M. Glowinski, Marcowe gadanie (Warsaw, 1991); J. Eisler, Marzec 1968: Geneza, przebieg, konsekwencje (Warsaw, 1991).

31H. Zawadzka, Ucieczka z getta (Warsaw, 2001), 167. See also the memoirs of Janina Bauman, who describes her post-war life in Poland and the circumstances in which she decided to emigrate in 1968: A Dream of Belonging: My Life in Postwar Poland (London, 2000). 82 Khamsin (Arabic), a dry, very hot wind, blowing in the south-eastern part of the Mediterranean.

198 Matgorzata Melchior Now my son does not remember anything [from the time of war and hiding]. I can hardly remember, so how can he remember that? Anyway, he does not want to remember. When there is a film showing the tragedy of the Jews, he will never watch it. When [in 1968] he was deprived of his Polish citizenship, he does not want to return to Poland. He says: ‘I was thrown away, so I’m not coming back.’ (K-10, 1913)

ories from the period:

Those among my interlocutors who decided not to emigrate also have bad mem-

1968 was terrible. Yet it came as no surprise to me. I worked at the Krakow Philharmonic as an announcer. Most employees knew [about my origin]. .. . Soon afterwards, after my husband’s death I was left alone. I could leave for Sweden, become an archive worker there and get a pension later, but I didn’t. (K-18, 1911)

In 1968 I was thrown out [from my job at the Ministry of Culture]. Very well. I no longer had any delusions. (K-16, 1913)

One of my interlocutors, who concealed her Jewish identity for many years, took that antisemitic campaign very personally, despite continuously hiding her origin and never experiencing any persecutions herself: “This entire period of March 68 and everything that happened later was a moving experience for me. I even went to a psychiatrist. But I did not betray myself to him; I did not even say why I came to him’ (K-7, 1930).

As a result of the events of March 1968 and the antisemitic campaign, some people, children of the Holocaust survivors, if they had not known it before, now learned about their own roots—from others or from their parents: I told my son about my family, about the past when it started to be a problem, that is in

1968. He was 17 [then]. (K-5, 1931) , Around 1968, many of my daughter’s friends found out that their mum or dad was Jewish. And they are still suffering incredibly for this reason. My daughter never had this problem. She has not ever suffered any disgrace due to her origin. When she had just started thinking, I told her of Alwernia, I told her of her grandma. I started with candles [on the sabbath], with our customs. I told her how her grandma got married under the canopy [Aupah]. I did that straight away, just when she started thinking. (K-16, 1913)

The events of March ’68 were often particularly dramatic for those young people whose parents had survived the Holocaust and not told them anything about their Jewish origin, which they learned of now, often from strangers with antisemitic views: “That 1968 was terrible! My daughter, for example, holds it against us that we had not told her anything’ (K-1, 1921). Some did not tell their children about their Jewish roots in order to protect them from antisemitism. Others, to prepare their children to cope with stigmatization and social rejection, tried to provide them as soon as possible with some information about their family, about the past, about references to their Jewish heritage.

Many people, including the children of my interlocutors, emigrated from Poland in 1968 and later. Certainly their reasons for leaving Poland were not always

Facing Antisemitism in Poland 199 related to their Jewish origin or to the manifestations of antisemitism they had

experienced. Yet it is a fact that out of nineteen interlocutors—those who remained in Poland after the emigration wave in the years 1968—71, and who had children®?’—the children of eleven of them live outside Poland now.** Therefore, the decision to stay in Poland after the war was also adopted by their children only

inIn thethe case of eight interlocutors. interviews I asked my interlocutors to specify how they felt today (in the

late 19gos) in reference to their Polish and Jewish identity. The replies were neither simple nor unambiguous. Individuals vary as to the significance attached to their Polishness and Jewishness. Most interlocutors define themselves through reference to both identifications, Polish and Jewish, at the same time, yet place the stress differently, and assign different meanings to those identifications. One of my interlocutors pointed out the inapplicability of discussing the alternatives, since for him both identifications were equally important: ‘If someone asked me whether I am a Pole or a Jew, I would not be able to say “either-or”. I am one and the other. Such questions should pass into the history of the German and Soviet occupation’ (M-8, 1927). Some refer to the sense of their double identity in the following manner: There is something schizophrenic about my perception of nationality. I feel very closely related to Poland. I could never live anywhere outside Poland. Not only because I am old, but because I care about everything in this country. I am just sometimes scared of people nowadays. . . . | wanted [after the war] not to be Jewish any more, I just failed. I simply failed to do that. But this does not mean that I spit on others. Any nationalism is alien to me. Because other people see me like that [as a Jew], I cannot say this is not true. I am here, Iam from here. I feel very strongly bound to Poland. (K-1, 1921) This is very complicated. I don’t even know whether I clearly understand what it is really like. There is some connection [with the other Jews]. After the war—there is a certain solidarity. And yet I feel more Polish than Jewish. I don’t know—or perhaps [I feel] the same. (K-3, 1905)

The two interlocutors quoted above were not alone in defining themselves through close relations with their Polishness. However, both the memory of war experiences and about what happened to Jews then, and the sensitivity to all manifestations of antisemitism, made some of my interlocutors affirm their Jewish identity even though they had previously tried to forget it. They did not wish to deny it any longer. This is their present awareness despite having decided otherwise immediately after the war, despite not having wanted then to return to their Jewish identity, or even admit it.

For example, two of my interlocutors who defined themselves primarily as Poles also admitted that they are Jewish, principally when confronted with antisemitism: 23 Out of the total number of twenty-six interlocutors in my interviews, at the time twenty-two lived in Poland, of which three women had no children. 34 Tn the USA and various west European countries (but not in Israel).

200 Matgorzata Melchior When faced with antisemitic attitudes, in such situations I defend my Jewishness and I feel Jewish. I then say I am Jewish. Yet I am also a Pole, and I cannot be denied that. (K-14, 1914)

If anyone just tries to say something [antisemitic], the first thing I do is to introduce myself. I principally feel Polish. I don’t see any difference. I feel as much Polish as Jewish. Every Pole is as close to me as every Jew. It is only that with a Jew I can talk about my experiences. When one is old, one turns back to the past. (K-10, 1913)

The above statement expresses the conviction of many of my interlocutors that at the end of one’s life one looks back to the past. If this is really so, it is because those were the days of the person’s youth, but also because with age one begins to live with the past. In many cases it may even happen that a previously rejected identity becomes increasingly important when compared to earlier years, and becomes pri-

mary with regard to the Polish identification that had previously been chosen specifically as the only or principal identity. In many of my interlocutors’ statements one can sense some ambivalence in the

way they express their identification. On the one hand, the previously quoted interlocutor convinces us that after the end of the war she joined the Krakow Jewish Committee and that at the time she did not fear rejection or antisemitism. On the other hand, however, the same person claims that both before and after the war she mainly felt Polish. What is more, she is of the opinion that ‘One should not be a Jew in Poland nowadays’ (K-18, 1911), and that she does not perceive the sense of rebuilding Jewish institutions here, aimed at restoring the community: ‘All these organizations created nowadays in Poland by the Jews. . . I understand that there is a Jewish community for those 2,000 or 3,000 Jews scattered across Poland. But the other [organizations]? I am against developing any community from scratch. It is as if one wanted to build a synagogue on the swamp’ (K-18,

1g11). This person clearly points to what personally defines her: ‘For me my homeland is the Polish language. I am really filled with authors like Zeromski, Stowacki. I could not find myself somewhere [abroad] in the street and not know what people are talking about. Here [in Poland], I know everything people are talking about’ (K-18, 1911). To my question whether she believed her present feeling of Polishness was affected by wartime experiences, she replied: ‘No, because I was Polish also before the war. I had Polish friends. It was from school times. . . . But at the same time, in the 1930s, I and my husband were members of the Makabi®°

rowing club. Moreover, I was often invited to spend Christmas Eve with my friends. I feel Polish only’ (K-18, 1911).

Another interlocutor tries to explain her way of identification during her ‘Aryan’ existence in terms of magical thinking: ‘It is truly a matter of defining who 35 Makabi: a Jewish sports organization with a Zionist orientation. The world Makabi movement began in 1903. In 1930 Makabi clubs in Poland included about 30,000 members (in 150 clubs), and in 1937, 150,000 members (in about 200 clubs): J. Tomaszewski and A. Zbikowski (eds.), Zydzt w Polsce: Dzieje i kultura. Leksykon (Warsaw, 2001), 302.

Facing Antisemitism in Poland 201 I really am. I would have preferred all this during the war not to be true. And that I really was Polish, Catholic, and I was born like that. Yet that was impossible. It was only some kind of magical thinking’ (K-5, 1931). After many years of not return-

ing to the wartime past and the Jewish dimension of her identity, her present thinking about herself 1s—as she herself admits—quite complex: I do not talk about it with people I don’t know well, not with my friends, as—first—it is quite a complex issue for myself who I really am. Second—I don’t want to be the odd one out, [ don’t want to stand out. This is complicated. My consciousness is complex—who I am. When we start with birth, I was born in a Jewish family. So these ancestors are in me, you can’t help that. Maybe a few more people live in me? Life is so precious that if you have survived, it is some gift and there is no need for deliberating. . . . I still can’t hide that all Catholic holidays are much closer to me now than [ Jewish] ones. (K-5, 1931)

The perception of many facets of the self, or varied but not conflicting dimensions of one’s identity, may be related to the superimposition of various identifications of the individual, different in time and in particular periods of his or her life. In the case of the interlocutor quoted above, there is also the case of different identity decisions made after the war by herself and her parents. She remained in Poland and decided not to return to her past and to her Jewishness. Her parents and her younger brother left Poland late in 1949 and then, after the years of hiding their background, returned to their Jewish identification, also in the religious sense: ‘My father, when they arrived there in France, began regularly to attend synagogue again’ (K-5, 1931). The same person also indicates that the way of defining herself depends on the

situation and on many other factors which might cause one of the dimensions of her identity at any one time to become more important than the others.?° These various identifications and dimensions form the complex, multi-partite identity of an individual: “This | Jewish] identification occurring 1n various moments depends on many things. It depends on the situation’ (K-5, 1931). Some Holocaust survivors still experience trauma from the past, related (inter alia) to concealing their true identity. As a result of the trauma of war and of experiencing antisemitism, some survivors developed certain escape reactions. These could take the form of literal escape, but also imaginary escape, or a state of mind consisting in imagining oneself as someone different than in reality. The interlocutors, particularly those who after the war decided not to return to their wartime and pre-war past and to their Jewish identification, point to elements which seem decisive for their Polish identification. They also mention the fundamental reasons for their present connection with Jews. The first issue refers to the Polish dimension of their identity. The core elements of their Polish identity (but 36 The issue of indices of social identity of an individual as related to situations has been discussed in M. Melchior, Spoleczna tozsamosé sednostki (w swietle wywiadéw z Polakam pochodzenta zydowskiego urodzonymi w latach 1944-1955) (Warsaw, 1990), 243-61.

202 Matgorzata Melchior also the reasons making them feel Polish), according to their own interpretation, principally include: upbringing in the Polish culture, the Polish language as their mother tongue, attachment to their place of birth, the place where they spent their youth and later years, as well as ties with people and involvement in Polish matters. Another dimension of their identity refers to their Jewishness. It turns out that nowadays the same interlocutors also admit their Jewish origin. This is caused, on the one hand, by their awareness of the Holocaust, that is everything that happened to the Jews during the war, and their own wartime past and experiences, which constitute an important element of such awareness. On the other hand, admitting their Jewishness was sometimes their reaction to manifestations of antisemitism they faced. Moreover, many of my interlocutors explained that as they became old, they increasingly recalled the past and everything that used to define them then, therefore also their Jewishness as a certain (more or less important) aspect of their prewar and family life. Also for this reason, as if secondarily, their previously unwanted and rejected Jewishness again became a dimension of their present identity. Some interlocutors, not wishing to deny their origin, at the same time objected to being stigmatized by other people. The Holocaust and the annihilation of their nearest and dearest meant that they neither wanted nor felt it was morally possible to deny their origins: as they explained, this would be a self-betrayal, a betrayal of their past and their roots: as if they were denying their kin murdered 1n the camps of Belzec, Treblinka, or Auschwitz.

In many of my interlocutors’ statements one can sense a certain ambivalence concerning their self-identification, for they simultaneously feel Polish and Jewish at heart. This may sometimes lead to an unwillingness to define oneself at all using such identifications. For example, one of my interlocutors declared she did not actually feel ‘either a Pole or a Jew’. And although in another part of the interview she said that owing to the Holocaust and to the fact that she herself managed to survive she cannot deny her Jewish affiliation, she still admits: ‘I am not really a Jew, if I were to say who I really am, but I certainly cannot say about myself that I am a Pole’ (K-2, 1922). Thus, the interlocutor quoted denies being a Jew (in the sense of having positive references to what was to form elements of Jewish identity), although at the same time she admits to her Jewish origin and, owing to the Holocaust, to relations with other Jews. Despite being brought up in the Polish language and Polish culture, she nowadays does not feel a Pole either, mainly

because of antisemitism that was widespread among Poles: ‘What therefore remains after this experience [of war|? Awareness how very antisemitic Poles are. It’s because when one was anonymous [among Poles, with “Aryan” documents], you know much more from the inside. When you listen to what I wouldn’t have been told if they had known I was a Jew. This has remained, unfortunately. ‘This is why I do not feel Polish today’ (K-2, 1922). This interlocutor and her adult children now live in France, where they emigrated after the events of March ’68. When attempting to reply to the question

Facing Antisemitism in Poland 203 about her self-definition nowadays, she also wonders how her children define themselves: My son says he is a cosmopolitan. He is very much interested in our [parents’| past. In turn, my daughter did not even read my memoirs [from the war], she did not even open this book. My son is interested in what is going on in Poland now. He is more related to Poland, although he would not admit to being Polish. My daughter speaks to me in Polish, but she reads French books, as it is easier for her. What identity is that? I do not know. It is certainly not French, certainly not Polish, and certainly not Jewish. (K-2, 1922)

CONCLUSION Reactions to experiencing antisemitism (not only among the Holocaust survivors who managed to survive the war under a false, non-Jewish identity) can include fear, a feeling of threat, and a negative identification with one’s Jewish origin.®’ Yet, confronted with antisemitism, an affirmation of one’s Jewish identity may also occur (or be intensified). This was mentioned years ago by Jean-Paul Sartre, who formulated a thesis that ‘antisemitism created Jews’.?° During the war, when antisemitism was related to extermination, experiencing it was lethal, or at least dramatic and extremely painful. It had a profound impact on the later biographies of Holocaust survivors. 37 Melchior, Spoleczna tozsamo sé jednostki.

38 J.-P. Sartre, Rozwazania o kwestii zydowskiej (L6dZ, 1992), 138, published in English as AntiSemite and few, trans. G. J. Becker (New York, 1995).

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools of

the 1960s

JOANNA WISZNIEWICZ AREAS OF BELONGING ‘I’M INTERESTED in the ways the first post-Holocaust generation of Jews and persons of Jewish descent raised in communist Poland after the war experienced their Jewishness. Would you grant me an interview?’ I asked this question of many Polish Jews or persons of Jewish descent growing up in various places and environments of post-war Poland and born in the years 1944-53. That so-called ‘March generation’ experienced the 1968 antisemitic campaign with mature understanding. The dramatic nature of that event impacted them so intensely that their sense

of identity developed differently from that of the younger children of postHolocaust generations. This explains the age boundaries.

I conducted about ninety taped interviews of many hours with people who either still live in Poland or left Poland after 1968 and settled in the USA, where many of those €migrés moved (besides Sweden, Denmark, and Israel). The majority of them were raised in fully Jewish families, but some came from mixed families (including some Polish—Russian) or converted families (few). Their parents survived the war in Poland or abroad (usually having fled to the USSR). The main topic of our conversations was to what degree and how my interlocutors identify with their Jewish origins. The question concerned all their lives, but this essay covers only their childhood and school years. And it refers to just one, Slightly different versions of this text can be found in E. Bergman and O. Zienkiewicz (eds.), Zydzi Warszawy: Matertalty konferencpi w roo. roceznice urodzin Emanuela Ringelbluma (21 listopada 1900-7 marca 1944), Warszawa 13-15 grudnia 2000 r. (Warsaw, 2000), and also in Res Publica Nowa, 1 (2004).

The text is a part of a larger project on the first post-war generation of Polish Jews. The study was conducted by the Jewish Historical Institute with support from the following: the University of Central Europe, Kosciuszko Foundation, YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, Alexander Hertz Foundation, Foundation for Jewish Philanthropies in Buffalo, Littauer Foundation, Delta Airlines, three friends who wish to remain anonymous, the Polish Ministry of Arts and Culture, ArtsLink Foundation, and the Committee for Scientific Research, Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research.

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 205 small group: those who were raised in central Warsaw and went to schools in the city centre. My interviews date from the mid-1gg9o0s, some thirty to forty years after the events and experiences recalled. Their perspective therefore is double: that of children or teenagers of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the same people at the time of the interviews, middle-aged, many of whom spent their adult lives away from

Poland. I expected that the main focus of the interviews would be the tension between Polish and Jewish identities in the lives of my interviewees. After all, the Poland where they were raised, after the war, under communism, was pretty much a homogeneous, ethnically Polish and religiously Catholic country, subject to communist uniformity. I assumed that the monolithic nature of that society thwarted the expression or even awareness of separate individual identities. The interviews, however, only partially confirmed my assumptions. And though

their subject indeed was the tension between Polish and Jewish identities, the material gathered presented a variety of attitudes and experiences. It revealed that even in post-war homogeneous Poland the conditions under which identities of the first post-Holocaust generation of Jews developed varied greatly and contained many diverse elements.

WARSAW’S UNIQUENESS Initially, the variety of attitudes towards Jewishness among my interlocutors was relatively easy to explain and sort out. I soon realized that for the Jewish youth the social scene in Warsaw differed from that outside the capital. In Lower Silesia, £,0dz, or Szczecin, their parents were usually a part of large groups of Polish Jews who emotionally, culturally, and institutionally identified as Jews. Social cohesion

in that milieu had a great influence on their children, who spent much of their school year in Jewish clubs, and vacations at Jewish summer camps.

In Warsaw, it was different. ‘Though here too a strong Jewish milieu existed, in , addition to those who identified with Jewishness and participated in the life of Jewish institutions there was another, large group with Jewish roots who avoided those institutions. In family or social situations, they did not deny their origins, but

they wanted to live the life of Polish society and be totally absorbed into it. Therefore they did not like being formally recognized as Jewish: 1: My parents opposed such associations [as TSKZ—Socio-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland] where you stood out as a Jew.

2: Atone point .. . I told my father that I would like to go to the TSKZ camp . . . and Father

got very angry with me, saying I would not be going to TSKZ, that we live in Poland and are like everybody else, so we will not separate ourselves by joining another group. ' Loffered my interviewees anonymity; they are identified here by number.

206 Joanna Wiszmewicz In my Warsaw interviewees’ stories, Jews who distanced themselves from Jewishness were frequently represented, either as those young people’s parents, or their parents’ friends and acquaintances. They lived in Zoliborz or Mokotéw, but mainly in the centre of the city. They avoided formal, public identification with Jewishness, but enjoyed getting together, which created a paradoxical situation in Warsaw. For, trying to become invisible as Jews, they at the same time formed (with other Jews striving for invisibility) an attractive, large, and recognized community, common goals, united by shared cultural traits. 1: We had a certain kind of humour, intelligence, and education. ... Q: Could you describe it? A: A Jewish intellectual. ... A sort of openness to the world, to innovation. . . . Curiosity about recent sociological trends in France . . . viewing culture as borderless. . .. Knowledge of languages, a sense that you can be a citizen any place... A kind of sparkling and witty conversation.

Differences between the Warsaw social environment and that of Jewish communities in western Poland and in Lodz came as no surprise. The group cohesion of Jewish settlers in the formerly German territories annexed to Poland after the Second World War and in deserted post-war 1.0dz seems to be based on the shared condition as pioneers in the new areas where all survivors were reconstructing —_ their lives. But I was amazed by disparities within the capital itself. Having conducted a number of interviews, I realized that the identity of children of Jewish descent who lived in the city centre and attended schools there was formed under different conditions than in other parts of Warsaw. The integral element of that uniqueness was the presence in central Warsaw of exactly that group of people who, born Jewish, refused to be visibly recognized as Jews.

THE CHILDREN’S QUESTIONS The community of Warsaw Jews who did not identify themselves as Jewish was the

topic of my numerous debates, but my interlocutors’ interpretations of this attitude brought more questions than answers. Why did that absurd situation of a community of Jews avoiding Jewishness arise at all? What attracted those people to each other? Why did their efforts to assimilate and melt into the Polish environment stop midway? And why did such a group exist only in Warsaw, even though

outside the city many people of Jewish descent also distanced themselves from Jewishness? One question followed another. Why were my interviewees’ parents mostly left-

ist? (They ranged from leftist non-party sympathizers to those actively involved with the system, with positions in the party apparatus, or even prominent communists.) And why did numerous scientists, scholars, and artists of Jewish descent also belong to that Warsaw elite close to the circles of power? 3: My parents had lots of friends, mostly Jews—of Jewish origin. .. . They used to socialize within their Jewish circle. That always surprised me. 1: Q: Were all those your parents

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 207 associated with communists? A: Yes, to be sure. . . . I was already in such an environment, you know, closed, with a lot of Jews. 4: And the realization that the communist government in Poland after all, especially in the early period, was, well, to a large . . . in large measure composed of Jews, which wasn’t . . .

what was rather unsettling...

My interlocutors in general clearly understood the seductive power the communist promise of universal equality before the war held for their parents. They heard about pre-war antisemitism, of ethnic and societal barriers and humiliations. They understood that communism alone gave their young parents a sense of parity and opened one of the roads to assimilation. They saw the attraction of communist conspiracy that—even though it condemned their parents to a life of one jail sentence after another—still made that life feel meaningful and increased their selfrespect. And they honoured the communist ethos of group solidarity and sacrifice, a result of the pre-war communist conspiracy, which parents often conveyed to their children in colourful accounts of their youthful years. My interviewees, however, often were not aware of how small the number of communists among Jews in pre-war Poland was (0.16—0.29 per cent of all Polish Jews before the war, compared to the post-war period of approximately 2 per cent in 1947, and about 14 per cent by the end of 1949).” Also, it rarely occurred to them that, had their parents been less committed to assimilation before the war, they might have become involved in other dynamic, non-communist Jewish groups and organizations. Lack of this information made the young people believe even more that they understood their parents’ choice of ideology. What bothered them more was not their parents’ motivations in joining the Communist Party, but their reasons for remaining faithful to it for years. 5: [Father . . .] was accused of Trotskyism . .. Until the end of 1953 . . . he was interrogated every day for a good . . . over a year. Q: And in spite of that your father remained a party member? ... A: My father is very defensive. He says there is no chance I would understand lit]. 1: Father was annoyed, for he didn’t want me to support the current Polish authorities, but wanted me to believe in the zdeology [that varied from the everyday reality of socialism]. Only much later, as an adult, did I realize . . . that the whole system could be rejected. . . . This exactly is the problem of those honest communists: they seemed to act honestly, but within something that didn’t allow for honesty.

6: Father . . . when he returned to Poland [from the Soviet Union, after the war], he found nothing there. No family, no home, no one. And some of his friends . . . they were mostly communists. According to him—he was dragged into it. He was told that ‘.. . we do great things here’. And... he agreed... . I imagine him, as he arrives from Russia to a complete vacuum, I mean emptiness, and someone offers him something . . . that gives him a sense of meaning. He can get involved. He has nothing and there is something he can link up with. 2 According to J. Schatz, ‘On the Myth of “Zydokomuna”’, Jidele special edn. (Spring 2000), 65.

208 Joanna Wiszmiewicz Some interviewees perceived a vague connection between their parents’ communism and their attitude to Jewishness: 7. The reason my parents chose that particular [communist] road . . . isn’t quite clear to me. But it had something to do with their total silence on Jewish matters, with their never mentioning the past.

‘Why did your parents never mention their Jewish past and why was their attitude to things Jewish so inconsistent?’ This was another set of questions considered by my Warsaw interlocutors, the majority of whom had a very difficult access to the family’s past, especially its Jewish aspects. Their parents either kept silent or shared only highly selective information with the children. 7: To descend from something . .. My parents somehow cut themselves off . . . there was no past, nothing was there, it was empty. 1: My aunt [met much later in life, overseas] recalled the family history, about which Father

talked a lot... in a slightly different way. The aunt presented the Jewish character of the family more clearly.

Children realized early enough that their parents’ relation to Jewish matters was complicated. On the one hand, the parents neglected their Jewish origins (or tried to hide them from the children); on the other, they often signalled to the children

their Jewish pride and informed them favourably about who around them was Jewish, and who was not. 5: Q: So what did your mother tell you [about the Jewish origin of the family]? A: Not much, nothing really, one conversation . . . The conversation was that it didn’t matter, it was not important, but that those were the facts. 8: There was indeed such a pattern at home: this one’s a Jew, or that one’s a Jew. . . among well-known figures, right? Mickiewicz’s mother too, everyone knows that.

3: Dad was always saying: ‘Hey! This one is a Jew! And this one, that young girl . . . she must be Jewish. That is a Jewish surname.’

Informing children about their Jewish descent and explaining who Jews are and how they differ from Poles was one of the most difficult issues in their education. 1: Dad told me that as a piece of information which was supposed to protect me from some-

thing. I felt that—so I wouldn’t find out in a wrong way. Just as you tell your kid where children come from. 7: My parents told me that I was . . . that we were Jewish, when I was perhaps seven, or eight... . Q: Did you ask what, what .. . what it meant that you were Jewish? ... A: We didn’t talk about that.

In some homes the parents’ uneasiness with Jewish subjects and their ambivalent attitude were also expressed in their language: g: ‘Jew’, ‘Jewish’ . . . these were the words my parents feared. . . . Actually we never pronounced the word ‘Jew’; what was used were the words ‘amchu’, or ‘ours’. ... But... one of

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 209 the somehow more significant pieces of information exchanged about other people obviously was is he. . . ‘amchu’, is he one of ‘ours’? Those [‘amchu’] were definitely people closer to us.

1: In my home, by the way, the word Jew was never used . . . just that familiar expression: ... ‘He is ex nostris’. That means people were divided between those who were ‘ex nostris’ or not. Q: How was that ‘ex nostris’ pronounced? A: In a subdued tone, certainly.

Some parents decided not to tell children about their origins. In such cases, obviously, the parents’ job was done for them by the children’s intuition or simply—the street. 10: In a sense, you know, I was aware of being Jewish. After all, you know, I had my black hair, and dark eyes, and I was spat on in the street from time to time and, you know, called names... I remember from childhood, when someone walked by . . . he would spit at me and, you know, something about a Jewess.

2: How did I know? From the neighbours . . . Kids in the street . . . I didn’t go to the first communion, well, everybody knew. ... We had a maid .. . who was. . . teased by the neighbours for working in a Jewish home. Q: And you never asked your father about that? A: No. ... After all, you know, if there are certain things never mentioned, then you think there are things at home... that you never discuss.

The children who didn’t find out about their descent until March ’68 or even later considered themselves Polish. And the later they found out about their roots, the greater was the shock that information caused. My work on how Jewishness was experienced also in childhood covers only those who discovered their Jewish origin not later than at age 14. It may be worth suggesting, though, that the identity formation of the ‘uninformed’ children, who grew up in an atmosphere dominated by the parents’ efforts to hide their Jewish roots, deserves a separate study, perhaps even a comparison with those families who decided to bring up children of Jewish descent as Catholics.

THE HOLOCAUST In spite of the parental determination to avoid Jewish subjects, one Jewish theme

kept forcing its way inexorably into the children’s family consciousness: the Holocaust. Information about it was transmitted both through the parents’ stories

, and, more frequently, by their silence. ‘The emotional impact of that account seems to have been equally strong in homes of those whose parents survived the Holocaust in Poland as in the families where the parents managed to escape the Holocaust, unlike their relatives, who perished: 3: My parents .. . never really talked about it. They never wanted to see [the family graves]. Perhaps we went there once.

6: My mother .. . never mentions her home, or anyone from her family. [The Holocaust] was too great a shock to her to speak about.

210 Joanna Wisznewicz 7: [Mother] lost all her family... . She still thinks and talks about it every day. Q: You always knew that she thought about it daily? A: I did. It was in the air.

For many children of people distancing themselves from Jewishness, memory of the Holocaust was often the only concrete information about Jews as a group apart and about their families’ Jewish past. In other words, it was actually the only element of their Jewish identity.

perished. |

7: After all we had no history at all! None! ... What kind of past did I have? Mother named all her brothers and sisters who perished, and father named all his brothers and sisters who

8: Q: You never wondered what it meant [to be a Jew]? A: No, with that one exception... that it means having less of a family and that... we once had a large one, but. . . it went up in smoke. .. .Q: You were always aware of that? A: I always was.

Silence about the family past often meant not mentioning murdered relatives. On the one hand it protected the children from the heavy emotional burden of

victims: ,

knowledge about the murdered; on the other, however, it erased the memory of the 6: The fact that my parents never talked to me about it—I didn’t think of it. Those people [uncles, aunts] didn’t exist. 2: If ... you don’t know... your father’s past until the age of 12—13, you have no idea that anything like that happened... . And one doesn’t think of it, doesn’t wonder about it.

Many years later, as adults, my interlocutors would painfully and intensely look for the ways to discover their family histories. In that period, however, they simply found the ways of filling the vacant areas of familial memory with some substitute, often fictitious: 11: I felt my otherness . . . exactly because of the lack of family. .. . I never wondered nor asked about why. But it certainly bothered me to the extent that I made up. . . a greatgrandfather. ... He lived in a Parisian suburb, had two villas and seven cars.

IN PLACE OF JEWISHNESS—WHAT? Parents also used substitutes—though theirs were not fictional. In the homes under discussion, silence about the family’s Jewish tradition was replaced by the heroic tradition of participation in the pre-war communist conspiracy or wartime struggle. About that adventurous part of their past the parents not only did not keep quiet, they willingly told infinite stories: 4: Dad always told about his pre-war prison sentence [for his communist activity |].

1: My parents were raised as children in Poland before the war always threatened by and escaping from the police [because of the family’s communism]. g: Dad took part in the September 1939 campaign. . . . There [at home] are numerous detailed accounts, interestingly conveyed, and with great pride . . .a story of some radio station.

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 211 In those stories, the parents taught their children the romantic and heroic ethos of courage, striving for truth, loyalty to oneself and to the idea, devotion to others, _ and reaction to injustice: 1: The belief that for different views you pay with your liberty was simply something I grew up with, it probably seemed normal. . . . I considered prison, camp, struggle a part of every life story. 4: That was the kind of, you know, speeches [father] used to make: “Don’t smoke, for when you are in prison, they, you know, will take your cigarettes away.’ . . . ‘Remember, when you are a prisoner, they can take away your pillow, so you need to get used to sleeping without a pillow.’

In my interlocutors’ minds that romantic-heroic ethos of the parents’ com-

| munist past corresponded with the ethos of Polish patriotism. Holding back information about the family’s Jewish history and the lack of a Jewish cultural environment were the reasons why children from this group had practically no sense of their Jewish identity. On the other hand Polishness and Polish patriotism constituted one of the important values in their homes: 6: The concept of Polishness was certainly very much present. .. . Unlike the concept of Jewishness, which didn’t exist for me at all.

9: I recall my feeling of patriotism. . . . In a sense of an enormous importance of such matters as Poland’s sovereignty and independence. 5: Well, I was raised in such a way, that for me, that certainly I was a Pole. .. . Before 1968, it never even came to my mind that I could one day write that I am a Jew.

Their Polishness, however, was of a particular make-up. It was a Polishness without religion, leftist and communist. In their homes materialist ideology was not subjected to debate. In a sense it constituted an element of the family identity. The parents’ atheism often degenerated into a rejection of religion. But ideological

command of tolerance required them to articulate that rejection as refutation of bigotry: 7: My parents are very hostile to religion. It’s not that they are non-believers; they are hostile to religion. g: I certainly learned at home that we’re non-believers. . . . I simply had it in my head, that this makes a kind of identity.

11: Constant prayers or going to church... . turned . . . my parents off. But as a rule, as someone being religious—no. For ‘you have to respect other opinions’.

My interviewees didn’t always adopt their parents’ attitudes; their Catholic nannies were another important authority. The clash between the nannies’ piety and the parents’ atheism forced upon them a dual interpretation of the world, causing traumas and anxieties, especially when nannies reached for the arsenal of Catholic threats:

212 Joanna Wiszniewicz 10: My nanny raised me... . A person I adored. .. . Nanny hated Jews and during all those ten years she spent with us, she tried to have me baptized. Q: What was it like? A: Well, first of all, she explained that if I were not baptized, I'd go to hell. . . . It was perfectly frightening.

3: I was raised by nannies. .. . They told me that my parents... had to end up in hell... . I finally got to believe in it. They also said that if I prayed hard to the Lord God to forgive me ... T never really knew why I had to be forgiven, but I prayed anyway.

12: Q: That nanny, she explained something to you? A: But of course she did! . . . She was such a believer! I prayed when I was little. .. . I had my own private God. . . . I couldn’t believe in that, you know, the Catholic God, because my parents told me God didn’t exist, so invented a God for myself .. . and I always prayed, you know, before bed. . . . For years.

Not all my interlocutors adopted their nannies’ beliefs. But all were confused because of their ignorance of religious behaviour: 6: Entering the church . . . I always dread that they would notice, that someone would notice, that ’'m not crossing myself as I should, that I will do something incorrectly, and will suddenly become an object of attention. 1: IT have caught myself at being much more rigid, cautious, and frightened in church, not to do anything improper.

The emotional power of this ambivalence and the anxieties developed under the nanny’s tutelage were increased by the fact that in Poland in the fifties and sixties

the only living religion with which the children from those homes were put in touch was Catholicism. Jewish tradition and Judaism were not usually mentioned to children by the non-believing parents of that group of my Warsaw interlocutors. They were even less aware of Jewish holidays, especially since in many homes of those people who separated themselves from Judaism, Christmas was an important family occasion: 15: Jewish holidays, that would be out of the question, simply out of the question. We always had a dozen people at the table for Christmas and now, as I look back, probably ten of them were Jews.

DO I LIKE BEING A JEW? | In those homes in central Warsaw, parents consciously manipulated the areas of the family’s memory and tradition. What was the psychological result of that manipulation? How were my interlocutors affected by the absorption of various fragmentary, casual, and at the same time contradictory pieces of information, emotions, and insinuations related to their family history? The substance of their Jewishness appears to be not the knowledge of belonging to a distinctive Jewish culture (of whose existence children were rarely aware), but rather a sense of absence in their own lives of certain cultural elements crucial to Poles. The children imagined simply that a Jew differs from a non-Jew by not attending church, and also that a Jew sometimes looks different, or has a character-

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 213 istic last name. People with typically Jewish looks or family names were conscious of their outward, potentially stigmatizing, distinctiveness. In spite of the parental display of Jewish pride and the fact that parents favourably mentioned Jews, the children were aware that before the war the Jewish uniqueness would have caused

discrimination, that during the war it meant death, and that currently it could expose them to crude verbal attacks by primitive neighbours or passers-by. So the children often felt uncomfortable and ambivalent about their Jewishness. 7: Q: Was it a shock to you to learn that you were Jewish? A: I wasn’t happy about it. I recall

kidding my parents about it sometimes: ‘I don’t want to be a Jewess! Could we perhaps change it?’ ... Mother said: ‘Nooo, ha! ha! ha!, we can’t change that’—but something about it bothered me. 15: Q: What was your reaction [to the news that he was Jewish]? A: It was very difficult for

me... . As if someone learned he was a leper. Q: You learned that you were a leper? A: Something like that.

The children didn’t feel threatened by antisemitism because of some significant personal experiences. It was rather a theoretical awareness, having to do with the past. Yet it was a source of a certain vulnerability, of being somehow ‘prepared’ for an antisemitic threat, of more or less consciously expecting it. For a long time, psychologically, it was rather vague, almost intuitive, but it had a large emotional potential, that—starting in 1967—revealed itself clearly in that group’s fate. g: They [other neighbourhood kids] picked on us for going to our school without religious instruction for they didn’t like those who went there. ... We often heard the words ‘Jews are coming’ or ‘Yids’. . . . It embarrassed me somewhat, but because it was meant . . . to annoy, as if they called us, I don’t know, ‘ragamuffins’ .. . I didn’t worry about it too much.

The same speaker, however, described how he felt a few years later: g: I became interested, who was and who wasn’t a Jew .. . mainly because in 1968 and afterwards I felt the need to know who wouldn’t tell me: ‘You’re a Jew.’ That was probably my only motivation.

SHELTERED TPD SCHOOLS Parents of my interviewees worried about sending their children to school, because at that time—in the second half of 1950s—the Catholic religion was introduced to schools the parents feared that their atheist offspring would be negatively distin-

guished and marked. Therefore they chose schools under the patronage of the Towarzystwo Przyjaciot Dzieci (The Society of the Friends of Children; TTPD) because there were no religion classes there. For the same reason the parents who strongly identified with their Jewish roots were also eager to send their children to non-religious schools, as were Polish atheists, usually communists or at least leftists.

That kind of choice resulted in an other than average social composition of student bodies in the TPD schools. In some it was decidedly different. Among

214 Joanna Wiszniewicz them were three central city TPD schools: the then President Klemens Gottwald Grammar School and High School no. 14, the then Grammar School and High School no. 5 at 7 Parkowa Street (later School no. 34 at 24 Zakrzewska Street), the then Grammar School no. 42 on Natolinska Street, and the no. 43 elementary school.

Children of Jewish descent constituted a relatively large percentage of these schools’ student body. There was also a striking uniformity in the social, material, and ideological environment, unlike in other Polish schools. A majority of students

came from communist homes (often connected with the communist establishment); they naturally didn’t go to church, and the economic level of the whole group was generally similar and rather high. 1: In 1956 religion was brought back into schools . . . so all parents in the area with houses and blocks inhabited by party activists or employees of the MSW [Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrznych; Ministry of Internal Affairs] and the like would send their children to the so-called TPD schools . . . Ours was elementary school no. 43 behind the ‘Luna’ movie theatre. . . . Our class was number ‘A’ and the kids of notables or those in high positions were invited to enrol in that class.

4: I attended ‘no. 14’, the Gottwald. . . . Gottwald was a kind of school for the red bourgeoisie ... My classmates were kids, you know, like me. . . . They were all children of some, you know, government ministers . . . familiar with one another, who went to summer camps together. 13: No. 34, that was the kind of school in which, to a certain extent, Jews were the dominant force.

Naturally, the uniformity of the student body had a strong influence on the schools’ atmosphere, the students’ attitudes, and their vision of Polish reality. It was of course a false vision, because the artificial selection of students gave the children no idea how far their social and economic situation differed from the lives of average Poles. 1: Belonging to a privileged group. . . . In my opinion—singled us out. We certainly didn’t comprehend it then. Q: So when did you realize it? . . . In college? A: Yes.

4: I studied, you know, in that school where everyone was the same [Gottwald no. 14 Elementary and High School] so I simply had no idea . . . that it was a kind of privilege as compared to other kids.

The young students were unaware of the big ideological and cultural differences

between them and children from the rest of Warsaw: 1: Only much later [in college] did I learn that I lived in a strange environment. . . . Only then did I start frequenting such circles . .. where, when you drove out with those people, they were going to church on Sunday. I always lived in places where no one went to church. 6: Q: Were all the kids in the [no. 5, later 34 elementary] school non-believers? A: I don’t even know, I have no idea! . . . It was never mentioned. . . . The only time when I was con-

, fronted with the question of religion happened at a summer camp [where children from

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 215 other areas of Poland also came]... . We started debating whether there was God . . . and I declared, with great assurance, that practically no one of course believed in God and that the concept was pretty ridiculous—that’s what I more or less said... . And then. . . that summer... it was agony. . . . Someone always reminded me of that... . One boy brought acat...and said ‘Pray to the cat! You don’t believe in God, so you probably believe in cats!’

1: In our class [at the no. 43 elementary school], there was a Catholic boy and there was a big scandal, for someone tore off his cross. And the teacher started raising us in ‘tolerance’. That means, she explained that it’s OK to weara cross and believe.

That cultural isolation has been well described by Adam Michnik, who also belonged to that student milieu in the 1960s: My biography isn’t typically Polish. I come from a family of totally Polonized Jews, who got

Polonized by adopting communism. It was a sort of red assimilation and that’s why my classically Polish national emotions lacked the classical Polish ingredient of national symbols. Normally, in a Polish family a young boy is taken to a Catholic church. I was raised totally without religion. Usually, a family legend included participation in the anti-Nazi Home Army (AK) or in some national uprisings. In our home it wasn’t quite so.°

REINFORCING THE FAMILY DOCTRINE For these young people there was basically no conflict between the ideologies of school and home, which was remarkable in Poland at that time: the average student’s social experience in Poland of the 1960s was a contradiction between the information and values taught at home and those in school (Catholicism and anti-

communism at home, and praise for the communist system at school). This dichotomy had both positive and negative effects. On one hand it made an average Polish pupil rational and increasingly mistrustful and critical. On the other, however, it created fear and taught conformity, or at least caution in social interaction. But students in the T'PD schools were educated in the same value system both at school and in the family homes. The lasting harmony between the family’s vision of the world and the one learnt at school and from official propaganda gave the students a sense of security and belonging to the surrounding world. Since they accepted and even internalized the principles of the system, treated by both the school and the home as indisputably positive, they developed a conviction of their own moral right to act against evil which, in their opinions, resulted from abandoning communist ideas. Their criticism, therefore, wasn’t directed against the principles of the communist system, but was meant to defend them. Here’s what Adam Michnik said about it in the conversation quoted previously: In the 1960s I considered communist Poland my Poland. What was I to be afraid of there? ... In normal Polish homes children were being told that they lived under Soviet occupation ° ‘A Certain Polish Ethos: Dany Cohn-Bendit Talking to Adam Michnik’, Kontakt, 6 (1988), 34.

216 Joanna Wiszmewicz and that there were secret agents just waiting to hear a careless word. . . . Those kids were afraid for they knew what to fear. And I didn’t... . I would, for example, get up in class and say: since a communist tells the truth, why don’t we tell what happened in Katyn.*

My interlocutors had similar attitudes: 10: For the first time in my life I came across quite unbelievable poverty for, you know, we— I mean those of us who were raised in communist and socialist families—believed all those lies that, you know, workers are having it better. Because, well, we went to organize a scout group among families who lived in one-room apartments with seven children and... when those kids visited me at home, they didn’t know what butter was.

g: At home I certainly didn’t learn resentment of communism, the left, and all the rest. . . . Resentment and later perhaps even hatred . . . of the PRL [Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa; Polish People’s Republic] wasn’t a dislike for the left, the commune, or communism . . . and without a doubt I learned it at home from Mother—that what we had there, wasn’t communism.

In fact during the 1950s and 1960s a spirit of revisionism appeared in the communist homes of many of my interviewees. Parents started talking, often with bitterness, about distortions of the system, and in their interpretation the clash between the everyday socialism and the ideology didn’t invalidate the latter. On the contrary, it encouraged implementation of the leftist ethos in practice even more: 1: Both of my parents are second-generation communists . .. and they didn’t believe that they had to be loyal to prove anything. . . . In our home there was no such thing as the party has commanded and we have to obey. With us, it was constant turmoil.

ATYPICAL POLES Among the values learnt at home, the ones most reinforced by school (and sometimes, by scouting) were my interviewees’ Polish identity and patriotism: g: Somehow I took from school, but perhaps also from home, a sort of huge respect for various Polish national upheavals, starting with Kosciuszko, then the January Uprising, and so forth.

Yet the patriotism of those young people was particular, communistic, and nonreligious. It integrated romantic Polishness with the romantic ethos of the communist movement. There too attitudes at home and at school were similar. They formed in the children a value system in which courage, nobleness, and struggle for truth occupied an important place: 1: Q: Was there any concept of ‘Poland’ at all ingrained [in your schooling and scouting]? ... A: Certainly. I mean, somewhere in the context, you know, of ‘righteous revolution’. . . . [In our scout group] we dealt a lot with the November [1830, anti-Russian] Uprising. Yet we dealt much more with the ‘Red Lantern’ theatre and essays written by [a communist 4 ‘A Certain Polish Ethos’, 34—5.

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 217 poet, Lucyan] Szenwald. .. . In my opinion, the way I feel now, those models, readings, all that together, that scouting—it worked together. And we simply believed that one should fight for what’s right.

That particular kind of Polishness—noble, communistic, and of course atheistic—

appeared to my interlocutors as the only and indisputable form of patriotism. They weren’t aware of any missing cultural elements in their kind of Polishness. Its limitations became evident to them only much, much later: 1: [At the university it turned out] that I didn’t understand literature because I lacked a Catholic background. Q: But what was it you didn’t understand? A: Everything! I didn’t know the Bible. And what can you understand about Polish literature, if you haven’t been brought up Catholic?

While still at school, my interlocutors had such a secure sense of fitting into the surrounding world that it couldn’t even be shaken by minor antisemitic incidents that each of them occasionally experienced in childhood. True, in the back of their

minds they had that above-mentioned ‘readiness’ for antisemitism—a sort of slight oversensitivity, as if expecting some antisemitism a priori. But in that period of their lives that anxiety still remained in the subconscious. It was suppressed by the sense that antisemitism was a distant phenomenon that existed only in nationalist, xenophobic, and bigoted circles. And even if that xenophobic and bigoted Poland stepped occasionally into their lives—in the form of contacts with maids, in the street, at camps, or other accidental places—it remained anachronistic and

foreign, distant from their immediate environment, therefore subconsciously at least considered of little importance and non-threatening: 7: They were laying the table [at a resort where the young girl with her parents was staying] for Christmas Eve dinner. . . . [One lady] asked me if I was Jewish. I said: yes. So she said: ‘Then there is no place for you tonight.’ I thought: ‘What a witch!’ .. . I didn’t think about: it any more... . I didn’t even tell my parents.

DIFFICULT SOCIAL RELATIONS As I have mentioned above, people who strongly identified with their Jewish roots also gladly sent their children to the TPD schools. In this respect they resembled the ‘less Jewish’ parents because they too usually spoke Polish and supported the regime, and most of them distanced themselves from the Jewish religion: 16: My father used to talk to me in this way: we are Jews, but we are Poles as far as education and language go, and we shun religion.

17: They [my parents] tried to stress that even though we are Jews, we aren’t religious. . . . ‘We, our family, we don’t believe in God.’ . .. That was the other element of my identity.

Yet in spite of these similarities, the sense of Jewishness that those parents inculcated in their children was much clearer and consistent. Their children—as ‘more Jewish’—had a definite and unambiguous awareness of their Jewish identity:

218 Joanna Wiszmiewicz 13: Q: So you always knew you were Jewish? A: Always. . . . I was a Jew living in Poland. ... and I also never considered myself a Pole, so I had a very well-balanced attitude, if I may say so. Q: To Jewishness? A: Both to Jewishness and Polishness.

18: I had a Jewish family name and besides, I looked like [here, a humorous Polish wordplay] not one Jewess, but three.

There were relatively few of those ‘more Jewish’ children in the TPD schools in

the centre of Warsaw. But their presence was noticeable, mainly to their ‘less Jewish’ peers, who had ambivalent feelings towards them. The marked Jewishness of those ‘more Jewish’ made the others edgy, with their different looks, manners, and most of all—disapproval: 6: There were comments [the ‘more Jewish’ colleagues’ critical remarks] about something not quite Jewish in me.

g: [A ‘more Jewish’ classmate used to personally approach me about . . . joining a group loudly manifesting their Jewishness. . . . I was annoyed by their noisiness . . . by their loud manifestations of that actually restricted group.

In spite of comparable economic levels of that community, certain social differences occasionally appeared between the ‘less Jewish’ and ‘more Jewish’ children. My ‘more Jewish’ interviewee remembers it thus: 13: Q: [School no. 34] was a kind of an elite school, right? A: I didn’t have a feeling of belonging to the elite. I felt I was going to school attended by the elite. . . .The difference was, for example, the apartment I lived in. . . . It was very small. I had classmates who lived

on Belwederska Street, in enormous apartments. . . . Then there were vacations. ... My father earned enough to afford me a trip to Zakopane, so I also went there, but I didn’t stay at...a party home. ... I simply travelled there and rented.

Parents sometimes opposed socializing between the two groups. The ‘less Jewish’ ones put too much effort into their assimilation to accept their child’s friendship with someone who would encourage attending Jewish camps, learning Jewish songs, and demonstrating ethnic Jewish distinctiveness: 1: Mother simply couldn’t stand, perhaps not [her daughter’s ‘more Jewish’ friend] but certainly that friendship, for she was afraid someone would drag me onto some ‘horrible’

Jewish path.

On the other hand, the ‘more Jewish’ parents didn’t spare the ‘less Jewish’ milieu

, spiteful remarks: 16: My mother always made fun of a woman she knew, by the name of Sara Kowalska: ‘She is Kowalska, but how come Sara?’

15: I said something [to his ‘Jewish’ friend’s mother] about being Polish. She told me then: ... You should have got yourself another nose!’

One of the basic elements of the sense of a separate Jewish identity among the ‘more Jewish’ children was their conscious expectation of antisemitism. While the

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 219 ‘less Jewish’ children were psychologically ‘prepared’ for antisemitism in a vague, not fully realized way, the ‘more Jewish’ ones were often alert to it as a fundamental element of their self-definition: 13: It never happened that my playmates in the yard would consider me one of them... . I got used to it, and later on .. . the lack of acceptance became a normal state. Q: So, that means that you anticipated not being accepted? .. . A: I was certainly raised that way. 19: Q: Did you have any close friends among Poles? A: .. . Yes, I did, only I always made it clear almost immediately. . . . Having made someone’s acquaintance, I would openly say: ... ‘Lam Jewish’... if you havea problem .. . let’s not get more involved.’

The ‘more Jewish’ children, therefore, could not fully identify with the Polish society—not any more than the ‘less Jewish’ ones. Their ‘expectation’ of antisemitism

constituted a serious hindrance, even though Polish culture was practically the only culture within which they existed. Was there, however, any such culture or society with which those children could fully identify? Could it be Jewish culture and society? Almost certainly not, because their contact with it was most likely minimal, and their parents’ exotic ethnicity was probably somewhat foreign to them. 16: [My parents] used Yiddish with each other when they didn’t want me to understand. ... [Father and his friends] often turned to Yiddish so they could go out and talk [politics]

...and ‘sh, sh, sh, sh, sh, did you hear this, did you hear that?’ 18: Because with my parents I often attended . . . all celebrations organized at the Monument [of the Ghetto Fighters] . . . I knew that I belonged to another [not Polish] group. ...P?mnotsure... if Iatall... could recognize myself in any ethnic group. I only knew, theoretically, that I didn’t go to church, didn’t go to communion, that I didn’t say prayers at bedtime. . . that it’s a different clan than Poles. . . . That we live over graves, that Daddy cries at night . . . that he always has a sandwich in his pocket as he goes out, that I know, that I knew, do you understand? But I was a part of no group. . . . | was a part of my family.

I want to stress forcefully, however, that the ‘more Jewish’ children’s feeling of isolation from society and community was related to the one single aspect of their lives: Jewishness. And that problem at the time when they were 12 or 13 years old (and sometimes later) by no means dominated their psyche or kept them from participating in the lives of their peers. On the contrary! All the children attending schools then in central Warsaw engaged in friendly and often even very close relationships with others, and only for the sake of my research has the Jewish problem

been artificially isolated here from the wider range of problems of my interviewees’ childhood and early youth. 13: Pretty much most of the time . . . I was preoccupied with other matters. Not with the fact of being Jewish. 19: In high school I had other things on my mind. Like any guy in high school . . . I was anx-

ious to lose my virginity as soon as possible. . . . This is the subject of our conversation

220 Joanna Wiszmiewicz [ Jewishness], but as a matter of fact I resent it for I truly couldn’t . . . qualify . . . quantitatively the space taken by those [ Jewish] matters in my mind.

Even though my last interlocutor didn’t come from Warsaw or go toa TPD school, I decided to quote his opinion here for it seems to me that many of my interviewees would readily agree with him.

SAFENESS OF THE SENSE OF BELONGING OF ‘ATYPICAL POLES’

| Let us return for the moment to the main group of my central Warsaw interviewees, those ‘less Jewish’, the ones with the identity of ‘atypical Poles’. The ideological and social uniformity of their milieu made them feel at home and like each other. So it seems that a sense of security within the communist system dominated

their attitude to the surrounding reality, along with an increasing awareness of social autonomy and the willingness to resist injustice. Several years later that emotional aura would become an ideological and ethical

basis of socio-political nonconformism for a large section of that high school group, a nonconformism that many of my interlocutors from that group would

reveal in their activity within the Club of Contradiction Seekers (Klub Poszukiwaczy Sprzecznosci), in the student protests of 1964-8, and finally in the very events of March 1968: 1: We were the only squad of the Central City Scout Troop whose two leaders were jailed [for participation in the March ’68 opposition].

Even though the particular social situation of the central Warsaw TPD schools was to last for only a few more years, until the removal of religious education from Polish schools, within that short period those schools graduated several classes of

, unusual alumni, who would later play a crucial role in the life of Warsaw youth elites. And not only theirs. | HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS—NEW AREAS OF BELONGING When my interviewees graduated from the T'PD grade schools and entered high schools—the good high schools of central Warsaw—they met there not only their peers from the familiar communist milieu, but also young people from other areas. And those new schoolmates often had different, not leftist, views, different value systems and family traditions. So the world of my interlocutors—especially those ‘less Jewish’—was no longer uniform. How did they react to that confrontation? Did those ‘less Jewish’ maintain their sense of belonging in the world in spite of _ the clash with other visions of reality? And didn’t it deepen the sense of social and identity alienation of the ‘more Jewish’ children?

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 221 As it happened, that time—the beginning of the sixties—witnessed the formation of two new youth groups that not only did not diminish, but even strengthened my interviewees’ sense of belonging. The one with which my ‘less Jewish’

| respondents identified was the Inter-School Discussion Club founded by Adam Michnik and his friends in 1962, closed by the authorities in 1963 (the group also

known as the Club of Contradiction Seekers, but most often called Michnik’s Club). The other environment, with which my ‘more Jewish’ interviewees identified, was one of the Jewish summer camps organized in the years 1958—67 by the TSKZ with the help of the Joint (American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish charity organization). The camps were for both older and younger children. But my interviewees remembered them mostly as an experience of their high school period. Another important and attractive place for the Jewish youth in Warsaw was the ‘Babel’, a Jewish youth club opened in 1962 and closed by the authorities in 1967. It was famous throughout the whole city.

THE ‘CLUB OF CONTRADICTION SEEKERS’ This was an intellectually ambitious group of about a hundred Warsaw high school students of diverse attitudes originating at various schools. 15: I suddenly found myself within a group of people who, in the ninth grade, were interested not in soccer, but philosophy, sociology, and economics. . . . It was an unusual community of bold, unruly folks, full of chutzpah but extraordinarily intelligent . . . very mature and interested in everything. .. . Part of it was for show and we sometimes discussed books we didn’t read, but, you understand, an atmosphere of this kind encourages reading and learning. .. . Well, I wish every young person to find a group of people so daring intellectually.

Next to people with a communist orientation, sometimes one could meet there others with a liberal or nationalist leaning. Besides radical materialists, occasionally (though not too often) Catholics turned up. Lectures and discussions were led by outstanding Polish philosophers, sociologists, and economists connected to the post-October opposition. During those meetings one could hear officially banned information. The topics of lectures and discussions were dictated by the intellectuals’ disappointment with the government’s abandonment of the post-October renewal. Many Club members were also personally interested in learning about their parents’ leftist roots. 15: The history of the socialist movement was constantly debated, without any regard for censorship. 1938, the purges, history of the PCP [Polish Communist Party], and factional friction. 20: As sociologists ... Czapow and Manturzewski . . . did research on semi-criminal, hooli-

gan groups... and at some point in time we in the club did it too. . . . Aleksander Malachowski discussed . . . the significance of the Polish Commonwealth’s eastern

222 Joanna Wiszniewicz borderlands. . .. Once our club had a meeting with the ‘Walter’ scouts [led by Jacek Kuron since 1955 and dissolved by the authorities in 1961]... . Karol Modzelewski visited us. . . . We had a meeting with the youth from KIK [Club of Catholic Intelligentsia].

16: Some people discussed things . . . I never heard about. A few times they mentioned _ something about Katyn, I remember it well... . They talked about democracy . . . about things everyone knew but no one spoke about out loud. And they spoke about them in the language that was a language of the intellectuals . . . you were given to understand for example that it was a wider kind of a problem.

So the environment of the Club of Contradiction Seekers—by its diversity and nonconformity—disturbed the previously uniform vision of reality that the ‘less Jewish’ children received in the TPD schools of downtown Warsaw. That, however, didn’t diminish their sense of belonging to the surrounding world. Among the most active group of about thirty Club members, the attitudes and world view typical of the TPD schools prevailed, which meant that their critical opposition to the communist reality had basically a ‘revisionist’ subtext, corresponding to the attitudes of their communist homes. 21: It certainly wasn’t: ‘bring down the regime’, etc. . . . it was rather a question of repairing the socialist system than, you know, bringing it down. The majority, maybe not everyone, naively believed that it could be repaired.

15: The majority [in the Club of Contradiction Seekers] were the so-called revisionists, that is, people attached in some way to socialism. Q: Those children? A: . . . Yes. Quite certainly. Though theirs was that kind of a socialism in opposition. . . . Everyone was very critical of Stalinism, of .. . well, actually of all that Gomutka’s Poland too, in fact. Very proOctober like.

Club members’ self-respect was reinforced by the fact that university professors, writers, media personalities, and artists were under those young people’s

spell, fascinated by their intellectual temperament, which turned them into a Warsaw youth elite. A factor that reinforced that feeling of secure belonging to the world was the social status of some of their families: 15: That was a group of children of the red bourgeoisie, especially of former Jewish establishment figures, now demoted. 4: Many of my [friends from the group of the Club of Contradiction Seekers] . . . were the children of my father’s pre-war comrades and friends. . . . Father was enormously moved by their visits. 8: Those were privileged kids. Certainly so, ‘a red couch’? . . . In a sense I was something of an oddball among them, for I didn’t belong to the ‘red couch’: . . . my parents had no high party nor government positions. . . I didn’t stay at government resort homes. . . . Neither I nor they were much disturbed by it. . . . Q: It follows that it wasn’t a tightly closed group? A: It certainly wasn’t. > ‘Red couch’ was a popular name in the 1960s for a group of former communist dignitaries who had been demoted.

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 223 As for Jewish matters—they weren’t discussed at the Club. Some of my interviewees, however (I emphasize: some!), suggested that the prevalence of young people of Jewish descent affected the Club’s atmosphere: 20: There was a sort of fad of being Jewish . . . That it was a special kind of intellect... . that, how smart those Jews are... who among prominent people was Jewish.

Some were embarrassed by it: 15: There were people who . .. had such a strong sense of being Jewish and perhaps even a little feeling of superiority for that reason . . . It made me very uncomfortable. When a person told me for the first time that Jews are more intelligent or that someone wasn’t intelligent for he’s not a Jew, it discomfited me an awful lot.

But the same person added 1n a moment: 15: You know, I don’t want to give an impression that it was so widespread there.

Indeed, no interviewee claimed that the ‘Jewish atmosphere’ dominated the Club. Many didn’t even notice it. What people considered prevalent was the group’s intellectual energy and its effects: 16: I suspect that in general that intellectual fascination with social matters to which they introduced me was probably a huge influence in my decision to study sociology. 15: There’s no doubt that my interest in philosophy had its roots there. And that in a sense gave direction to my life. Besides, certain intellectual friendships dating from that time were also very important... . The proof that it was a magnificent institution in my opinion is that the same group of people for many, many years always were in the vanguard, if I may say so, during the seventies and eighties. .. . And those who left Poland, also made a mark.

JEWISH SUMMER CAMPS Jewish summer camps for the elementary and high school students played an enormous role in my ‘more Jewish’ interlocutors’ identity formation. It was, however, a

peculiar kind of Jewish identity, because the Jewishness of those camps was unusual: 22: Q: Was your education there specifically directed? A: Yes. We were officially raised to be

Poles, Jews, and socialists. .. . There was a guy there by the name of Shmul Tenenblatt [a Jewish camps’ organizer]... a yiddishist. . . . He was probably the one who set the tone of that all... . A tone of socialist scouting, egalitarian, Jewish in the sense of Yiddish, you know, all the best traditions of the Jewish proletariat. Quite certainly not Zionist, not the tradition of leaving Poland. 23: [remember Yiddish classes, very popular. 8: There were Yiddish songs, Russian songs. .. . I enjoyed learning hora dancing.

23: Q: At that camp, did you fly a Polish flag? A: Yes. Q: .. . And you sang the Polish anthem? A: ... We used to sing a Jewish song about us campers. . . . | don’t know Yiddish, I

224 Joanna Wisznewicz just remember the first three words. .. . laped that song. .. . They really were Polish camps with the only difference that the children there were Jewish.

It was then a Jewishness of Jewish communists from TSKZ, which was at that time—starting in 1950—the only secular Jewish organization in Poland (controlled of course by the communist authorities). 17: TSKZ existed as a continuation of ‘Yevsektsya’ [the Jewish section of the propaganda department of the Russian Bolshevik party established in 1918 and dissolved in 1930], which means: communism and anti-Jewish tradition. But there was a kind of—a lack of consistency . . . That too is such a small historical irony that communists and Stalinists,

who used to fight the Bund before the war, adopted most of the Bundist values in the TSKZ. ... Yiddish culture, Yiddish language, and anti-Zionism.

At Jewish summer camps the leaders of TSKZ weren’t always able to enforce

, the theoretically accepted ideas, especially in regard to Israel. Not just the campers’ opinions but also their activities were hard to control: 17: At Jewish summer camps there was one basic topic [of informal discussions between campers]: our position on Zionism in Israel. Should one leave or remain in Poland. 24: [From the camp instructor’s point of view] Every camp’s leader was told not to expose elements connected to Israel. . . . Q: Is this what you were told during instructors’ meetings? A: If [remember correctly, yes.

23: It was probably in Elblag. There was a group at the camp called ‘The Invisible Hand’ and that unfortunate ‘Invisible Hand’ . . . decided one night to form the Star of David with

pebbles under the Polish flag. ... A man... came, who was an important character in TSKZ ... and said that the Star of David should be ‘detonated’ because it constituted a clear conflict of interest. ...Q: What year was that? A: ... The early sixties.

25: At one camp... there was a post with a white-and-red flag. .. . The boys formed ...a Star of David... with pebbles under that flag post. And just then . . . the Folksztyme editorin-chief [Grzegorz (Hersh) Smolar], who happened to be there at the camp, got very upset. ... He called a meeting and tried to explain to the young people that the Star of David symbolized a certain ideology, a world view alien to us. .. . That it is a Zionist symbol. . . . We are Polish Jews and our place is here.

Jewish identity learned at the camps was affected both by the camp leaders’ influence and the campers’ interaction. Their mutual relations there soon turned into close ties. Because Jewish youth from all over Poland attended the camps, and

family. |

| the same young people often met there, relations between the leaders and the campers were unusually warm and the atmosphere was friendly:

26: We all felt like one big family. Literally, like a family! Like it wasn’t just a camp, but 25: First of all Tenenblatt wanted, you know, to integrate us somehow. In a sense, you know,

to make us well acquainted. For kids used to come there, you know, from Szczecin, Wroclaw, Legnica, Warsaw, Lodz, Lublin, you know, all over. .. . I think his idea was simply to, you know, make us feel Jewish.

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 225 24: I had just such a feeling, that we all liked one another. 22: In fact the worst tensions were of an erotic nature; people met, it was great. Those were, you know, such intercity romances, you know, much more romantic than local relations, you know ... A wonderful thing.

All that developed in the camp participants a strong identification with their camp group, increased their self-respect, and created a special community energy. That energy in turn contributed to various spontaneous group behaviours, at the centre of which was often an expression of Jewishness. It gave the campers a sense of their Jewish pride and helped to overcome resistance to the articulation of their Jewishness. Demonstrations of Jewishness often had symptoms of letting 1t all out: 25: We would go to the beach and there made, you know, a circle and sang [ Jewish songs]. 8: I remember, we were on a trip in Gdansk. . . . In the centre of a street someone suggested: ‘let’s dance a hora’. 3: We used to walk around villages and yell: ‘Jews are now in every place; every Pole hates a Jew’s face. But as Jews are now en masse, Polish goys can kiss my arse.’

Letting it all out was one of the elements of the camp atmosphere and revealed

the camps’ cathartic role. Those children’s everyday surroundings were often somewhat alien to them, and frequently not too friendly. So now, at those camps, among other Jews, they could vent the frustrations built up during the school year: to get rid of them, yell out, cry out the strains of alienation or rejection: 24: I clearly remember [from the camp instructor’s point of view] children and young people from small towns relating some horrible antisemitic experiences that we discussed over and over again.

3: Some antisemitic excesses . . . if something happened at school or outside, at camp you could talk about it. 24: [From a camp instructor’s point of view]: At the same time they [kids at Jewish camps] acted out, taunting each another as ‘a Jew’ or ‘kike’. 20: As we arrived in Poronin, and went to sleep . . . I was woken by a scream: . . . ‘Yuids, what have you done with my skirt?’ . . . I was in a total shock. ... When they got together at

those summer camps... they acted out all their anxieties and stresses... . They would mock Yiddish speaking. . . . Tell offensive Jewish jokes. . . . The camp leader [Szmul Tenenblatt] went completely nuts because of that.

How did that integration impact my Warsaw interlocutors, those ‘more Jewish’ children (for mainly they were the ones attending the camps)? What can I say: for many of them those vacations were the first experience of release from their solitary social identity. Several weeks spent among other Jewish children, shared expe-

riences, and observations made them realize that they were not destined for loneliness as Jews once and for all. Besides, joining a strong and self-assured Jewish

group gave my interviewees a sense of security in reaction to antisemitism. It encouraged them to try out new psychological responses to tt:

226 Joanna Wiszmewicz 18: We were playing volleyball and several families who lay there on the side got very upset ... that we made too much noise. . . . They started yelling at us to go away . . . to our filthy Palestine. . . . If I had been alone, I would have felt terrible. [But] I was with a group of people who never even looked at that man.

Jewish kids from different towns and communities could observe various attitudes and ways of being Jewish. Through those confrontations the ‘more Jewish’ kids from Warsaw could find out, for example, that their peers from Lower Silesia, Lodz, or Szczecin had a much more intense contact with Jewishness. They went to Jewish schools or would run to the neighbourhood Jewish clubs every day after classes: 16: There was a whole group, very strong, with close ties, you know, from Lodz. They had a Jewish school. So I asked . . . if they studied [ Jewish] literature. They said : ‘Sure. What a question.” And I said: ‘So you can read Peretz in Yiddish?’ And they said: ‘We can.’

27: In a sense I envied them [the youth from Lodz, or Walbrzych] for . . . they had a community. ... It was a group where they felt comfortable with one another. I didn’t have it. My contacts were... dispersed through various areas [of Warsaw]. I rarely saw these people.

It would be worthwhile to find out what eventually became the dominant identifying feature acquired at those camps by their participants. In other words, what type of identity resulted from the combined educational and ideological activities

of TSKZ, the camp leaders and instructors, and, finally, the group dynamics between the campers themselves.

One feels tempted to claim, being aware of the over-generalization of this answer (which 1s therefore not completely legitimate), that it mainly was identifica-

tion with the group: a group of students attending Jewish camps for years and sharing a specific common experience; the experience of finding a community with other similar youngsters (after a whole year among people who made the young Jews feel more or less alienated); the experience of living a few weeks a year ‘fully’ and ‘at home’; the experience of finding a secure area of belonging. g: Q: And then you suddenly noticed that you were ‘among your own kind’? A: Yes. Q: What gave you that feeling? A: I think the ability to talk about being Jewish. And we lived it out toa maximum. ... Yelled it out! 18: Q: You said something changed in your soul at the moment you [started coming to Jewish summer camps]. A: I started feeling better. .. . I found a group of people who were my people. I didn’t know it was my ethnicity, you know, but that was my group of people. None of them, not one, would say that my nose, you know, is too curved, or that my eyes look Jewish.

That sense of identification with the community of campers proved so meaningful that it has lasted for over thirty years and survived in the lively social and organizational activity of those campers, now nearly 60 years old and dispersed throughout the world. Since the 1980s they have been meeting at reunions, publishing their own newsletter, and running several internet debate lists. All that enables them to share memories, experiences, and reflections on their identity.

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 227 THE ‘BABEL’ CLUB The ‘Babel’ club on 5 Nowogrodzka Street was naturally frequented first of all by the ‘more Jewish’ youth who would come there to refresh the Jewish camp atmosphere, along with its particular lifestyle, warmth, and the possibility of contacts with people of similar experiences: 18: We used to meet at the club [‘Babel’] and, you know, normal teenage conversations, various interest sections. .. . There were a lot of us... one through another sooner or later met and got acquainted. So that suddenly you had a feeling of having many friends.

Yet because the ‘Babel’ club was very attractive, well known for great dance parties,

excellent bridge tournaments, and interesting meetings with artists and media commentators (widely resonating throughout Warsaw), it soon drew also the youth ‘distant from Jewishness’, as well as a small number of Polish sympathizers. 16: There was a mixture of the TSKZ and Michnik’s discussion clubs. A whole bunch of people would frequent both. 13: I used to visit that [‘Babel’] club, play bridge, meet girls. . . . It was a serious place for playing cards in Warsaw.

The ‘Babel’ club meetings of Jewish youth from different communities resulted

on the one hand in mutual influences, on the other in competitiveness. Competitiveness referred both to issues of sociability status and in-group standing, as well as to the attitudes towards things Jewish. The ‘more Jewish’ youth surprised their ‘less Jewish’ peers by focusing all their social energy on their Jewish community.

15: Q: How did you feel about that group [ Jewish campers]? A: . . . It surprised me that people got so involved in it. 13: Some from that intellectual elite [of the ‘less Jewish’ group] also sometimes visited the Jewish club, but they didn’t go to Jewish camps. . . . It wasn’t considered . . . chic.

The ‘campers’, on the other hand, didn’t hide their disapproval of the ‘less Jewish’ youth’s distance from Jewishness: 17: The attitude [of “campers’] to those who pretended not to be Jewish, for that’s how it was viewed . . . was quite negative. . . . So I say: ‘If you want me to consider you a Pole, I can consider you a Pole. But I don’t decide who you will be considered to be in Poland.’

This last remark is an excellent illustration of one of the basic dividing lines between ‘the less’ and ‘the more’ Jewish. It points to the level of expectations of antisemitism and a different sense of distinctiveness from Poles. All these confrontations, of course, took place during dance parties, games of bridge, or the famous sharp political debates organized in the ‘Babel’ club, in the atmosphere of mutual interests and attraction. In their stories, my interlocutors

228 Joanna Wiszniewicz even today stress “Babel’s’ role in their social integration. That was probably what gradually led to a certain social mingling of the two rival groups, and to the mutual adaptation of some behaviours and attitudes.

NOTHING WILL BE AS IT WAS This study should close at the moment my interlocutors entered college, since it was supposed to cover their high school period. Let us just mention that at the time the downtown Jewish youth entered the university (it is mainly a question of the years 1964-8), their social life was reconfigured and attitudes grew more polarized. Although the Club of Contradiction Seekers was disbanded by the authorities (in 1963), it maintained its continuity through small discussion groups and

frequent parties. At the same time, at Warsaw University many of its former members established close ties with the circle of former ‘Walter’ scouts, with the

opposition-minded University staff, and with various groups of contesting students. New circles formed, new leaders emerged, and new opinion-forming centres appeared. In spite of those changes, the experiences of many former members of the Club of Contradiction Seekers and the lasting cohesion of that milieu played an important role in student oppositional activities (along with some other major groups). Many people from that circle, among them quite a few of Jewish descent, found

themselves in the group that initiated the student and intellectual protests of March ’68 in defence of Polish democracy and culture. During the student demonstrations and strikes many representatives of the CCS’s milieu (also those of Jewish descent) were spontaneously elected to students’ committees to represent Polish students. They worked with non-Jewish colleagues, as well as with their colleagues with Jewish roots not connected to the CCS. Together they were later imprisoned—for many months or longer. _ How did the ethos of ‘atypical Poles’, developed by communist homes, ‘hermetic T'PD schools’, and later by the group around CCS, influence the decisions of that city-centre ‘less Jewish’ youth? What role did their subjective sense of belonging to the world play in all that? 1: [am convinced that I was best served by my communist upbringing. It taught us to fight for truth, justice, loyalty to our beliefs, absolute devotion to, you know, values. . . . I imagine that many of the generation responsible for March ’68 were similarly raised. They came from homes. . . where ideology, and not a career, truly counted, so those people were raised with certain values.

In prisons and jails students identified as ‘atypical Poles’ met, besides Polish friends, other students of Jewish descent, not as deeply involved with the student movement. The latter found themselves jailed solely because of their Jewish family names, which could be conveniently used by the government antisemitic cam-

paign. Additionally, the names of people from among the CCS circles were

Jewish Children and Youth in Downtown Warsaw Schools 229 constantly publicized and slandered in this campaign, which came as a great shock. Still greater shock was the reaction of Polish society, astounding in its indifference, even with symptoms of rejection (and occasional aggression). Local expressions of solidarity (mainly in the academic world) couldn’t soften the resulting bitterness. The brutal shock of March ’68 forced all ‘atypical Poles’ to revise their previous identifications (that happened probably to most people of Jewish descent in Poland at that time). The March experience left those with the identity of ‘atypical Poles’ with an awareness that whatever they did in Poland in the public sphere could one day be considered questionable because of their Jewish origins: 21: A political movement with even a few Jews has less support in society than a political movement without Jews. .. . You try to change something [for the better] in a society of people who basically say to your face: ‘we don’t want you here’.

That awareness remains in the consciousness of all my interviewees (also those ‘more Jewish’, and those from outside Warsaw), but each of them understands it differently. It influenced their decisions, they recall it in a variety of ways and in various situations, and cope with it differently, sometimes confronting it, at other times pushing it into the subconscious. But even when totally pushed into the subconscious, that awareness is alive. Because March ’68 was a crucial life experience for my interlocutors. And still remains a constant point of reference: 8: My life is divided into that before 68 and after. Before and after Christ.

WHOSE STORY IS IT? The above story is of course the story of the central-Warsaw youth of Jewish descent. But not just theirs. After all, this is the story of Warsaw, of Warsaw social and cultural elites, the story of Warsaw youth elites of the sixties.

A question thus arises: does the fact that a large part of those elites were of Jewish descent, identified with Polish culture, and were close to the communist establishment and distant from their Jewish roots but conscious of their origins, affect those elites’ development and formation, and if so, how? Some people may regard this question as antisemitic. But the answer is not up to antisemites. It is up to cultural sociologists. And to cultural historians. Translated from the Polish by Maya Peretz

,I

The Exile of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk Polish Jewish Communist HOLLI LEVITSKY

ON THE eve of her final departure from Poland in October 1968, Sara NombergPrzytyk had an unexpected visitor at her home. It was Pawel Dabek, chairman of the Lublin Provincial Administration and an old friend. Once, in 1956, he had persuaded her not to leave Poland. At that time, she had recently been removed as___ chief editor of a daily communist newspaper for vague reasons, although she suspected it was because she was a Jew. She and her family were becoming quite concerned about the rising level of antisemitism in Poland, and as a result, along with many other dedicated Jewish communists, she was preparing to leave for Israel as soon as possible.

Dabek heard about her decision to leave Poland and offered her a new job on a weekly newspaper whose goal was to raise the consciousness and improve the life of the peasants in their province by revealing abuses and corruption. As a journalist for a weekly rather than a daily paper, she would have less work to do and could spend more time with her husband and young sons. He recommended that instead of leaving Poland she should take a month’s rest at a sanatorium and take the new position when she returned. In 1956, the combination of good conditions, a lighter workload, and the important goal inherent in her new position was impossible for the idealistic communist and young mother to reject. But many things had happened to her and to Poland in the interim. On this night in 1968, Dabek returned to persuade her to remain in

Poland. He pleaded with her to reconsider her decision to leave, urging her to remember how much she had given to the country. He wondered where she could go that would be better. After she told him that neither she nor her husband nor their one son who was still with them were citizens of Poland any longer, having given up their citizenship in exchange for their travel documents, they sat and wept together as long-standing friends and comrades. She offered a toast to their friendship, but expressed concern that he would risk retribution for visiting her. The man who stood on the street, watching her house day and night, would surely report him. Dabek comforted her, declaring that to see her before she left was more important to him than what might happen as a result

The Exile of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk 231 of the visit. He told her that it was not the Poles who were throwing her out of the country, but she already knew that. She had many good friends who were Poles. Still, Dabek paid the price for visiting his old friend. He was removed from his position as chairman of the Lublin Provincial Administration shortly after she left Poland, and one of the reasons given was that he had come to say goodbye to her. Polish communism attracted a considerable Jewish following; Sara, her husband

Andrzej, and many of their friends were Jews who held a party office or high government position. Among the disproportionately high numbers of Jews in the Communist Party before the Second World War, most were well educated and had experience of leadership at regional or other levels. Many of these Jews survived the war in the Soviet Union, and upon their return to Poland were asked—as Sara was, although she survived in ghettos and concentration camps—to draw upon their prior experience with and commitment to the party to serve as leaders in the fledgling communist state.! But over time Poland began to change: more universities were built, so that education became available to everyone, and out of these masses sprang new activists. They questioned why so many Jews worked in government, academic, and professional posts. On a visit to Poland, Khrushchev himself wondered, ‘Such a capable people as the Poles has to benefit from the help of so many Jews?”? Eventually, many older Jewish activists were replaced by younger, newly educated Polish communists. Sadly, many of these communists, from predominantly peasant and middle-class origins, felt that ‘Jews in general and Jewish Communists in particular became the symbol of and the reason for everything that went wrong in modern Polish history and in the fulfillment of their ambitions’.° Despite steadily mounting evidence to the contrary, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk held a sustained belief that communism would eradicate antisemitism. This illusion allowed her to overlook the Stalin-inspired paranoia that had its effect on the many Jews who lost posts in the communist-led Polish government: first in the late 19408, after the founding of the State of Israel; then again after Stalin’s death in 1953. At every opportunity, it seemed as if the Jews in Poland were blamed for the country’s problems. When Stalin’s crimes were revealed, it was the fault of the Jews. When economic disorder struck the country, it was the fault of the Jews. When it was clear that communism was not working, it was the fault of the Jews. Along with other Jews, she had the opportunity to leave Poland more than once

before 1968. At each opportunity, she found more reasons to stay and rebuild her | country than to abandon it. Even when she was faced with incontrovertible evidence that it would be better for her to leave Poland, she stayed. In her unpublished, final memoir, covering the years 1945-68, she explained her reasons for * J. Schatz, The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland (Berkeley, 1991).

2S. Nomberg-Przytyk, ‘Communist Poland: My Dream and the Reality’, trans. Paula Parsky (unpublished MS, 1998, in my possession). Further references are given in the text. 3 Schatz, The Generation, 287.

232 Holh Levitsky choosing to stay in Poland, even after a politics of antisemitism seemed to rule the country: When [ analyze my decision of that time to stay in Poland, I have to add one thing: It would have been very difficult to renounce what I had fought for throughout almost my entire life. From my childhood, I had been a Communist in school, in the University. I had spent five years in prison because of my beliefs. I didn’t do it for a career, or for money or honor. I did

it because I believed Communism to be the future of humanity. How could I so quickly acknowledge that it had all been a mistake? (p. 82)

Il Sara Nomberg-Przytyk was born on 10 September 1915 in Koluszki, Poland, to hasidic Jews, Jakob Nomberg and Lea Erlech; she spent her childhood in L6dz and Lublin. On her mother’s side she was descended from several generations of rabbis; her maternal grandfather was director of the local yeshiva and sat as a judge in

the rabbinical court. |

The period between the two world wars was difficult for the family; there was little work and her father spent his days reading religious texts. Her mother found ways to add to the family income through knitting and mending. Their poverty was made more pronounced by the fact that as an infant Sara had contracted polio and needed urgent and major medical care, for which the family did not have funds. When in 1918 she became paralysed in both legs, her mother took her to the Catholic hospital, which treated patients of all backgrounds. After a month, Sara left the nuns and the hospital to the home care of her mother and maternal grandparents, spending many days in bed observing the daily rites of the hasidic family into which she had been born. She became painfully aware of the strict dichotomy

between women and men in her religious community, noting the prayer her beloved grandfather recited each day thanking God for not making him a woman. Two years later she had painful surgery on her legs again. These early experiences —unbearable physical pain, feeling abandoned by her loved ones—contributed to her lifelong commitment to ease the sufferings of those less fortunate.* As she was often ill, Sara and her mother left their home and its religious community frequently for visits to the hospital. Travelling from Lublin to Warsaw, she

witnessed public humiliation and violence against Jews that left her angry, ashamed, and yet also keenly aware of her Jewish identity—its strangeness—in ways that shtetl living did not. When she observed an unprovoked attack by a Polish soldier on a bearded Jewish grandfather on a train, and saw other soldiers shout defamatory and antisemitic names at people who resembled her and her family, something stirred inside her. These observations developed into a hardened consciousness about economic and other disparities in the world, and about the best means to create an inclusive rather than exclusive society. * Interviews with Jerzy Przytyk and Wlodek Przytyk, Quebec, July 2003.

The Exile of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk 233 As she grew, she began to question the strict religious—and misogynistic— practices of her religious family and community. This early questioning intensified | at her Jewish school, and then even more so at the classical Gymnasium in Lublin, which she began to attend in 1927. Confronted by antisemitism and raised in poor living conditions, the young woman easily embraced the revolutionary ideals advo-

cated by the new communist ideology. She was additionally influenced by the socialist and Zionist movements; European Jewish society destabilized by the First World War, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in favour of a national Jewish centre in Palestine, and the Bolshevik revolution gave birth to hope for a new era for humanity, in particular for the Jews. Along with many other religious and assimilated young Jews, Sara participated in the remaking of Polish society through her Communist Party activism. Already drawn to the ideology of liberty, brotherhood, and economic freedom, she learnt the rudiments of communism from her high school teachers. In 1931 she joined the Komunistyczny Zwiazek Mlodziezy Polskiey (Communist Union of Young Poles; KZMP) and the Komunistyczna Partia Polski (Communist Party of Poland; KPP); the illegality of the party at the time required that she join under a pseudonym. By 1932, Sara was a student at the University of Warsaw, an actively committed young communist. She scouted the city for meeting spots, smuggled illegal documents, led reading groups. Her mother, a religious woman with a deep love for her child, delivered communist documents for her when necessary. While she could not accept the constant danger her daughter was in, she attempted to understand her communist activity as a way of remaining close to her. Sara’s brother and his wife also became members of the party. Even her grandmother hid documents for her when she could. Very early on the morning of 31 December 1932, the police knocked on the door of Sara’s parents’ house. She knew that this time it would not be one of the almost

routine forty-eight-hour interrogation and arrest scenes she had already undergone. She was going to go to prison. She was 17 years old.° Sara spent her young adult years in and out of prison, studying communist texts and teaching communist theory to fellow political prisoners. Schatz notes that ‘for those who went to prison . . . sentences often meant a strengthening of their revo-

lutionary maturation and commitment; prison functioned as a sort of communist academy’.° Since the political prisoners were for the most part segregated from the general population, it was in prison that she fully absorbed communist theories from many leaders of the movement, including the future general secretary of the Polish Socialist Party, Wladystaw Gomutka, who was himself in and out of prison between 1933 and 1954 (Sara was herself imprisoned twice for her political activ-

ity). Sara found herself among the most educated and literate of the political > S. Nomberg-Przytyk, Wiezienie byto moim domem (Lublin, 1964). © Schatz, The Generation, 87.

234 HAolh Levitsky prisoners; often she wrote letters for other prisoners, made impassioned speeches to keep up morale, and devised clever ways to correspond with the men and with communists outside the prison. A gifted singer and public speaker, she became a charismatic teacher and leader, influencing her comrades inside and outside the prison through her song-leading as much as by her knowledge of communist doc-

trine. Unquestionably, the prison experience created solidarity and feelings of brotherhood among its members. As she described it in her memoir of the concentration camp, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land, the political connections she made in prison before the war saved her life during the war, in the camps, and after.

Il When in 1939 Germany bombed Poland, Sara was serving her second prison sentence. The Polish authorities released only criminals from the prisons; political prisoners remained locked up. Aware that capture by the Germans probably meant death, she led her communist cellmates in a charge against the guard and escaped. She crossed Poland, already torn apart by war, with the purpose of gathering up her family and establishing it in the Soviet zone. Sadly, her parents and brother would die in the Lublin ghetto, but Sara successfully made her way to the relatively safe city of Bialystok.

When the Germans reoccupied Bialystok, creating a ghetto, she helped to organize a Jewish school and taught history and other subjects. Once they began to liquidate this ghetto, she joined the resistance with her first husband, with whom she had a child. Both were killed by the Germans. She was among the last of the Jews in the ghetto to leave Bialystok. Years later, the group of Jews who survived the ghetto invited her to write about her experiences there; this material became her second published memoir.’ While in the Bialystok prison awaiting transfer—the Germans would take the

remaining Jews, including Sara, to the Stutthof camp in northern Poland—she was isolated as a Jewish prisoner. Not since her childhood among the hasidim had she felt so separated from the surrounding society. She had been working, living, and breathing as a communist for Polish communism since her teens. Separation from the people to whom she felt she most belonged, the communist prisoners, made her feel the tragedy even more acutely. She wrote about these feelings in Auschwitz: We were the first Jewish transport to arrive in Stutthof, a motley crew who shared nothing in common but the tragedy of having been born Jewish. No wonder we met with little sympathy from the other prisoners. Nobody wanted any contact with us, and nobody asked us about anything. We were alienated. We felt that no one wanted us here. It was the isolation ’ S. Nomberg-Przytyk, Kolumny Samsona (Lublin, 1966).

The Exile of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk 235 of the prisoners in the Jewish cell that had hurt me most of all in the Bialystok prison. Now

the same thing was happening to us in Stutthof.® 7 And yet, upon her arrival in Auschwitz several months later, she was taken charge of by the leading camp communist, Orli, who was the administrator of the area to which she was assigned. Orli arranged a life-saving job for her in the camp infirmary run by Dr Mengele, an area of the camp that, she stated, “was seeded

with members of the anti-Fascist organizations. In this area, the functionaries were safer than they were anywhere else in the camp... . You could say, in plain language, that [Orli] held the lives of many women prisoners in her hands.””

Sara’s communist contacts eased her through numerous unbearable and lifethreatening moments during her years in Auschwitz. In her memor, she vividly described times during roll-call, selection, in the barracks, hospital, or transports when international political contacts saved her life, or made her misery more bearable. Yet even as she was buoyed by the strength of her communist ties, she found

herself repelled by what she called the ‘fanaticism’ of the practising Jews. She described two religious girls she knew in Auschwitz: As soon as [ got to know [the religious Slovak Jews], their fanaticism irritated me. Despite the reality that surrounded them, they continued to believe in the Glory of the Chosen people. Here in Auschwitz, in the face of the unavenged murder of the whole Jewish people, in light of the bestiality toward the elderly, women, and children, they continued to believe in God’s special affection for the Jews.'°

On her way back to Lublin from Auschwitz, in the confusion of nationalities, political allegiances, religions, and personal histories, Sara shouted to a belligerent Russian soldier: ‘Iam a Communist! Iam rushing back to my country because they are building a Socialist State there’ (p. 156). If equality and justice became the central aspirations for the Polish Jews of ‘the generation’, like Sara, the communist survivors of the genocide would leave the hell of the death camps only with the idea that they would establish a system within and through which they would struggle against fascism. She wrote: ‘I would like to help make another country where one could not do things like this [Auschwitz]. I believed in this Communism, it was my religion.’**

IV In her final memoir, Sara Nomberg-Przytyk filtered her vision of a communist Polish utopia through the narration of her own life story, and then analysed how that vision turned sour. She began with a frightening account of her return to

9 Ibid. 38—41. 10 Tbid. 30.

8 S. Nomberg-Przytyk, Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 3—4. 41 Quoted in M. Chamberland, ‘Culture et mémoire: Sara Nomberg, juive polonaise (1915—1990)’ (MA thesis, Université de Sherbrooke, 1992), gg—100.

236 Aolhi Levitsky Lublin from Auschwitz. For several days she travelled in a closed train carriage with many other displaced persons, mostly peasants who had been dislocated during the war. As they talked amongst themselves, she heard degrading and shameful comments about the Jews, many of which suggested that they should no longer be alive. Yet, even while terrified, she understood the peasants’ antisemitic attitude as simply a problem that would be solved by the institution of a communist regime. This post-war, lingering antisemitism represented by the new Polish social class named by Paul Lendvai ‘the guardians of the Jewish goods’,'” tested a number of

Jewish returnees’ willingness to stay in Poland. But she stubbornly—and optimistically—focused on what communism could create out of the mess of post-war society. Even when antisemitism turned virulent during the pogroms at Kielce and elsewhere, and she had more frightening moments after resettling in Lublin, she explained away those episodes. She comforted herself with the notion that antisemitism was illegal under communism. It was simply a matter of more work to do with the masses.

Sadly, her account of her life shows that over time, despite her resolve to see communism through to the end, she eventually became completely disillusioned with the politics of post-war communist Poland. It took three steps to puncture

her dream completely. The first occurred after Stalin’s death, when in 1956 she was asked to stand down as chief editor of a daily communist newspaper. Had Pawel Dabek not intervened, she would have left Poland for Israel along with thousands of fellow Polish Jews. Dabek persuaded her to stay in Poland, but he could not alter her disappointment at Poland’s treatment of her.

The second step in her path towards disillusionment occurred between 1962 and 1967. In 1962, she was removed from her position on the weekly regional party newspaper. She had been a journalist on this paper when she began visiting vil-

lages in her region, doing research for her articles by speaking to the peasants, examining the new schools and social services the government was supposed to be providing for them. Suddenly, while attempting to interview villagers and party members about a problem in one district, she found herself unable to interview a single person in the village. No one would speak to her. She sought out a friend in

the area, a communist from her prison days, who told her that the secret police (Stuzba Bezpieczenstwa; SB) had been terrorizing the whole population in order to control the district. In order to get proof that this was in fact the case, she sought ways to get the villagers to trust her enough to speak to her. Once she became successful in talking to people, she found enough corroborating evidence for a news story.

Sara Nomberg-Przytyk returned from that research trip with a notebook filled with evidence about the many problems in that village. After writing up an article 12 P Lendvai, L’Antisémitisme sans juifs (Paris, 1971), 77. Quoted in Chamberland, ‘Culture et mémoire’, 125-6.

The Exile of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk 237 questioning the government’s policies, she took it to the chief editor, who, after reading it in her presence, said the Party Secretary would also need to read it. At the time, she felt encouraged both by her skill in expressing the problem and the editor’s immediate response to her article. She felt that she had done her duty as a journalist to expose the corruption, to speak for those who could not speak. But within an hour after the article had been forwarded up the command ladder, she was called in to see the Party Secretary. With him stood her chief editor and the commandant from the provincial command of the police. The Secretary complimented her on her article and assured her that the particular problems she wrote about would be handled by the police. She countered that that was not enough; in fact, she intended the article ‘to be an example not only for that district, but for others, for the whole police and for the population, to show them that they shouldn’t

be afraid to speak out when something is not right’ (p. 106). The commandant interrupted her, arguing that if the article was published, then the enemies of the Communist Party would also read it and use it to undermine the interests and authority of the government. Instead of printing it, they returned it to her, and she realized that she would henceforth be on the radar of the censor. Still, this did not stop her from pursuing justice for the people. She took her work as a journalist very seriously. Even with the understanding that she would have to pass the censorship of the Provincial Committee, she still sought out real news stories. She found the next one after the minister of agriculture outlined the new plan for the development of agriculture during the plenum of the Provincial Committee of the party, to which she was invited as a guest.

During his speech, the minister described how each municipality would be assigned an agronomist whose duty would be to work out a production plan for each farm with each individual farmer.

After hearing the plan, she felt it would be important to travel around the province to each municipality and find out how they would institute it. She would go directly to the agronomist in the municipality who was charged with organizing

the plans for each farmer. Her concern was that, once again, the peasants, the farmers, would not have a voice of their own. In fact, she discovered that the agronomists all worked out their plans by themselves, in their offices, without con-

sulting the farmers, with no confirmation from the farmers that the plan would work, and with no guarantee that the farmers would execute the plan. After she met with a number of agronomists and peasants in districts around the Lublin region, she became certain that this kind of agricultural planning without the farmers’ input was happening all over Poland. She wrote another long article about the operation of the agricultural plan, citing facts she had discovered during her research visiting districts, municipalities, and villages. She sent one copy to her chief editor and another to the minister of agriculture, to let him know that he was mistaken in believing that his plan was being instituted correctly. It never received approval, and never appeared in the newspaper.

238 Holh Levitsky Although this last bit of censorship unnerved her, she still believed that it was not directed against her personally. She assumed it was politics, to conceal the true picture of present-day Poland from the population. Yet soon after this last incident she was called in to see the Provincial Party Secretary, who told her he had a very good proposition for her to consider: You have lived through a great deal in your life. You spent many long years in prison, in camps, in wars. We have decided to give you a party pension, so that you won’t have to work so hard. You will remain half-time in the newspaper. You won’t have to write big articles like you do now, but small articles, notices, and you will have a party pension almost as big as what you earn now. And you might even begin to write about some more important problems rather than running from one district to another, seeing what is going on in the districts. Enough! I would be happy if someone would make me such a proposition. (p. 110)

Confused, she tried to refuse the offer, because, at the age of 47 and in excellent health, she simply felt she didn’t deserve it. She had joined the youth organization of the Communist Party when she was 14. She had always wanted to participate in what was happening around her. She knew there was an unspoken reason for ‘retiring’ her so early. As she explained it, “They didn’t want me to tell the truth, and they wanted to make the newspaper free of Jews’ (p. 111). Over the next few years, after her forced retirement, the members of her family had a series of disillusioning experiences. Her elder son Jurek was studying at the Sports Academy in Warsaw, and her younger son Wiodek was still at school in Lublin, but their family also included a Polish peasant named Jaska whom they had ‘adopted’ years earlier and who was a trained technician in a factory. One day, she came home from the factory and told the family that her co-workers were all saying terrible things about Jews, so terrible that she was ashamed to repeat what they said. The most horrible things, in fact, were being said by party members—so she felt that she could not denounce them to the party although antisemitism was offi, cially barred from it. Moreover, she said, the jokes were getting worse, and she was afraid to challenge what they were saying. One day, when the situation became particularly bad—a technician said: ‘Hitler did one good thing—he killed Jews’, and everyone laughed—Jaska told off the workers. She lectured them about how many Poles were also killed by Hitler, about the concentration camps, about the many contributions over time made by the Jews in Poland, and finally about the rejects, scoundrels, and outcasts like them who were in the party (she was not a member). They responded with silence, infuriating Jaska, who could not work the rest of the day.

Jurek, too, had his share of openly antisemitic experiences. At the Sports Academy in Warsaw where he was a student, troublemakers among the students tried to defame him with jokes about Jews. And while his response was to challenge them, it did not lessen the number of stupid jokes. His lack of fear in the face of such jokes and idiotic comments about Jews only strengthened his resolve, con-

The Exile of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk 239 firming among the students who his friends were, as they regarded him with more esteem afterwards. In early 1967 Jurek was invited by his father’s family in America to come for a visit after his exams. Andrzej Przytyk came from a large, working-class family, who long before the war lived in Grodzisk. Between 1926 and 1938 the entire family emigrated to the USA from Poland except for Andrzej, who had become a committed communist, and two younger siblings, who perished during the war. His family had tried to get Andrzej, Sara, and their boys to leave Poland many times, unsuccessfully. Neither Sara nor her husband had been ready to give up their goal of a New Poland. But the time seemed right to send Jurek off to see the world. The relatives sent the tickets, Jurek applied for a passport, and then waited; the family assumed that since they were well-known communists it would not be a problem

Middle East.

for him to travel abroad. But in June 1967 the Six-Day War broke out in the Many Jews in Poland asked the same questions as Sara did:

What connection did we, in Poland, have with the war? What connection did my son, a student in Poland, have with the Six Day War in the Middle East? Perhaps they would use this as a reason not to let Jurek travel out of the country. In connection with the overall mistrust, even hatred of Jews, it would protect the country not to give Jews passports. (p. 125)

In fact, when the Six-Day War first broke out, before there was any news of it on the radio or in the newspaper in Poland, Sara was called in to see the local First Secretary. He greeted her by saying that he had some very bad news for her. Since he put it in such personal terms, she immediately thought the worst about her children or her home. Instead he said, ‘We have a new war in the Middle East. Israel has attacked all the Arab people.’ He waited for her to say something, but she had no idea why he had called her especially to say it to her. So she replied, as seriously as she could under the circumstances: ‘Comrade Kozdra . . . I swear to you that nobody consulted me. Israel didn’t ask me if it should be done or not. I had no part in it, believe me’ (p. 122).

After the awkward silence that followed this conversation, Sara knew that very bad times were in store for Jews in Poland. In fact, while Polish radio reported that Jews had incited the war, her younger son Wiodek listened to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe and got a true picture. Her family and many others knew what was propaganda. It was with anxiety about the war in the Middle East and its effect on the Jews of Poland, and surrounded by an already increasingly hostile attitude towards Jews, that Sara and her family waited to hear about Jurek’s passport. But Jurek had an experience that made him certain he would. While he was reading in the park after

completing his exams, a secret police (SB) agent followed him and began a conversation. When the agent asked him about the war, Jurek acted as if he was completely ignorant, claiming his exams took all of his time. The agent told him how Israel had attacked the Arabs and how the Israelis were acting like murderers.

240 Holh Levitsky Responding to the agent’s version of events with a simple, ‘Thank you very much.

Now I know what is happening’, he was certain he had been characterized as a political idiot and would therefore receive his passport. Which in fact he did, a few days later. Both Sara and her husband saw that it was not mass antisemitism, but the party pushing antisemitic propaganda on the people. After the Six-Day War, the propaganda took its most public forms yet. There were television talk shows and panel

discussions in which people made openly antisemitic statements without being challenged. After watching one television interview with a working-class woman carrying a sign that said ‘Moszki do Dajana’ (‘Jews, go to Dayan’), Andrzej pulled out his gun and laid it on the dining-room table. The family had begun to feel as if it were under attack. The lifelong dream of a communist utopia in Poland finally came crashing to an end for her several days after the beginning of the war. She was sitting in her small, shared office at the newspaper of the Provincial Committee of the party where she worked. Several journalists were discussing the situation in the Middle East; they openly expressed hope that the Jews would be slaughtered by the Arabs, and ‘it will all end quickly’. After hearing that comment, she emptied her desk, saying to her colleagues: ‘You surely know that after what I have heard here, I will not set foot in

this room again’ (p. 128). Without saying goodbye, she walked out and never returned to her office, writing what she had to for the newspaper from home. From that point on, she refused to attend all party meetings as well. This was the final step in her disillusionment.

V Sara Nomberg-Przytyk wrote her first two memoirs, Prison Was My Home and The Pillars of Samson, immediately following her 1962 retirement. They were immediately accepted for publication and won wide recognition for her in Poland. Now, her husband persuaded her to begin a memoir about her time in the concentration and death camps. She decided to write a literary book about Auschwitz, to evoke characters and situations based on her real experiences. The working title, ‘Jews in Auschwitz’, was meant to signify to those who read it before publication that it was about Jews rather than Poles and other nationalities (mostly political prisoners) in

Auschwitz, who had already been represented in Polish books. When she first returned to Lublin, after the war, she had tried to write about those painful experiences, but the words would not come.

But this was many years later, and, having being forced into early retirement and having written two memoirs already, she found that not only could she write, but that she wrote ‘Quickly, with great satisfaction. I felt as though I were casting all the terrible images of these things out of my heart and out of my head. I spoke

once again with all of the people who were murdered in Auschwitz. I spoke

The Exile of Sara Nomberg-Przytyk 241 once again with friends I had loved in Auschwitz’ (p. 119). In the memoir, she showed the refinement of the Nazi killing process, how they measured each step so that an entire people would be wiped out with speed, efficiency, and economy. She

herself was extremely satisfied with her memoir as a picture of the situation of Jews in Auschwitz and felt it was the most successful thing she had done in her life so far.

In 1967, full of confidence, she took the completed manuscript to her publisher. It was praised as the best book she had written, but it would have to be cleared, like the others, through the Provincial Committee. This was the period during which the Six-Day War broke out in Israel, with sudden, terrible changes for the Jews in Poland. Soon she was asked to meet with Comrade Kozdra, the First Secretary of the Provincial Committee, who told her that she would have to ‘edit the manuscript a little’. He said, ‘You know, there’s too much about Jews. The leader of the

Committee’s Propaganda section has also read the book, and he had the same impression’ (p. 131). She was outraged at the suggestion that she should edit out references to Jews, as the book was specifically about the Jews in Auschwitz. She immediately withdrew the manuscript from the publishing house, realizing that she would probably

need to hide it or it would be taken from her. She found a trusted friend, a nonparty member, who agreed to help her hide the book. The manuscript remained unpublished in the Yad Vashem archives until 1983. But the campaign to remove the Jews from Poland for good had infiltrated her life to the very core. She and her family had seen antisemitism in many forms, and had had opportunities to emi-

grate. After earlier episodes she had declared that ‘My belief in Communism was | so strong, so deep in my consciousness, that all this could not change my attitude, my belief, my love for the party’ (p. 70). Yet at the end of her fourth and final memoir, written in exile in Canada, she described a very different situation: Many times when I have attempted to analyze the situation in Poland after we left, I have tried to answer one question: who was responsible for the antisemitic, underhanded, poisonous situation that had developed in Poland at that time? Who had organized the antiSemitic slogans, the anti-Semitic outbreaks, the slanders of Jews? Who was responsible? Where did the antisemitism come from? Was it organized from above, or did it originate with the masses? I think I can say with certainty that the antisemitism of the time was organized by the party. (p. 151)

During the final months of 1967, the entire family was persecuted. Her husband, thrown out of the party, contemplated suicide. One son was refused entry back to Poland from a trip abroad; her other son was excluded from the university and slandered. Lies about her were published and her life was threatened. Finally, she realized that she would have to lead her family away from Poland, towards salvation in the Promised Land of her people. On that night in 1968, as she sat with her old friend and colleague Pawel Dabek, she explained what she had to do:

242 Holh Levitsky You know that I have been for Poles my whole life . . . But now it is like this, and I have no more strength to fight against it, and I have no way to do it. So, Dabek, understand me. I will never forget you nor all of my good friends . . . Now I have to begin to think about my own people, the Jews, from whom I have been estranged for a long time. I think I will return to them. . . I will go to Israel. Not only because I want to, but because I have no other way. Nobody wants to take me in but Israel, my State, my people, my country. (p. 165)

In order to leave Poland, the authorities declared that the family would have to give up their Polish passports. She and her family were forced to relinquish their Polish citizenship and leave for ever the land of Polaniya where the Jewish people, her people, had lived and worked in some kind of harmony with their hosts for a thousand years. She left Poland saddened and dejected by the failure of her ideal, but returned to her people in Israel. Until her death in 1990, she lived in both Israel and Canada, often joined by her many friends and extended family. And yet, though she rarely spoke of it, she never forgot the pain of forced exile. It might be said instead that her silence was ‘not the silence of forgetfulness, but one of an inexpressible pain that is always present, deep-rooted in the very depths of [her] being’.*° 13 N. Wachtel, ‘Le Travail de la mémoire et les limites de histoire orale’, Annales ESC (1980), 147. Quoted in Chamberland, ‘Culture et mémoire’, 156.

TERETE ETE FE TEE TE ETF HE PE PTO OTT TOOT TTS OEE OTTO

The Fate of a Yiddish Poetin _ Communist Eastern Europe Naftah Herts Kon in Poland 1959-1905 KAREN AUERBACH THE IMPRISONMENT of the Yiddish poet Naftali Herts Kon in Warsaw in 1960 on charges of spying for Israel was emblematic of the life path of a generation of Yiddish leftist writers in eastern Europe. In Poland before the Second World War, Kon had been arrested for communist activities at a time when communists were persecuted; after the Second World War in the Soviet Union and Poland, he was imprisoned for being a stubborn, outspoken critic of the communist system; and after his emigration to Israel in 1965, he struggled to make a living as a Yiddish writer in a Hebrew culture that had not found a place for Yiddish. Kon’s arrest in post-war Poland was part of a crackdown on dissent in Polish

intellectual life that began the year after the establishment in October 1956 of a national communist regime in Poland, which had raised and then dashed hopes of democratization. Yet Kon’s particular history also reflects the importance of the period from 1956 to 1967 in understanding the subsequent fate of Jewish communal life in post-war Poland. His arrest was symptomatic of the Polish security apparatus’s heightened suspicions of Jewish organizations and individuals of Jewish background from the end of the 1950s, fuelled in part by the rise of a faction within the Communist Party whose stronghold became the security apparatus, and in part by the influence of Soviet policy towards Israel. The atmosphere of suspicion complicated the Jewish communal leadership’s attempts after 1956 to re-establish contact with the larger Jewish world and foreshadowed the so-called anti-Zionist campaign of 1967—8 in Poland. I am grateful to Ellen Kellman of Brandeis University for helping with access to materials during the early stages of research on Kon; to Gennady Estraikh and Marek Web for commenting on an earlier version of this article; and to Naftali Herts Kon’s daughters, Ina Lancman in New York and Vita Serf in Tel Aviv, who shared their recollections about their family’s experiences. The research for this arti-

cle was funded by the American Society for Jewish Heritage in Poland and by the GTR fund of the | Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis University.

244 Karen Auerbach In this essay I will describe the experiences of Kon, whose life path from a young, leftist Yiddish poet in Warsaw in the early 1930s to an Israeli immigrant in 1965 provides a window onto the disintegration of Yiddish literary life in eastern

Europe after the Second World War and the disillusionment of a generation of Yiddish writers and poets who had been persecuted in pre-war eastern Europe for their adherence to a communist ideology that later betrayed them. Kon’s experiences in post-war Poland, from his arrival in 1959 to his emigration to Israel in 1965, will then be contextualized in the light of the nature of Jewish communal life in that period.!

THE FATE OF A YIDDISH WRITER , Naftali Herts Kon was among one of the last generations of Yiddish writers who came of age in pre-war eastern Europe. He was born in 1910 in Storozhynets,” near Chernivtsi (Czernowitz, today in Ukraine), the capital of Bukovina, where his father was a watchmaker and his mother, the daughter of a rabbi, ran a small boarding house.* Kon and his younger brother Jacob were split up at a young age as a result of their parents’ separation, after which Jacob remained 1n Storozhynets with his mother, while Kon lived in various towns with his father, eventually settling in Chernivtsi. Although his family was a pious one, sending both sons to heder, Kon became politicized at an early age, while still living in Storozhynets. (It is unclear exactly when he left the town, although his brother estimated Kon’s age at about 14 or 15 at the time.) After the construction of a factory in Storozhynets, many of the town’s youth, including the rabbi’s son, turned to communism, perhaps because of the establishment of a communist cell in the factory.* _

In the multilingual society of Bukovina, which belonged to the Habsburg Empire before the region was joined to Romania after the First World War, Kon’s native tongue was Yiddish, but he read and wrote fluently in German in addition to knowing Romanian. In Chernivtsi Kon began his literary activities in Yiddish, 1 The main sources for Kon’s arrest in Poland are records of the Polish Ministry of Internal Affairs’ surveillance of Kon and records from his trial, located in the Instytut Pamieci Narodowe] (Institute of National Remembrance; IPN) in Warsaw. Thirteen files on Kon compiled by the security apparatus

are extant, including background material on his life, reports from informants, surveillance of his apartment, copies of letters and writings found during a search of his apartment, and testimony during his trial. Other written sources about his experiences in post-war Poland include his collection of poetry, Farshribn in zikorn (‘Written Down in Memory’), published in 1966 in Israel, which included a lengthy autobiographical essay about his life and work; newspaper articles; the collection of Kon’s personal papers at YIVO in New York; and memoirs of other Yiddish writers. 2 Alternative spellings: Storozyniec, Storozynetz. 3 The details of Kon’s early life in Storozhynets were described in an interview with his brother Jacob Cohen in Tel Aviv, where the latter moved with his wife after the Second World War and established a printing house. Interview with Jacob Cohen, Tel Aviv, 10 Dec. 2006. * Interview with Jacob Cohen, 10 Dec. 2006.

Naftah Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 245 publishing his poems in the Tshernovitser bleter.” According to Shlomo Bikl, he was

part of a loosely affiliated group of Yiddish writers in the city who were born around 1910 and were known as ‘Der Nokhvuks’, translated as ‘the aftergrowth’ or

‘the offspring’.° While still in Chernivtsi Kon was arrested for a short period, apparently for political reasons, and he left Bukovina for Vienna, where he lived with an uncle, before coming to Poland in 1929 or 1930. (It was at the time of Kon’s departure from Bukovina, Kon’s brother recalled, that Kon took the name Jakub Serf, which continued to appear on all official documents; Jakub was taken from his brother’s first name, while Serf was his mother’s maiden name. Kon’s wife Liza took Serf as her last name, and most government documents from postwar Poland refer to Kon as Jakub Serf. As a child he was known to his family as Dovid 'Tsvi.) Although Kon’s first stay in Poland spanned only a few years, in that time he became known within the Yiddish literary circles of the Polish capital as a talented and passionate, albeit inconsistent, young poet who spoke in a compelling voice despite possessing a nervous character. Kon was living illegally in Warsaw, usually staying with Alter Kacyzne or, when Kacyzne’s apartment was under suspicion,

sleeping in the building of the Union of Jewish Writers and Journalists, at 13 Tiomackie Street. Melekh Ravitch recalled that Kon was the ‘zorgn-kind’ (worrychild) of Yiddish writers’ circles. ’ At a time when linguistic acculturation was progressing rapidly among Jewish

youth in inter-war Poland, Kon, barely 20 years old when he came to Poland, gained notice as part of a young generation of Yiddish writers. He first published his poetry in the Bundist Vokhnshrift far literatur, kunst un kultur,® and an essay of

his, which cited the importance of using poetry to address the class struggle, appeared in a collection of essays under the heading ‘From our youth’.’ Kon later

broke with the publication, however, and in July 1932 he began publishing in Literarishe tribune, which was published legally from 1930 to 1934 as the organ of

the unofficial ‘group of Jewish revolutionary writers and publicists’ associated with the illegal Communist Party, including Binem Heller, Isaac Deutscher, Mosze Szulsztein, Dawid Sfard, Herts Bergner, and others.!° Kon also wrote in > ‘Politically the newspaper was affiliated with the Bund, but in terms of literature, it was Yiddishist and independent’. V. Tambur, Yidish-prese in rumenye (Bucharest, 1977), 207. Manger published his early poetry and Dos bukh fun ganeyden in this periodical. 6 S. Bikl, Shrayber fun mayn dor, iii (Tel Aviv, 1970), 92. 7M. Ravitch, Mayn leksikon: yidishe dikhter, dertseyler, dramaturgn in poyln tsvishn di tsvey groyse velt-milkhomes (Montreal, 1945), 216. 8 ‘Brodyagn-lid’, Vokhnshrift far literatur, 14 Aug. 1931, p. 3. 9 Der eyntsiker veg’, Vokhnshrift far literatur, 12 Feb. 1932, p. 3. 10 An editor’s note with a poem by Kon in Literarishe tribune, entitled “Tsayt-akordn’, informed the

reader that Kon had broken with the Bundist Vokhnshrift far literatur, kunst un kultur and had joined the revolutionary writers’ group. See “Tsayt-akordn’, Literarishe tribune, tsaytshrift far literatur, kunst un krittk, July 1932, p. 11.

246 Karen Auerbach this period for Literarishe bleter, one of the most important Yiddish literary journals in Warsaw at the time.'? Despite Kon’s short stay in pre-war Warsaw, the city had a defining influence on his life. It was in Warsaw that he completed his first book of poems, Tyot nokh trot

(Step after step), which was confiscated by the censor, to be published later in Minsk, in 1935.'* In the capital he also met his future wife, Liza Goldman, the daughter of a shoe merchant. She later became a paediatrician. In 1931 and 1932 Kon was twice imprisoned in Poland for communist activities. He was sent back to Romania, but through the intervention of the writer Melekh

Ravitch and the Bundist leader Henryk Erlich, Kon obtained a Soviet visa.'° Settling in Kharkov, Kon resumed his literary activities, which included writing for the American Communist newspaper in Yiddish, Morgn frayhayt. In the next four years he published two collections of poems as well as a collection of short stories. Soon after arriving in the Soviet Union, however, Kon became disillusioned with communism. In 1937 or 1938 he was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in Ukraine and then arrested and sentenced to three years in a labour camp, probably because of the accusation that he provided information about the closure of Jewish newspapers and institutions to the Bundist newspaper editor in Warsaw, Jakub Pat, and to the Yiddish writer Joseph Opatoshu in the United States. 14

Upon his release from the work camp in 1941, Kon returned to Kharkov, but at the outbreak of war with Germany he was probably evacuated with his family

to Kazakhstan. During the war, Kon was active in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, writing for the committee’s newspaper, Eynikayt./° He returned to Chernivtsi in 1944 and began collecting materials about the Chernivtsi ghetto,'® with plans to publish a book. In March 1949, however, in the period after the

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had been shut down and the crackdown on Yiddish writers and institutions had begun, Kon was arrested again on accusations "1! Literarishe bleter was published from 1924 to 1926 in Vilna and until 1929 in Warsaw, although the

publication was always based in Warsaw. Contributors to this journal included I. Singer, Perets Markish, Melekh Ravitch, and Moshe Zylburg as well as Alter Kacyzne, David Pinski, Noah Prylucki, and Hilel Cajtlin. 12 N. H. Kon, Trot nokh trot (Minsk, 1935); available at YIVO in New York. The volume includes several additional poems that were written after his move to the Soviet Union. 13 Ravitch, Mayn leksikon, 216. 14 TPN 00231/209, folder 4, pp. 185—7.

15 According to information listed by Kon on various personal papers, he was a correspondent for — the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee from the summer of 1942 to the committee’s liquidation six years later. His personal papers also list him as a correspondent for the Soviet press agency during the war. See YIVO RG 1616, box 3, folder 8. 16 A 349-page manuscript of Kon’s history of the Holocaust in Bukovina and Bessarabia, including Chernivtsi, can be found in the collection of his personal papers at YIVO. See YIVO RG 1616, box 4.

The manuscript contains information from interviews he conducted while a correspondent for the

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

, Naftah Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 247 of anti-Soviet writing for his earlier submission of an article about the Holocaust to Eynikayt, which had been closed in November 1948. Kon initially received the death penalty but his sentence was commuted to twenty-five years in a work camp.'’ After being rehabilitated in 1956, Kon returned to Chernivtsi, where his family had been living. While still in Chernivtsi, he began publishing his poetry in Yidishe shriftn, the Yiddish literary journal in Poland. He left Chernivtsi for Warsaw with his family in July 1959. On the train to Poland, many of Kon’s manuscripts and books were confiscated as the family crossed the border, though he managed to sneak through the most important papers. The family stayed for four to five weeks at a repatriation point in Przemysl before moving on to Warsaw. Upon his repatriation, Kon was again welcomed into the Yiddish literary circles of the Polish capital. Perhaps because of the revelations from three years earlier regarding the fate of the better-known Yiddish writers from the Soviet Union, Kon’s arrival was reported on the front page of the Warsaw-based newspaper in Yiddish, the Folk-sztyme,'® where he soon received work as a literary editor. In September 1959, Yidishe shrifin published a poem by Kon dedicated to the murdered Soviet Yiddish writer Der Nister, with an introductory message noting that Kon was preparing a book-length poem about the Warsaw ghetto and a book about Jewish life in Bessarabia and Bukovina between the world wars.*? In Poland, Kon

attended events of the Towarzystwo Spoleczno-Kulturalne Zydéw w Polsce (Social-Cultural Association of Jews in Poland; TSKZ), the secular organization for Jewish cultural, political, and communal life, and he gave poetry readings and talks in various Jewish communities.”° He published poems and articles about his travels within Poland in Folk-sztyme and Yidishe shriftn. Shortly after his arrival in Poland, Kon published a long article in Folk-sztyme entitled ‘October Revolution and the Yiddish-Soviet literature’, which analysed the development and major themes of Soviet- Yiddish literature.”* In the Soviet camps in the previous decades, Kon had composed poems using a cigarette on a makeshift tablet of glass and a mixture of toothpaste and water, memorizing the poems before wiping the tablet clean. At other times, he wrote poetry in the camps by substituting numbers as code for Yiddish letters.27 With his arrival in Poland in 1959, he wrote these poems down, leaving in his apartment a trail of dissent. Kon travelled as well to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania on assignment for Folk-sztyme, and it was these travels that seemed to alarm the 1” For information about Kon’s imprisonment in the Soviet Union, see L. Drobyazko’s articles in the bulletin of the Ukrainian Center for Holocaust Studies, nos. 7 (Mar.—Apr. 2003) and 9 (May—June

2003). The bulletin published the accusation paper against Kon relating to his arrest in 1949 and the article in Eynikayt which led to the arrest. 18 ‘Naftali Herts Kon gekumen keyn poyln’, Folk-sztyme, 25 July 1959, p. 1. ‘Erd vorem’, Yidishe shrifin, Sept. 1959, p. 6. 20 See e.g. ‘Der shrayber naftali herts kon bay di lubliner yidn’, Folk-sztyme, 13 Oct. 1959, p. 3. 21 Folk-sztyme, 7 Nov. 1959, pp. 4—5.

, 22 Kon, Farshribn in zikorn, ‘Onshtot a forvort’, 3-4.

248 Karen Auerbach Polish security apparatus. In Warsaw, Kon maintained contact with Israeli diplomats who, the security apparatus charged, were smuggling Soviet Jews across the border to Poland and then to Israel. The security apparatus alleged that Kon’s apartment was being used as a meeting place between Israeli diplomats and suspect Polish Jewish activists in arranging help for Soviet Jews. In addition, Kon was suspected of gathering information for the Israeli embassy during his travels for Folksztyme.*° The security apparatus’s suspicions of Kon were exacerbated when, after his travels in Romania, he returned to Poland and wrote a lengthy essay about the persecution of Romanian Jews.”* According to a November 1960 report of the Ministry of Internal Affairs: From the middle of July to 8 November 1960, Serf was in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. His travel to these countries was connected with intelligence interests of the Israeli embassy. As it is known to us, the Israeli embassy in Warsaw 1s the disposing means in relation to the Israeli embassies in the countries of People’s Democracy. In the situation when we had a lot of information to believe that Serf was conducting intelligence activity in Romania and Hungary, it was decided to conduct a secret search in his apartment. It was carried out on 7 November 1960. During the search we found material that could comprise evidence of intelligence activity of Jakub Serf. They [the materials] are about the Romanian intelligence police, about murder and terror. . . . Notes were found about camps and prisons in which Serf writes that all of Romania has became a thick web of camps which are organized on the Soviet model. He compares these camps with the Hitler concentration camps. He writes that in Romania in the last ten to twelve years the number of prisons has doubled. Work battalions are also written about. He is interested in Jewish youth who are taken from higher education and mobilized to the work battalions, in which they are assigned the hardest work. He writes that in these battalions are also people who expressed the desire to go to Israel. In other notes he describes the house arrest and suffering of Ana Pauker, about her isolation. She somehow wrote some kind of journals, which strongly disquieted the Romanian authorities, since they had a certain connection with her death. They do not want these diaries to get abroad because it would cause an international scandal.

23 For example, a note in a Nov. 1960 report for the Ministry of Internal Affairs includes the following statement: ‘In the editorship of the Folks-sztyme, Serf Jakub along with Gejer Lazar as well as [Yiddish poet] Hadasa [Hadasah] Rubin, suspected of intelligence activities, comprise an anti-Soviet, nationalist wing. He [Kon] is among a circle of people trusted by the Israeli embassy in Warsaw about illegal transfer of Soviet Jews to Israel through Poland as well as maintaining contact with Jewish nationalists in the Soviet Union. Among these trusted people is the doctor Cukierstein of the Institute for Nuclear [Research] . . . This unofficial conspiratorial activity is disquieting for his [Kon’s] wife, who warns him that he is risking his life and warns him to be loyal to the country in which he lives and if not, then he should leave. In his apartment Israeli diplomats meet, with Hadasa Rubin among others. . . . If Soviet Jews are led to Poland, they can count on help from the Joint [American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee]. Correspondence between Serf and people in the Soviet Union is through a tailor, Noach Weisberg, in Czernowitz.’ IPN 00231/209, folder 3, pp. 113-20. See also IPN 00231/209, folder 4, pp. 33-4, 105-6, and 108-11. 24 IPN 00231/209, folder 3, pp. 113-20.

Nafiah Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 249 After Folk-sztyme refused to print the article, according to Kon’s later recollec-

tions, he sought to publish it in Forverts, the daily Yiddish newspaper in New York.?° Kon’s letter to the Forverts editor regarding the article seemed to be the immediate trigger for his arrest in December 1960.”° An article about Kon’s arrest in Warsaw first appeared in Forverts in April 1961, four months after his detention, and in other Yiddish and mainstream newspapers

in Israel and the West (though not in Poland),”’ prompting complaints from human rights organizations and inquiries at Polish embassies in Paris, Washington, and Ottawa. A Ministry of Internal Affairs report from July 1961 indicates that the

protests from abroad had an effect on Kon’s treatment;?* the accusation of spying was subsequently dropped and his case was transferred from a military prosecutor to a regional court.”? After at least fifteen months in prison and in a psychiatric hospital,?° Kon was found guilty of the lesser charge of subversive writing based on his article criticizing Romania. He was released in March 1962.*" Kon later lamented that despite a higher judge’s orders to the contrary, many of his manuscripts and his Yiddish typewriter were never returned to him.*” In an autobiographical essay published in Israel in 1966, Kon wrote that he had

come to Poland in 1959 with the intention of remaining there, although his 25 IPN 00231/209, folder 15, pp. 84—170. Only the security apparatus’s Polish translation, not the original Yiddish essay, is contained in the files. 26 IPN 00231/209, folder 2, p. 164. 27 Mikhter naftali herts kon arestirt in poyln oyf forderung fun moskve’, Forverts, 15 Apr. 1961, p. I. The date of Kon’s arrest varies in the MSW files. In his sentence, dated 19 Mar. 1962, his arrest date is cited as 22 Dec. 1960. See IPN 00231/209, folder 15, pp. 176-84. See n. 65 for further explanation. 28 A report from 18 July 1961 states: ‘In April Comrade Gajewski, still as our ambassador in Paris,

turned to the MSZ [Ministry for Foreign Affairs] to clarify whether the writer Naftali Herts Kon, a repatriate from the Soviet Union, was in fact arrested in Poland. News of his arrest appeared in the Paris dailies France Soir and Le Monde. ... Up to this time our diplomatic places have received further questions in this matter: the embassy in Paris was asked twice by letter about this by the French League for the Protection of Human and Civil Rights; the embassy in Washington received a question from the Jewish Cultural Congress in New York; the embassy in Ottawa asked for an explanation

by J. Gerszman, a member of the Communist Party of Canada, editor of the Jewish weekly ‘“Wochenblatt”. In connection with the above, to avoid further repercussions in the matter, it seems advisable for the organs to hurry in the proceedings in this manner and finish the investigation, whether by bringing the matter to the court, or by discontinuing proceedings.’ IPN 00231/209, folder 4, pp. 269—70.

29 The accusation act against Kon dated 24 Aug. 1961 noted that the original activities for which he had been arrested were found not to have constituted the cited crime, and the case, based on the lesser

charges, was transferred to the wojemddzki, or provincial, prosecutor. IPN 00231/209 folder 3, pp. 160—6. Another report states that ‘the information he transferred abroad does not comprise state or military secrets, in the face of which the accusation of the crime . . . does not have enough basis’. IPN 00231/209, folder 4, pp. 264-7. 30 After several months in prison, Kon was placed in a psychiatric hospital. In Farshribn in zikorn, he dedicated a poem to the doctors at the hospital. 31 TPN 00231/209, folder 15, pp. 176-84. 32 Kon, Farshribn in zikorn, ‘Onshtot a forvort’, 29.

250 Karen Auerbach younger daughter, Ina Lancman, has a different recollection. According to Lancman, her father arrived in Poland in 1959 with hopes of continuing on to the West, possibly to France.** Regardless of his initial plans, after Kon’s imprisonment and trial he was unable to find work in the small Yiddish literary world in Poland. Even after the charges of spying were dropped, Folk-sztyme would not allow him to return to work as an editor or publish his articles, Kon later recalled. Before his arrest, Kon had been in the process of correcting the proofs for the publication of a collection of his poetry by Yidish Bukh, but now the Yiddish publishing house informed him that the book would not be published.*4 After repeatedly being denied permission to leave Poland, Kon emigrated to Israel with his family in 1965.°° Kon was fascinated with his new country—his elder daughter recalled that he walked all over Israel in order to experience it up close—but his adjustment was difficult as he sought to earn a living as a Yiddish writer. In his personal papers are numerous projects on which he was working at the time, from a history of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the materials he had collected in Romania about the Holocaust, to a collection of Yiddish songs. Kon also was writing his memoirs and even applied from Israel to the writing programme at the University of Iowa, hoping for a stipend that would allow him to earn a living through his writing.®° He published a collection of his poetry in 1966 in Israel, and died five years later, suddenly, at age 61.

33 “He was very grateful for Poland in comparison with the Soviet Union. But . . . he dreamed of a beautiful Mediterranean place. It didn’t have to be Israel. He was very unrealistic. He thought Jews somewhere would sponsor him. He didn’t think about how to earn a living outside of writing poetry; he never talked about translations. . . . I think he had a very unrealistic view of what the Yiddishist communities were. He believed that there would be some way of his poetry being lucrative. . . . It was a very strange combination—to survive the gulag, you had to be very practical. But on the other hand, in terms of earning a living he was very impractical.’ Conversation with Ina Lancman, New York, 18 May 2006. A Nov. 1960 report to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, one month before Kon’s arrest, makes the following assertion: ‘He treats Poland like a foreign country, where he is staying temporarily. Nezer [an Israeli diplomat in Warsaw] advised him to submit documents to leave for Israel in December. He has made some steps in this direction. For example he spoke with an Austrian journalist, Halperin, about the possibility of obtaining Austrian citizenship. He also asked about the possibil-

, ity of emigrating to Canada, asking whether the Canadian section of the World Jewish Congress could arrange a position for him as a lecturer at a university. He also has considered settling in Italy or other countries of western Europe.’ IPN 00231/209, folder 4, pp. 113-20. 34 Kon, Farshribn in zikorn, ‘Onshtot a forvort’, 31. 35 Kon’s wife Liza also emigrated to Israel, although the two were separated there. His elder daughter, Vita Serf, also emigrated to Israel, while his younger daughter, Ina Lancman, initially remained

behind in Warsaw before defecting to Paris with her husband and later emigrating to the United States.

8° YIVO RG 1616, box 1, folder 3. There is no record in his papers of a response from the

University of Iowa. ,

Naftah Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 251 FROM THE “POLISH OCTOBER’ TO THE “MARCH EVENTS’ Naftali Herts Kon’s experiences in Poland between 1959 and 1965 reflect the limits imposed both on intellectual life in Polish society and on Jewish communal life in

this period.*” On the one hand, Poland in the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s was among the most liberal of all the communist bloc countries in freedom of political expression. Khrushchev’s secret speech in February 1956 acknowledging Stalin’s crimes as well as the so-called Polish October that year, when Wladyslaw Gomutka’s election as first secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party Central Committee was seen as a victory for a ‘Polish road to socialism’, raised hopes of democratization and greater Polish autonomy from the Soviet Union. Yet by 1957 the Polish government was already signalling the limits on dissent. In that year the widely read weekly periodical Po prostu, which regu-

larly published articles of dissent and political criticism, was shut down by the government. At the end of 1958, in the first political trial after the 1956 events, a Polish intellectual was sentenced to three years in prison for possessing and distributing the widely read monthly Polish-language journal Kultura, based in Paris. Later, in 1961, when the journalist and scholar Henryk Holland, of Jewish background, was arrested in Warsaw and fell from a window during a search of his apartment by the security apparatus, Holland’s funeral became the occasion of a protest against the security apparatus’s repressions in intellectual and cultural life.°° Kon’s arrest at the end of 1960 therefore placed him within the context of 37 The context of Polish Jewish society in post-war Poland is based on a reading of the Folk-sztyme and Yidishe shrifin, which were, respectively, the semi-daily Yiddish newspaper and the monthly literary journal published in Warsaw at that time; available archives of the Jewish communal organization, the TSKZ; and the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ surveillance of Jewish organizations and individuals in that period. These will be supplemented by memoirs from the period, particularly those of Hersz Smolar, who was chairman of the Social-Cultural Association until his emigration to Israel in 1971. All these materials pose significant problems as sources, raising issues that are a barrier to research on

Jewish communal life in post-war Poland beginning in about 1950. The security apparatus reports, while providing extensive statistical and descriptive information on Jewish communal activities and Jewish individuals, are based to a significant extent on informants’ reports. The archives of the SocialCultural Association are accessible only to a limited degree, particularly the central governing body’s records after 1956. The publications Folk-sztyme and Yidishe shriftn are helpful particularly in 1956 and 1957, when censorship was somewhat eased, but are less reliable as sources after that period, although their inside pages in particular reflect the nature of Jewish communal life to some degree even after 1959. Finally, memoirs of Jewish communal leaders who emigrated from Poland between 1968 and 1970 are burdened at times by their authors’ attempts to place their leadership in Poland ina positive light. This is especially the case with Smolar’s memoirs, which are nevertheless a rich source of information about post-war Jewish communal life until his emigration. Alina Cala and Helena Datner’s sourcebook on post-war Jewish life in Poland, Dzieje Zydéw w Polsce 1944-1968 (Warsaw,

(Warsaw, 2006). | 1997), contains selected sources from 1956 to 1967. 38 The Holland case is the subject of a recent study by Krzysztof Persak, Sprawa Henryka Hollanda

252 Karen Auerbach the government’s efforts to rein in dissent among intellectuals, journalists, and students, a struggle that continued throughout the 1960s, culminating in the student demonstrations and protests against censorship in 1968. Yet Kon’s experiences are also rooted in the situation of Jewish society in this period. As August Grabski points out,®® the situation of Jews in Poland between 1950 and 1957 was significantly better than elsewhere in the communist bloc, in that there were no trials of Jewish communists, and no direct repression of Yiddish writing as in the Soviet Union. To be sure, in 1952 and 1953 the arrests in Poland of Jakub Egit, director of the Yiddish publishing house; Jozef Gitler-Barski, former director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Poland; and

an employee of the Israeli mission created a sense of unease among the Jewish communal leadership until the three men were released following Stalin’s death. Particularly significant for understanding the period in which Kon was arrested is the intersection of three phenomena in the three years leading up to his arrival in post-war Poland: the repatriation from the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1959 of

more than 18,000 Jews among 267,187 Polish citizens;*° expressions of antisemitism both within the Polish United Workers’ Party and in larger society;** and the large wave of Jewish emigration from Poland to Israel and to the West.*” The repatriation and emigration wave entangled Polish Jewish society in Soviet policy towards Israel and the issue of Soviet Jewish emigration, further complicating the Polish Jewish leadership’s renewed connections with Western Jewry and Israel in

the aftermath of 1956. |

The radical political changes in Poland and the Soviet Union in 1956 had shifted the relationship of the Jewish communal leadership with the Polish government and communism as well as with the larger Jewish world. The revelations about the

fate of the Soviet Yiddish writers, with whom many of the Jewish leaders in Poland had worked before and during the Second World War, as well as the purge of communists of Jewish background in high party posts in Poland and the surge of antisemitism within parts of Polish society in 1956, shocked the Jewish leadership in Poland. Antisemitism was a problem particularly in the western provinces, where the Jewish communities were for the most part less assimilated into the surrounding society than in the capital. Hooliganism and fear of anti-Jewish vio39 A. Grabski, ‘Sytuacja Zyd6w w Polsce w latach 1950-1957’, Biuletyn Zydowskiego Instytutu EMstorycznego, 196 (2000), 505-6.

40 For a thorough study of Jewish demography in post-war Poland, including an analysis of Jewish repatriation to Poland and immigration to Israel, see A. Stankowski, ‘Nowe spojrzenie na statystyki dotyczace emigracji Zydow z Polski po 1944 roku’, in G. Berendt, A. Grabski, and A. Stankowski, Studia z historu Zydéw w Polsce po 1945 r. (Warsaw, 2000), 103-51.

41 For information on antisemitism in Polish society in 1956, see P. Machcewicz, ‘Antisemitism in Poland in 1956’, Polin, 9 (1996), 170-83.

42 According to Stankowski, 51,137 emigrants from Poland gave Israel as their country of destination between 1955 and 1960, while Israel recorded 42,569 immigrants from Poland in this period. (Some individuals who gave Israel as their destination settled elsewhere.) Most of the emigrants left Poland in 1957.

Naftali Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 253 — lence were significant problems in Lower Silesia, according to the Jewish communal leadership at the time.*® (Polish intellectuals, as well as the Polish weeklies Po prostu and Tygodnik Powszechny, took a leading role in condemning antisemitism

in this period.44) Many provincial Jewish communal leaders subsequently left Poland during the emigration wave in the three years following 1956.

The repatriation to Poland from the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1959 also had significant consequences for the relationship between Jewish society in Poland, communism, and the Polish government. Minutes from meetings of the provincial branches of the TSKZ in this period indicate that the repatriates bridled at the pro-Soviet propaganda of the TSKZ and Folk-sztyme.* Furthermore, in 1957 the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and later the Jewish organization ORT,*° which provided vocational training, were allowed to return to Poland to assist the repatriates, after being forced to leave Poland in 1949. This renewed assistance, along with the TSKZ’s observation dele-

gation to the World Jewish Congress, brought Polish Jewish institutions once again into direct co-operation with Jewish organizations in the West. A significant factor in understanding Kon’s arrest, therefore, is the intensification of the Polish security apparatus’s surveillance of Jews and Jewish organizations in Poland that accompanied the repatriation from the Soviet Union and the emigration wave to Israel and the West. The security apparatus’s investigation of Kon was part of a larger probe into alleged Polish Jewish co-operation with Israel with regard to the emigration of Soviet Jewry, a cause that Jewish organizations in

the West had first taken up in reaction to the Doctors’ Plot in 1953, and which escalated throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The change in Soviet policy towards Israel in 1953, when the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Israel, fuelled the Polish government’s suspicions of the Jewish state. At the same time, intensification in surveillance of Jews and Jewish organizations was also associated

with a faction within the Polish United Workers’ Party headed by Mieczyslaw Moczar, who established his stronghold within the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Whether because of the factional conflicts within the Polish United Workers’ Party, or independent of the factional tensions, the increased surveillance was already clearly evident by 1958. In that year, the security apparatus issued numerous reports about Israeli spying in Poland, alleging that Israeli intelligence was using the Sochnut, the Israeli agency responsible for immigration to Israel, to obtain information about Soviet Jews. The reports alleged that repatriates from the Soviet Union were being questioned by Israeli intelligence agents about the sit43 See especially the TSKZ Wydziat Organizacyjny collection at the Jewish Historical Institute in

Warsaw, for example, sygnatura 2, 1956, note from 9 Sept. 1956, about an incident in Szczecin; sygnatura 89, Dzierzoniow, 4 Dec. 1956; sygnatura 98, Legnica. 44 Stankowski, ‘Nowe spojrzenie’, 130. See also H. Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye mit der letster hofenung (Tel Aviv, 1982), 234.

45 See eg. minutes from the TSKZ branch in Legnica from 1956 to 1958. TSKZ, Wydzial Organizacyjny 98, pages unnumbered. 46 Organization for Rehabilitation through Training.

254 Karen Auerbach uation of Soviet Jews, and that those who had been dismissed from government posts in Poland in the aftermath of the 1956 events were asked about the military infrastructure, financial assistance for Egypt, and other internal Polish issues. By 1961, the security apparatus had become even more suspicious of Polish emigrants to Israel, dozens of whom they alleged were now working for Israeli intelligence. Emigrants to Israel who subsequently sought permission to return to Poland, either to visit relatives or to return permanently, aroused further suspicion of spying. The security apparatus also alleged that in addition to gathering information about and spreading ‘propaganda’ to Soviet Jews through Western tourists and east European Jews, the Israeli embassy, with the help of Jews in Poland, was bringing Soviet Jews across the border to ‘safe houses’ in Poland before smuggling them to Israel.* Hersz Smolar, chairman of the TSKZ, asserted in his memoirs that it was Kon’s arrest in 1960 which, in retrospect, made evident the Polish government’s distrust of the Jewish communal leadership, even though the leadership’s central governing body consisted almost entirely of pre-war communists who remained loyal to the communist regime. The suspicions were heightened, according to Smolar, because several leaders of the TSKZ, including Smolar and Dawid Sfard, editor of a Yiddish literary journal in Poland, had vouched for the pre-war communist cre- ,

dentials of Kon and his wife in their application for repatriation to Poland. Smolar’s assertion regarding the suspicion cast on him and others in the light of their help for Serf and his wife in 1959 is supported by a 29 April 1968 report by the Ministry of Internal Affairs about the Zionist youth organization Hashomer

Hatsair in the wake of March 1968 and the anti-Zionist campaign. The report includes the following note: Among the active members of Hashomer Hatsair in Warsaw were two sons and a daughter of Borys Goldman, who owned a shoe store at 40 Zamenhofa Street. One of these sons, Chaim, emigrated along with other members of Hashomer Hatsair to Palestine. A daughter of B. Goldman, Liza, later Elzbieta Serf, was a teacher in Serock and led the local organiza-

tion of Hashomer Hatsair there. In 1933-59 she was in the USSR. In the matter of her repatriation to Poland in 1959, she was helped by Bernard Mark [director of the Jewish Historical Institute], Grzegorz Smolar, Dawid Sfard, and Gorwicz, who submitted a statement that did not correspond with the truth, stating that Elzbieta Serf until 1933 was connected with the Communist Party of Poland. Elzbieta Serf as well as her husband and

two daughters are located presently in Israel.*® , For Smolar, the accusation that Kon, a literary editor of Folk-sztyme (which was

| published under the auspices of the TSKZ), was a spy for Israel upset the delicate balance that the Jewish leadership had attempted after 1956 in manoeuvring 47 See e.g. IPN 00231/209, folder 4, pp. 105-6; IPN 00236/284, folder 1, sub-folder 8, pp. 87—92. 48 IPN BU 0365/41, folder 5, p. 150. In fact, only one of Kon’s daughters, Vita Serf, was in Israel; the second, Ina Lancman, defected first to Paris and later emigrated to the United States, where she

lives in New York. There is no evidence supporting the assertion that Elzbieta Serf led a local Hashomer Hatsair branch, and its supposed source is not indicated in the report.

Naftalh Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 255 between loyalty to the Communist Party and connections with the larger Jewish world in the West and Israel. Kon’s arrest in 1960 was for Smolar a precursor to the ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign later in the decade.*? In fact, although Smolar might later have seen Kon’s arrest as a first sign of the security apparatus’s distrust, suspicions of the Jewish communal infrastructure had begun earlier, in the last years of the 1950s, partly in association with the repatriation from the Soviet Union and emigration to Israel. Despite the later recollections of Smolar and others that 1956 had begun their process of disillusionment, the central Jewish communal leadership in Warsaw seemed never to have expressed publicly between 1956 and 1967 the deep impact of the events of 1956 on their faith in communist ideology, even as the leaders of the provincial branches of the TSKZ, many of whom subsequently emigrated, voiced their deep disillusionment. Unlike in larger Polish society for a short period after the 1956 political changes, there was little possibility for publication of political debate in Yiddish that was unfiltered by the Jewish organizational leadership. The TSKZ’s monopoly on Jewish cultural expression at this time was quite different from the situation that had emerged in the first years after the Second World War. In the early post-war period, reborn Jewish cultural life in Poland had been pluralistic, with dozens of publications in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew.°° But by

, late 1949, political pluralism had given way to Communist Party dominance in Jewish political, communal, and cultural life, as in Polish society as a whole. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had been forced to leave Poland in 1949, and a year later the Central Committee of Jews in Poland, which had been an umbrella organization, became the TSKZ, which for the next forty years enjoyed a monopoly on Jewish organizational life. By the early 1950s the only Yiddish literary outlets, not including Bleter far geshikhte, the Yiddish journal of the Jewish Historical Institute, were the Folk-sztyme newspaper, Yidishe shrifin, a monthly literary journal, and the books published by Yidish Bukh. All three of these were headed by leaders of the TSKZ and essentially were the literary organs of this institution. Beginning in 1950, Yiddish literary outlets were therefore limited by their use as a propaganda tool by the Jewish organizational leadership and the communist government. While these periodicals therefore cannot fully reflect Jewish society, the newspaper and literary journal do chart the changes in the Jewish leadership’s attitude towards Jewish issues and the Polish government. For example, beginning in 1956, following publication of an article by Hersz Smolar that was first to report the fate of the Soviet Yiddish writers,>! Folk-sztyme and Yidishe shrifin began to publish 49 Smolar, Oyf der letster pozitsye, 315-17.

°° E. Bergman, ‘Yiddish in Poland after 1945’, in G. Estraikh and M. Krutikov (eds.), Yiddish and the Left (Oxford, 2001), 167—76.

>! “Unzer veytik un unzer treyst’, Folk-sztyme, 4 Apr. 1956, p. 6. See also Smolar, Oyf der letster

| pozitsye, 215-21.

256 Karen Auerbach frequent articles and literary criticism about the murdered Soviet Yiddish writers

as well as articles about Soviet Jewish life. The articles reflected the TSKZ’s resolve after 1956 to help revive Soviet Jewish life and to create what Hersz Smolar referred to as ‘Polish style’ (nusekh poyln), that is, an active Jewish institutional life that would prove the viability of Jewish communal life under a communist system. Folk-sztyme had a ‘nonconformist reputation’ among Soviet Jews, according to Gennady Estraikh, who notes that in this period Folk-sztyme was often the only outlet in which Soviet Yiddish writers could publish their work until the founding

of Sovetish heymland in 1961.2 | The content of Yiddish publications between 1956 and about 1960 also reflects greater attention to Jewish cultural life in Israel and the West. Beginning in late 1956, both Folk-sztyme and Yidishe shrifin began to publish translations from Hebrew, regular cultural news from Israel, and poems and articles by writers from Israel and the West, although throughout this period there continued to be only negative coverage of Israeli politics. A few short articles about Jewish religious life

in Poland were also printed, such as information about the kosher kitchen in Wroclaw and about a gathering of rabbis and ritual slaughterers from throughout Poland.

Between 1957 and 1960, the issues that dominated the pages of Folk-sztyme, apart from the standard political propaganda, were assistance for Jewish repatriates from the Soviet Union, the drain of emigration on the provincial Jewish communities, calls to rejuvenate Jewish communal activities, and the problem of antisemitism within factories and larger Polish society. This last issue was raised repeatedly in articles and letters to the editor in Folk-sztyme, particularly beginning in 1957. [he ‘emigration mood’ among Jews had been exacerbated by the earlier failure of the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party; PZPR) to condemn antisemitism during the political crisis in autumn 1956. The Jewish leadership hoped that the Polish prime minister Jozef Cyrankiewicz’s condemnation of antisemitism in February 1957, following a report by Hersz Smolar to the Central Committee of the PZPR on the atmosphere of panic among the Jewish population,’ would stem the emigration tide. Cyrankiewicz’s condemnation was prominently reported in Folk-sztyme,°* and references to it were repeated in subsequent months. Yet in that year, 1957, the emigration wave peaked at more than 30,000 Jewish emigrants. By 1960 three-quarters of the Jewish repatriates had left Poland for Israel and the West, comprising about one-quarter of more than 51,000 Jews emigrating from Poland in this period. It is possible to attribute the emigration wave to the greater opportunity for emigration, which between 1951 and 1955 had been severely restricted. However, minutes of the °2 G. Estraikh, ‘The Era of Sovetish Heymland: Readership of the Yiddish Press in the Former Soviet Union’, East European Jewish Affairs, 25/1 (1995), 17-22.

°3 See the document ‘Notatka Hersza Smolara dla KC PZPR z lutego 1957 r.’, printed in Grabski,

‘Sytuacja Zydow w Polsce’, 515-19. 54 Folk-sztyme, 28 Feb. 1957, p. 1.

Naftah Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 257 provincial branches of the TSKZ indicate that the dismissal of Jews from high and

mid-level government posts, antisemitism within factories and economic cooperatives, and the disillusionment of provincial Jewish communal activists as a result of the revelations from the Soviet Union in 1956 were significant factors for many individuals.

Among the emigrants were many of the Yiddish writers and poets who had remained in Poland after the immediate post-war years, including Binem Heller, Leib Olicki, and Hadasah Rubin, all of whom left between 1956 and 1960. Others, such as the Yiddish poet Yisroel Emiot, left Poland shortly after their repatriation from the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1959.°° Moshe Broderzon was probably making plans to emigrate from Poland when he died in Warsaw in 1956, three weeks after his repatriation from the Soviet Union. Lili Berger and Moshe Szkliar remained, only to be among the emigrants in the aftermath of the March events in 1968. Only two Yiddish writers, Shlomo Beilis-Legis and Daniel Kac, never left Poland, while a handful of others switched to writing in Polish.°°

‘STAMP OF A GENERATION’ Naftali Herts Kon refused to make the accommodation with the communist system which was necessary to continue working as a writer in the Soviet Union and to a lesser extent in Poland. Czestaw Mitosz, in The Captive Mind, describes the essence of this accommodation as: ‘One must . . . keep silent about one’s true convictions if possible.’°’ Comparing the tactic to a practice called Ketman in nineteenth-century Persia, Milosz describes the various ways in which a writer might seek to remain true to his work while appeasing the authorities, by writing about the distant past, for example, or translating inoffensive poetry. At times, in seeking to communicate to his reader a message that would not please the authorities, a writer might frame it in such a way that does not alert the censors, but which a knowing, educated audience would understand by ‘reading between the lines’. ‘To say something is white when one thinks it black’, Mitosz writes, ‘to smile inwardly when one is outwardly solemn, to hate when one manifests love, to know when one pretends not to know, and thus to play one’s adversary for a fool (even as he is playing you for one)—these actions lead one to prize one’s own cunning above all else. Success in the game becomes a source of satisfaction.’°? That is, the writer, in yielding to the demands of the system, even while surreptitiously opposing it, becomes invested in that system and therefore helps to perpetuate it. One can make the argument that Kon did not understand the limits of expression in Poland. His daughter Ina recalls that at the repatriation point just before °° Emiot had conspired, like Kon, to continue writing poetry while in Soviet labour camps in eastern Siberia. When he was freed and repatriated to Poland from Birobidzhan in 1957, he was able to publish a book of poetry in Warsaw that included two poems about life in the Siberian camps. 56 Bergman, ‘Yiddish in Poland after 1945’, 174.

57 Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind (New York, 1990), 57. 58 Ibid. 56.

258 Karen Auerbach arriving in Poland, her father ‘was delirious. He was drunk on freedom. He was so

delusional about the nature of Poland. There was a huge difference between Poland and the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t America.’ To be sure, Kon disregarded the political realities in Poland by conveying information to Israeli diplomats about Soviet Jews and writing about the persecution of Romanian Jews. ‘This was a time when providing critical information about the communist bloc countries to the West and to Israel was clearly risky, regardless of whether his activities constituted spying. In this way, the Polish government’s treatment of Kon in postwar Poland might be seen as relatively benign.°° But Kon was not merely ignorant of the limits on expression; he consciously disregarded them, despite the risks. He believed that this was the role of a poet in an unfree society. Perhaps for this reason, then, and despite Kon’s short stay in post-war Warsaw, several of the most important Yiddish memoirists from that period, including Smolar, Sfard,*! and Lili Berger,® each recall in retrospect Kon’s imprisonment in Poland as emblematic of their own disillusionment, whose seeds had been planted in 1956 and ended in their political defeat during the so-called ‘anti-Zionist’ campaign of 1967-8 in Poland. Sfard’s essay on Kon is a particularly illustrative example of the impression which Kon made on the Polish Jewish intellectual environment and the resonance which his life history had for the Jewish communist leadership of post-war Poland. Sfard, a pre-war communist who was a Jewish communal leader in post-war Poland, among other roles as editor of the literary journal Yidishe shrifin, emigrated to Israel in the wake of the anti-Zionist campaign in 1967-8. He later wrote: What did Naftali Herts Kon, in his eternal wanderings from land to land, from city to city and from prison to prison, search for in life, where was he ceaselessly driven to, where did he get so much strength to resist everything and everyone? Earlier it was the great truth that was supposed to free the world, the truth whose ‘light drew him from afar, its glare illuminated in his eyes’. Later, after the long years of prison and pain, it was the protest against strangled human dignity and the desire to tell the truth about the extinguished dreams and lost hopes. . . . The words of Naftali Herts .. . are so laden with pain, with disappointment, with dejection and bitter introspection, that they contain in themselves the stamp of a generation, these words will certainly remain after him and ascend . . . in their sincere and genuine expression of a poetic heart, which survived so much pain and which in deep sadness sang that ‘every letter | like blood | like fire — | glows | and I say — | a quiet kaddish — | my trembling, | quivering | poem’.°? °9 Conversation with Ina Lancman, New York, 18 May 2006. 60 Tam indebted to August Grabski for his thoughts in this regard. 61 DPD. Sfard, Mit zikh un mit andere: otobiyografye un literarishe esayen (Jerusalem, 1984), 210-24. 62 L. Berger, In gang fun tsayt (Paris, 1976), 181-91. 63 Sfard, Mit zikh un mit andere, 222-4. Sfard quotes here Kon’s untitled poem that begins ‘I have a vast, endless cemetery’, in the ‘Yizkor’ section of Kon’s collection Farshribn in zikorn.

Naftah Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 259 The political defeat of Sfard’s generation, pre-war communists who remained

committed to the re-establishment of Jewish life in eastern Europe after the Second World War, is reflected in the evolution of Kon’s poetry. His early poems, including those in his first published volume of poetry, Trot nokh trot, are dominated by the rhetoric of communist idealism. The narrator is frequently a factory worker, as in the sequence of poems ‘Mayn mishpokhe un ikh’ (My family and me), which describes the impoverished family of a young boy, the son of a washerwoman and a factory worker.®* Other poems in Kon’s first volume describe workers’ demonstrations in Warsaw, pre-war imprisonment, and escape to the Soviet Union. Kon’s last volume, Farshribn in zikorn, published after his emigration to Israel, laments the misplaced faith of himself and his generation in revolutionary politics and seeks to make sense of his life path from a communist sympathizer to a victim of communism. A focus of this volume which is missing from his earlier work is his attempt to understand his fate as a Jewish victim of both Nazi and Soviet persecution. The first section of Farshribn in zikorn contains poems written during and about Kon’s imprisonment in the Soviet Union. In these poems, he sees himself as a wit-

ness to life in the Soviet camps and the destruction of Soviet Yiddish culture in particular. For Kon, resistance against the dehumanization of the camp system is intertwined with his efforts to continue writing poetry while imprisoned, his refusal to give in to political demands on literature, and the struggle against the suppression of Yiddish writing. The interplay of these themes is most clearly expressed in ‘Mayn yidishe virde’ (My Jewish dignity), which evokes the image of slavery to describe the Soviet Jewish experience as well as the dilemma of writers under the Soviet system. ‘Am I a slave’, the poem begins, ‘Born to a slave; Or a scion of a people! ... Should I alone Dig a grave, Sew shrouds

, For my dignity,

My tomorrow, My past, (And as is the custom) ‘Give them a decent burial’, And forever, Forever To bea slave, And bring into the world Slaves,

And to bring up Slaves?! 64 Kon, Trot nokh trot, 7-15.

260 Karen Auerbach On my head, , Do I strew ashes

Tear my clothes [in mourning], Sit shive, say kaddish

For the poets (my brothers)

— The martyrs...

Kon continues to beseech himself not to allow ‘my poems [to] be rings in the chains of slavery’, before addressing his fellow poets in the final stanza: Should your words, Your songs, Oh poets, be incense On the foreign, False altars — sacrifices, Or illustrious, Glowing, Flaming lights, Unwavering, Untarnished . . . witnesses On the day Of the highest, The final judge?!

Kon evokes this argument more pointedly in what is perhaps the volume’s most significant work, a poem titled ‘Shmuel Halkin’s Jubilee’, which decries the celebration in 1958 of the literary anniversary of the Yiddish poet Shmuel Halkin in Moscow. The celebration was staged largely for foreign consumption following protests abroad in the wake of the revelations in 1956 of the murder of the Soviet Yiddish writers and poets. Each stanza of Kon’s poem describes the persecution of a Yiddish writer or cultural leader in the Soviet Union, from Solomon Mikhoels, Der Nister, and Dovid Bergelson to lesser-known poets such as Zelik Akselrod and

Herts Rivkin, ending with variations of the line ‘And they celebrate Halkin’s jubilee’. In an introduction to the poem, Kon explained that he had written the verses in distress immediately after the jubilee and made ‘no pretense as to the [poem’s] literary-artistic worth, but because of the documentary-historical authenticity’ he thought it worthwhile to publish the poem.®° 6° Halkin himself had been a defendant in an earlier indictment of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, in 1950, but, along with twelve others, was not among the defendants in the 1952 trial. Kon might not have known of Halkin’s encounter in 1952 with the Yiddish poet Itzik Fefer, who succumbed to interrogation and became the ‘principal accuser’ of his co-defendants during the trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In 1952 Halkin was taken to see Fefer for a ‘witness confrontation’. Without raising his eyes from the floor, Fefer urged Halkin to confess to engaging in ‘Zionism’ and ‘bourgeois nationalism’. Halkin remained silent but, before being led away, kissed Fefer on the forehead as a sign of forgiveness. See J. Rubenstein and V. P. Naumov (eds.), Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Fewish Anti-Fascist Committee (New Haven, 2001), pp. xiv, 56.

Naftali Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 261 Kon’s apparent criticism of Halkin in the poem’s early verses is tempered by his acknowledgement of Halkin’s impossible situation: A true poet cannot tell lies, At your jubilee evening you were silent, It seemed: you were sickened, sickened by everyone’s speech — The speech — the rings of the chain. — I understand your silence — Woe, woe to such a jubilee.

To your merriment a medal was pinned on your breast. . . Your silence was the great scream. Woe, woe to such a jubilee. ... If you, Halkin, would have thrown the medal And together with the ‘tin badge’, our horror, our pain, In the face of them all, the enemies of the Jews, The entire long-suffering [literally, hard-lived |

, Jewish people

Would have celebrated your jubilee.°®

Kon’s struggle with political demands on literature is a constant theme in this last volume of poetry. After his release from his Soviet imprisonment in 1941, he

had resolved not to continue writing and sought work as a physical labourer. ‘When it is not possible to speak the truth’, he later wrote, ‘be silent.’®” But as he describes in the poem ‘Farshribn in zikorn’, it is in prison where composing poetry became a defence against the dehumanization of his long confinement: Did they think: — If they confine My space, I will be A branch,

Cut off .

From the tree? Did they think: If they lock me up in prison, I will fade,

Wither... That I would grow mouldy, Rot?

For the spirit To be free There is no fence: In my cell, In the cage, I — also a branch, 66 Kon, Farshribn in zikorn, 46-53. ®” Ibid., ‘Onshtot a forvort’, 12 .

262 Karen Auerbach A tree, The earth:

Nourished My roots From my own Force, From my own Juice. Destroy My spirit? It lives,

| Creates, Does not stop writing. Weaves,

(On the hands Iron rings — But I do not stop

Singing.) ... There is no pencil, No paper. My poems ‘Written’ In my brain, In its depths They slept, Were stubborn, Dogged, On the sleeping-stone Of conscience.

The volume’s title, ‘Farshribn in zikorn’ (Written down in memory), is therefore in part a reference to the way in which he composed poems in prison and his refusal to succumb. But as the collection’s second two sections, ‘Yizkor’ and ‘Mit zikh aleyn’, make clear, the title also signifies his attempt to recover memories of his childhood and family to buttress the faulty foundation which he had built on political idealism. ‘The volume opens with a poem to his mother, to whom the book is dedicated: If the tears from all of your days Would be transformed into thorns I would on the path of thorns

Alone, alone | Walk, walk, walk,

Until the end, until the end.

Do I not walk on this very path?

Nafitah Herts Kon in Poland, 1959-1965 263 If the tears of all your days Would be transformed into grain And the wind would sow them On my path, lingering in a heavenly light: And there would appear a thick forest And your countenance —

, The full moon

Over the forest — Would smile at me quietly .. . Perhaps I would, in this very forest, Find a path. Do I not search for this very pathr

Kon repeats the imagery of his mother’s tears in an untitled poem in the fifth section, ‘Mit zikh aleyn’ (roughly, ‘By oneself’) in which he expresses remorse for the bankruptcy of the path which he chose to follow: [ returned to the beginning, to the clean source, To my childhood footpath, which I trod; — I left it in doubt, but without hatred, without bile, With holy, unpolluted commandments; I left —a bird in his first flight, I returned from the deep abyss; — Oh, how much gratuitous, useless toil! Oh, how many perished ships! Oh fate! You did not begrudge me the loveliest presents, Not just once did you help me on my turbulent way; —

, I returned rich, thoughts, thoughts — , My only possession.

I returned clean, bound by nothing, For my mistakes I have suffered enough; — I never praised the murderers, their swords Cut me also, like everyone.

I will sift myself and sift myself through a thick sieve,

_ Again immerse myself and purify myself; — Until my lips will be clean again like at the beginning, Until I will withdraw further and further,

Until I will retreat further and further from there, To the clean source, to the first daybreak flight of the bird, Only when I will be reminded of this, I will be silent and lower my eyes.

264 Karen Auerbach The search for his childhood path also resonates in the section on the Holocaust entitled ‘Yizkor’, in which he refers to his poetry as symbolic gravestones in his ‘vast, endless cemetery’. Yet it is Kon’s insistence on poetry speaking truth, despite the stifling of writing and the subversion of reality, that is his primary message, one that is reflected in a

farewell letter which he wrote to his family in 1961, during his imprisonment in Warsaw. Kon might have written the letter with the expectation that he would be deported to the Soviet Union, which, he believed, would be a death sentence; it also seems likely that it was a suicide note.® In the letter, Kon wrote: I am absolutely innocent. I never committed any crime against anyone; perhaps I made mistakes, but as a human being I have not erred. I wrote purely that which my heart and my conscience dictated and my motto in life was truth and once again truth and to do good for people. Perhaps I should have been born one century later. Forgive me my loved ones. ...I decided that this is not a decision of a deserter but a decision of a human being for whom freedom and life are one and the same.

He continued with advice to his children: ‘In the last minutes of life do not speak what is not the truth. Remember that your father was an honest person in everything—a person for whom God was humanism, love for every human being who 1s worthy of this lofty word.’ His last wish, he wrote, was to be buried in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw near the grave of Y. L. Peretz. He added, in a postscript, that he was writing from a prison in Warsaw’s Mokotow section, “where I sat in 1932 as a revolutionary writer. Now the circle is closed. Every person has his circle; I have reached the end of mine.’°? 68 After this note was written, Kon was placed in a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with delusions of being persecuted. Lancman recalls visiting her father at the Mokot6w prison and in the psychiatric hospital, but neither she nor her sister ever saw the farewell note. ‘I saw my Father as he

looked during those visits, dejected, forlorn and apologetic. As if to say, Iam sorry I did this again to you (meaning me, Vita [Kon’s elder daughter] and my Mother).’ Email correspondence from Ina Lancman. 69 IPN 00231/209, folder 13, pp. 167—9. Only the typewritten Polish translation is found in the MSW files, with a handwritten note dated 7 Mar. 1961 indicating that the letter, addressed to Kon’s wife, was found on Kon in prison.

Domestic Shame A Conversation with Professor ferzy fedlickt ANNA JARMUSIEWICZ AJ: Isn’t the analysis of March ’68 missing from the debate about the dark pages of our history and memory regarding antisemitism of that period? Communists used it cleverly in their factional strife and in the struggle with the new rising democratic opposition.

jj: Since 1989 several serious works about March ’68 have appeared, as well as numerous volumes of conference proceedings and documents, among them also the party documents concerning that period. Those publications show that it was not just a matter of factional strife or struggle for power at the top of the communist apparatus. What happened was rather the coming of age of a young generation of activists from nationalist and racist backgrounds. Up to the summer of 1967 such attitudes were still being stifled and not considered politically correct. In June 1967 Gomutka signalled that antisemitism was per-

missible and even expected, so it did not have to be concealed. Indeed, one could say that it was in a sense instrumental behaviour, as antisemitic attacks made it easier to get rid of many long-standing establishment members and free their positions to bring in new, career-minded, and driven characters. It does not change the fact that a lot of them revealed their frank and genuine antisemitic phobias. In that way a part of the party and state apparatus, as well as some academic and professional groups, could finally reveal opinions formerly typical of the radical right, for which after all there was no place in the public life of the time. In March ’68 therefore the radical right decked itself out in pseudo-socialist phraseology and costume or, on the contrary, the party and groups supported by it gladly seized on the rhetoric of fascistic nationalism.

AJ: There were, however, communities resistant to the antisemitic propaganda— I remember satirical leaflets, mocking the alleged Zionist threat, circulating among striking students (of whom I was one). This article first appeared in Rzeczpospolita in March 2005. It was subsequently republished in Anna Jarmusiewicz, Zydzi polscy: Dztedzictwo t dialog (Krakow, 2005), 81-7.

266 Anna Jarmusiew1cz jj: | Antisemitic slogans were being used in an attempt to divide the striking stu-

dents, but the students’ movement appeared resistant to it, just like the groups surrounding the Catholic publications Znak and Wiez. Antisemitic tricks and ugly personal insinuations suggested by the officials of the state security were actually used against anyone who for some reason—for example because of a belief in the need to liberalize the regime—stood in the way of either the party committees or the climbers bent on making a career. After all, in the years 1967—8 purges existed everywhere: in the party and state apparatus, in the military, in industry and commerce, in cultural and scientific institutions. AJ: The stereotype of ‘zydokomuna’ was bandied about, increasing both fear of Russia and the return of Stalinism, as well as refreshing the antisemites’ dislike of Poles of Jewish origin...

yy: The stereotype of ‘zydokomuna’ has a long history. Every revolutionary movement naturally attracts persecuted, humiliated, and marginalized people—simply by promising to do away with discrimination, to achieve equality before the law, and restore respect for human dignity. So there is nothing unusual in the fact that since the beginning of the twentieth century many secular Jewish youth were drawn to socialist parties, whether Jewish, Polish, Austrian, or Russian. Similarly, it comes as no surprise that in both of the 1917 Russian revolutions, Poles, Georgians, Letts, or Jews played an essential role. From this fact a stereotype was created in Central Europe of a Jew who by his very nature was a traitor, a spy, a saboteur, a subversive, a devious enemy of the social order and of the people among which he happened to live. 1963 was unique in modifying that worn cliché for the use of a party that considered itself heir to the revolutionary tradition, and which now declared itself a guarantor of social order and the embodiment of patriotism, while branding as subversives those who dared to protest against its usurpations.

AJ: In her insufficiently known book of 1992 entitled Polacy—Zydzi—komumzm: anatomia potprawd. 1939-1968 Prof. Krystyna Kersten stressed the fact that Jews identified with communism as communists, and not as Jews.

jy: After all, the pre-war Polish Communist Party grandly promoted internationalism, declaring national identity as secondary to universal equality and proletarian brotherhood. The communist movement promised the same in Russia as in Poland, Hungary, or France. In time the slogan of internationalism was to prove to be nothing but a masked demand to serve the interests of Soviet Russia and obey Stalin’s changing orders. However, any trace of another national attachment or solidarity meant a death sentence for communists.

A Conversation with Professor Ferzy fedlicki 267 AJ: In March ’68 antisemitic slogans also readily stressed the alien character of the persecuted and their alleged threat to national unity and culture. These slogans were used in the campaign against writers, scholars, and artists, for closing some of the Warsaw University departments, and also during the antisemitic campaign directed against the editorial board of the Wielka Encyklopedia Powszechna, the main Polish encyclopedia, and their publishing house Polskie Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

jj: The sense that some people are perceived as ‘alien’ can result from differences of language, faith, skin colour, customs, or opinions. It is probably human nature to divide people between ‘us’ and ‘them’. The way, however, in which otherness is defined is learnt in the process of education and socializa-

tion, and can be manipulated by teachers, the churches, or the authorities. Everyone, however, is capable of analysing critically attitudes learnt or absorbed from the environment. Let us say that I consider as alien to me people of ethical convictions different than mine, of totally opposing opinions concerning what is decent and what is not. In March ’68, however, alien character was defined in a simple racist way: birth certificates were searched to reveal the suspects’ Jewish origin.

AJ: Because of the hysterical antisemitic campaign in March ’68, about 15,000—20,000 Poles of Jewish origin left the country. They were handed

One-way travel documents and, contrary to international conventions, deprived of passports and citizenship.

jj: No physical force or coercion was applied directly, so the situation was not like that in Germany in 1938, when the Nazis deported all Polish Jews. However, an atmosphere of moral terror set in: people were dismissed from their jobs, slandered in newspapers, and occasionally threatened by phone calls. Many decided to leave, for in the atmosphere of persecution and slander they stopped feeling at home, and feared for their children’s future. The year 1968 was repugnant, but on the other hand, there were displays of warm solidarity with the Jews, and for many young people from the so-

called March generation, the year had become a turning point, an end of delusion about the legitimacy of the Polish People’s Republic and an initiation into oppositional activity against the ruling system. Contrary to prevailing opinions, however, neither in Poland nor any other European country was that the first, or even a unique, symptom of the antisemitic infection of the Left. It was not the first step in creating a pogrom atmosphere either, since after all such events had occurred earlier. March ’68 remained in memory first of all as a mass attack by propaganda controlled from the top, with its shameful rhetoric. Yet compared with the recent past it really was nothing | unique. During the first decade after the war Poland’s political and judicial

268 Anna Jarmusiewicz terror, with its accompanying ideological aggression, impacted larger groups of the population and was incomparably more dangerous to its victims, such as soldiers of the Armia Krajowa (Home Army; AK), Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe (Polish Peasant Party; PSL) activists, veterans of the Polish independence organizations, or distinguished officers of the Polish Army. We

, should not forget the official antisemitism of the early post-war period either: persecution of Jews in the USSR, which began in 1948 following Stalin’s command and grew until his death (I recommend Arno Lustiger’s book Stalin and the fews, recently published in Polish).* The persecution of Soviet citizens of Jewish origin continued in different forms as long as the USSR was in existence. The antisemitic tone of Slansky’s trial in Czechoslovakia

was also pretty clear. Viewed from a historical perspective, the year 1968 appears as a return to the tried models of communist totalitarianism rather than a new phenomenon in political life.

AJ: Was not the memory of people of Jewish origin additionally blocked by the revival of antisemitic phantoms in March ’68, regardless of censorship? Jj: | Certainly for the Holocaust survivors the March events were a psychological block—they felt terrorized and refrained from speaking even in private about their past experiences. Moreover, March ’68 retarded scholarly research on the history of Polish—Jewish relations. For a long time only the Paris Kultura, officially banned in Poland, wrote openly about these relations. It is true that a second edition of Bartoszewski and Lewinowna’s book Ten jest z ojezyzny moje] was published in Poland, as well as Artur Eisenbach’s important works on the nineteenth century, and Jerzy Tomaszewski’s studies of the twentieth

century, but in general nothing much happened. Historians avoided this topic not only for fear of censorship but also because in the situation when no public protest was possible, even the most honest works could have been used for purposes contrary to the author’s intentions. Only recently studies illuminating various, and even the most drastic, aspects of those relations appear one after another.

AJ: It 1s obvious these days that the question about history and the memory of the twentieth century must be connected to the question of moral reflection,

the question of evil in man. Is not the antisemitism (now called antiZionism), which exists today also in the European Union, an amazing example of the inherited tradition of hatred in European culture?

jj: Transmittal of the feelings of tribal or religious mistrust and enmity from generation to generation is characteristic of all civilizations; it has probably 1 Stalin and the Jews: The Red Book. The Tragedy of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the Soviet Jews (New York, 2003). A Polish edition was published in Warsaw in 2004.

A Conversation with Professor Ferzy fedlicki 269 been so since the dawn of history, as old as mankind’s existence. However, the

special feature of anti-Judaism or antisemitism is the power of delusions, believed in stubbornly in spite of all testimonies to the contrary. Those superstitions, and arguments fabricated to prove them, constitute an organic

part of anti-Jewish stereotypes, starting from alleged blood libel, wellpoisoning, or sacrilege, up to the belief in the Jews’ intention to rule the world and their alleged mafia networks, as well as political and financial conspiracies. Those phantasms have an almost paranoid form, but they are not individual deviations but archetypes rooted in centuries of European culture. Antisemitism in every country and era has its unique features, and it also usually acquires a form of self-defence in one or another national culture or national soul. And yet it is a totally international phenomenon, based every-

where on the same models. Groups can be found in nearly every larger national community that are ready to suspect evil in some religion, people, or

race. Those groups forget that such suspicions and the feelings of hatred fired by them were the source and justification for the most horrific mass crimes. Translated from the Polish by Maya Peretz

An Interview with Mirostaw Sawicki (August 2006) JOANNA B. MICHLIC

MIROSLAW SAWICKI was born on Io February 1946 in Warsaw. As a teenager he

joined the scout units—Walter’s troops—organized and led by Jacek Kuron. In time, Kuron became a close friend of Sawicki and his wife Paula. Between 1963 and 1968 Sawicki studied theoretical physics at Warsaw University, where he was also actively involved in the student movement (Zwiazek Miodziezy Studenckiey; ZMS). In October 1966, during the ZMS meeting at the History Department that he co-organized, Sawicki introduced a student resolution criticizing the communist regime for failure to deliver the political, social, and economic reforms that it had promised in 1956. After the meeting he was expelled from the university for two months, until December 1966. In March 1968 Sawicki was one of the leaders of the student demonstrations. In the aftermath of the demonstration of 8 March, he went into hiding from the police for a short while. However, a few days later, on 13 March, he decided to give himself up to the police and went to the main police station at the Palac Mokotowski. He was subsequently arrested and expelled from university. He was released from prison at the beginning of August 1968. He regained his student status in 1970, but for various reasons was not able to complete his studies until 1982. From 1971 to 1976 he taught physics in the Warsaw Jan Dabrowski Gymnasium. In 1976 he began to teach physics at another Warsaw gymnasium, Joachim Lelewel, where he worked until 1990; he also became active in the intellectual opposition group Komitet Obrony Robotnikow (Workers’ Defence Committee; KOR), though he was never a formal member. After the imposition of martial law on 13 December 1981, Sawicki became a co-founder and activist of the Independent Educational Group and played various roles in the Education Branch of the Solidarity Movement of Mazovia Region, of which he was a leading member in 1989-90. His political nicknames were Ola and Pawel. During that time he was involved in a number of Solidarity’s publications, including Tu, Teraz, and Zeszyty Edukacji Narodowej. In 1990 he began to work for

the Ministry of National Education, taking on various responsibilities for the implementation of major educational reforms. Between 1998 and 2002 he was Minister Counsellor at the Polish embassy in Washington, DC, and between 2002 and 2005 he was minister of national education.

An Interview with Mirostaw Sawicki 271 JBM: Miroslaw, you were one of the most salient figures in the Polish student

movement of 1968. However, public discussion of the events of 1968 (‘wydarzenia marcowe’) mentions you only sparingly. Could you remind us of your role in the student movement of 1968?

Ms: My participation in the student movement began in about 1964 or 1965 and it was a natural consequence of my previous engagement in the scouting movement. In the 1950s I was a member of one of the Walter scouting troops (Druzyny Walterowskie) that Jacek Kuron had established.’ During the scouting period in my life, Kuron represented the main authority for me and continued to remain a leading authoritative figure during my student years, when I also met Karol Modzelewski.” The establishment of self-education circles constituted the first major activities of our student movement. Next, the movement’s main activity took

the form of open meetings, organized by students representing the Socialist : Youth Movement at Warsaw University. At those meetings we held open discussions and presented our revisionist ideological points of view. Many former members of the dissolved Walter troops such as Adam Michnik, Seweryn Blumsztajn, and Aleksander Perski participated in our student movement, though the movement was not limited to the former members of the Walter District (Hufiec Walterowski).*? A small group of individuals, 1 Jacek Kuron (1934—2004), a historian, dissident, and opposition leader with the Solidarity movement. In 1952 he became a scoutmaster in the scouting section of the communist Zwiazek Mlodziezy Polskiej (Polish Youth Movement; ZMP). In 1956, as part of his involvement in the scouting movement, Kuron established the Hufiec Walterowski. Its local branches were called Walterowskie troops.

The Hufiec Walterowski was dissolved in 1961, but Kuron continued to work in the Zwiqzek Harcerstwa Polskiego (Polish Scouting Association; ZHP) until 1964. During that time, he delivered his major critical analysis of the communist regime. Recently, Kuron has become a victim of vicious right-wing nationalistic propaganda, accusing him of having collaborated with the communists in the post-198os. In this propaganda of slander, Kuron’s scouting Walterowskie troops are characterized as a symbol of his communist entanglement and of ‘the social damage’ that he allegedly caused to the Polish scouting movement. 2 Karol Modzelewski (1937— _), a Polish historian, writer, and politician. In the 1950s and 1960s, like Kuron, Modzelewski was a member of the Polish United Workers’ Party. In the 1960s the two became close associates in political endeavours. In 1965 they wrote the famous ‘Open Letter to Members of PZPR and ZMP at the University of Warsaw’, in which they condemned the party’s elitist practices. For their activities, Modzelewski and Kuron were sentenced to prison on 19 July in the same year, for three and a half and three years respectively. Like Kuron, Modzelewski participated in the Polish 1968 March and was again imprisoned for three and a half years. He was one of the leading figures of the Solidarity movement in the 1980s.

3 Adam Michnik, Seweryn Blumsztajn, and Aleksander Perski were leading members of the student movement in the 1960s. All three were arrested during the events of 1968 and expelled from university. In the aftermath of the anti-Zionist campaign Blumsztajn and Perski were forced to emigrate

from Poland. Blumsztajn, who was actively involved in the Solidarity movement in the 1980s, returned to post-1989 Poland and is one of the leading editors of Gazeta Wyborcza. Perski, a wellknown psychologist specializing in stress, lives in Sweden. Adam Michnik, a leading political dissident

272 Joanna B. Michlic without a defined organizational leadership, but under the clear ideological leadership of Kuron and Modzelewski, represented the pillar of our student movement. The communist regime called this group ‘komandosi’. I was also a member of this group and participated in the meeting during which we decided to organize a student demonstration, scheduled for 8 March 1968 at Warsaw University.* During the same meeting, Irena Lasota and I volunteered to read two resolutions at the Warsaw University campus during the demonstration on 8 March. yBM: What did March 1968 mean for you then? What does this event signify for you today, thirty-eight years later? Ms: For me, participation in the March 1968 events was a logical consequence of my earlier activities. | would feel ashamed today if I had not participated in them as a student.

JBM: Could you recall your reaction towards the Jewish aspect of March 1968? _ What was your reaction towards the news that the party began to hunt ‘the Zionists’? How did you react towards the news about the suspension and

, expulsion of students of Jewish origin from the universities—your colleagues and friends? Ms: At first, at that time I mainly viewed the antisemitic activities of the regime as a part of the internal struggle within the party. However, I became shocked when I realized the extent to which a large section of Polish society—work- _

ers, intelligentsia, and journalists—joined and took an active part in the , party’s anti-Zionist campaign.

jBM: Was your attitude towards the Jewish aspect of 1968 influenced by the fact that your family rescued a Jewish boy during the Holocaust? Ms: My family’s history of sheltering Janek did not have any influence at all on my attitudes and actions during the events of 1968. Rather my upbringing at home and at school and, perhaps even more, my scouting education played a major role in my student activism in 1968. For me, the March events and our earlier participation in the student movement were not directly linked to the in the 1970s and a prominent figure in the Solidarity movement of the 1980s, created Gazeta Wyborcza in 1989. He is the editor-in-chief of the paper.

* This was the meeting of 5 March 1968, which took place in the apartment of Jakub Karpinski. The participants included Kuron and Modzelewski, Henryk Szlajfer, Irena Lasota, Piotr Borowicz,

and Miroslaw Sawicki. The main aim of the meeting was to organize a student demonstration in protest against the recent ‘arrest’ of the renowned play Dziady by Adam Mickiewicz and against the expulsion of Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer from Warsaw University. Michnik and Szlajfer were

expelled for publicly condemning the ban on the production of Dziady in the National Theatre of Warsaw and voicing their protest to the French journalist of Le Monde.

An Interview with Mirostaw Sawicki 273 discussion around the Jewish issue and around antisemitism, but, to speak in grandiose terms, sprang from the desire to struggle for freedom, equality, democracy, and tolerance.

JBM: Could you tell me how Janek Kaczynski/Szlomo Gazit came into contact with your father, Professor Ludwik Sawicki, in wartime Warsaw’? Were your family already acquainted with Janek at the time they made a decision to shelter him? How old was Janek then? Do you know anything about his biological family’s background?

Ms: Janek Kaczynski adopted the name Szlomo Gazit after he emigrated to Palestine/Israel in the early post-war period. I have no idea if Janek’s pre-war family name was also Kaczynski, or if this was just his Christian Polish name that he adopted during the Nazi occupation.® I am going to call him Janek because that’s the way my family spoke about him in our home. He came from a simple poor Jewish family. His father was a droshky driver. Before the outbreak of the war in September 1939, Janek began his education in the primary school at Spokojna Street (the narrow cul-de-sac crossing Okopowa Street and located between the Jewish and Catholic cemeteries on Powazki). When the ghetto was established Janek was forced to move there with his entire family. It seems to me that he must have had many siblings and was himself one of the youngest children. He had a fragile, tiny body. Like many other children confined to living in the ghetto, Janek became a breadwinner for his family: he regularly left the ghetto for the Aryan side in search of food. He begged for food by walking from door to door in Warsaw’s apartments. When we met for the ©

first time in 1988, he told me that during his trips to the Aryan side he felt pretty safe in the neighbourhood of Zoliborz, especially in the area of the estate housing managed by the Warszawska Spoldzielnia Mieszkaniowa (Warsaw Housing Co-operative; WSM). According to Janek ‘decent people inhabited the area. They seemed more generous in their offerings of food, or at least did not threaten to call the police.’ With the passage of time he learned which doors he could safely knock on and get something to eat. Amongst those who provided Janek with food were my parents. My mother told me that when Janek began to visit them—this must have been sometime during 1941 when > Prof. Ludwik Sawicki (1893-1972) was a leading Polish geologist and archaeologist, one of the founders of the Polish archaeological school and a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). ® According to Szlomo Gazit’s testimony of 1958, Irena Sawicka, the first wife of Ludwik Sawicki, provided him with the false birth certificate that stated that he was Jan Kaczynski, the son of Stanislaw Kaczynski and Zofia Rutkowska. This birth certificate saved Szlomo’s life during the last two years of the war, though Szlomo was at first reluctant to show it to strangers because he was afraid that people would recognize that it was newly issued and would suspect that he was Jewish. See S. Gazit, ‘Al-Hik Amv (‘To the Bosom of My People’), published in Hebrew in Bulletin of the Ghetto Fighters House, 20 (1958), 59-63.

274 Joanna B. Michlic Janek was approximately 11 years old—my parents suggested to him that he should stay with them, but then Janek always preferred instead to ask for food to take away (‘na wynos’) and would insist that he had to go back to the ghetto because there his hungry parents and hungry siblings were waiting for him. Sometimes he briefly visited my parents to warm up. He slept over only when the police hour was approaching and he knew that he would be unable to reach the ghetto in time to avoid being caught by the police. However, one day, most likely after one of the liquidation actions—perhaps even after the so-called Great Deportation of July 1942—he came from the ghetto and told my parents that he found his ghetto home totally empty—all his relatives were gone.

From this moment he stayed with my parents, but during the daytime he would still carry on with his trips, visiting the neighbourhood of Zoliborz.

JBM: Was Janek totally dependent on your parents, or did he attempt to maintain

his independence? What was the relationship between Janek and your

parents?

Ms: He was very independent and very stubborn. He fought to maintain his independence and for the right to decide his own fate. Because of that he often got into sharp conflict with my father, who expected from him the subordina~ tion that a child should show an adult, particularly an adult like my father,

who felt responsible for the child. Janek strongly demonstrated that he wanted to keep his fate in his own hands. Certainly he was not just a passive

child, rescued by my parents, but played an active role in his survival. Therefore my parents were not surprised when sometime during the spring of 1943 Janek announced to them that now he would be moving in with another family that lived on Wilson Square. According to Janek, this family was friendly towards him and had already agreed to look after him for a certain amount of time. When many years later he told me that in reality he did not have any other family ready to take him in during the spring of 1943, I was really surprised how mature Janek was as a young boy. He was happy and

grateful that my parents had provided him with shelter during the winter months, but, at the same time, he was aware that they were nervous and unhappy about his trips around the city. | know from my mother that my parents were really afraid of some of their neighbours. In the spring of 1943, he realized that my mother was pregnant and also overheard rumours that were

spreading around that for some reason the Germans might be checking apartment after apartment in their neighbourhood. At the time, Janek acquired information from one of his friends—another little smuggler—that it was quite safe to find a semi-permanent night-time shelter in the allotments on Promyka Street in Zoliborz. These shelters were supposed to be particularly reliable between the police hour and the next morning, but one had to watch out for one of the two allotment watchmen

An Interview with Mirostaw Sawicki 275 who had earned a reputation as a malicious man, whereas the other one was known as good-hearted. In my view, this story suggests that the Jewish children like Janek shared a data bank. This is also confirmed in the stories about the cigarette salesmen (‘papierosiarze’) from the Plac Trzech Krzyzy.’ With the beginning of warmer days, in the spring of 1943, already in the aftermath of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April 1943, Janek moved out from my parents’ apartment and began to live in the allotments at Promyka Street. When he recollected this story to me many years later he reflected that he did not feel good and comfortable in the allotments and regretted that he left my parents. At the allotments he was also constantly afraid that he might be discovered by the ‘bad watchman’. This is exactly what had happened. Yet this ‘bad watchman’, who at first shouted at Janek in a loud voice and held him by his shirt, suddenly softened up and let Janek run away into the nearby

bushes. Janek was convinced that this man realized that he had caught a Jewish child and had told one of the underground organizations, because after this incident metal containers with food began to appear in one of the allotments’ alleys. Janek at first used to empty the food containers only after the departure of the woman who was delivering the food. Yet after a while this woman gradually began to encourage Janek to come out from the bushes. Many years later, in a conversation with me, Janek stated that ‘this woman had blue eyes, but was one of us’ (‘Muiala niebieskie oczy, ale musiala byc z naszych’). Finally, Janek agreed to go with her and she arranged a new shelter for him—a watchman’s lodge on Grzybowska Street or nearby Grzybowski Square. This place was very busy; many people passed through it constantly. Janek was convinced that this place served as a meeting point of one of the underground organizations. He was never allowed to go out and when all kinds of strangers came to visit, he had to hide in a coal container that was located underneath the steps. The container was dirty and uncomfortable and this watchman lodge, in general, was not such a safe place. Therefore Janek revolted again. He told his new rescuers that he did not wish to remain with them any longer. At that moment they asked him for the first time where he had lived before he came to ‘reside’ at the allotments. Janek must have

given them my parents’ address because they turned to my father with a question whether he was willing to take Janek in again. ” The writer Jozef Ziemian (1922-72) was the author of a collection of short stories, Papierosiarze z Placu Trzech Krzy&y, first published in 1986 in Polish by the L6dz samizdat publisher Solidarnosc Walczaca. A year later the book was published in Hebrew (Mokhrei hasigariyot mikikar sheloshet hatselavim (Tel Aviv, 1987)), translated by Adah Pagis. The stories were based on his wartime experiences. Ziemian, who escaped from the Warsaw ghetto, subsequently worked on the Aryan side for the Zydowski Komitet Narodowy (Jewish National Committee; ZKN), an organization that provided aid for Jews in hiding. In October 1943 he came across Jewish children selling cigarettes at Plac Trzech Krzyzy in Warsaw and began to assist them on behalf of the ZKN. In 1957 he emigrated to Israel.

276 Joanna B. Michlic JBM: How did the ordinary day in the life of your family look like upon the return of Janek to your parents’ wartime home in Warsaw? Ms: Upon Janek’s return to my parents’ home, they reached an agreement. Once a week Janek received a sum of money (the sum was not a payment for sheltering him) that he passed to my mother who, 1n turn, bought for him food and fed him like a king. Later Janek told me that he often ate better than my parents, who were then going through hardship. According to the same agreement, Janek was not allowed to go out. My elder brother Ludwik had already been born then—he was born in August 1943°—and my parents treated Janek as a fully-fledged member of the family: he had his share of responsibilities with housework and with taking care of the baby, and, at the same time, he enjoyed all the pleasures of a regular family life, with one limitation. He was forbidden to go out and, during daytime, he was not allowed to approach any of the windows in the apartment. In the evenings, he was allowed to sit near a

window in the dark room from where he could look at the courtyard. Sometimes in the autumn when it got dark early before the police hour, Janek

, accompanied my mother to the allotments to collect fruit and vegetables. During the Warsaw Uprising, when there was heavy shooting, the tenants

of the apartment building where my parents lived had to go down to the air-raid shelter in the cellar. In the cellar my mother and Zofia Malanicz, my parents’ neighbour, who was also a good friend of my father, both protected Janek with their own bodies from the eyes of nosy neighbours. During their trips to the cellar Janek once overheard that a military unit of the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization; ZOB) was based in the 3rd housing estate of the WSM (the corner of Suzin Street and Krasinski Street, whereas my parents lived in the 5th housing district of WSM, at the corner of Suzin Street and Slowacki Street). This information was indeed

true: a group of Jewish fighters, including Antek Cukierman and Marek Edelman, were at that time staying in this area.? The 12-year-old Janek

8 Ludwik Sawicki is now a medical doctor. .

9 Yitzhak (Antek) Zuckerman (Cukierman) (1915-81) was one of the leaders of the ZOB, an underground resistance movement in wartime Warsaw, where he moved from Vilnius in 1938. During the Great Deportation that began on 22 July 1942, Zuckerman called for armed resistance against the Germans. On 28 July he and other Jewish youth movement leaders established the ZOB. In the winter

of 1943 he was appointed a commander of one of the three main areas of the ghetto. During the Warsaw ghetto uprising, he was on the Aryan side, trying to organize arms for the fighters in the ghetto. After the uprising was quashed, he was a member of the Jewish National Committee. He and his wife Zivia Lubetkin, who was a fellow underground youth leader, emigrated to Palestine in 1947, where he helped found the Ghetto Fighters’ Kibbutz and the Ghetto Fighters’ House. Marek Edelman (1922— ) was a youth leader of the Jewish socialist movement Bund during the war. Like , Zuckerman, he was also one of the founders of the ZOB in the Warsaw ghetto. During the uprising, Edelman became one of its leaders following the death of ZOB commander Mordechai Anielewicz. During the liquidation of the ghetto by the Germans he managed to escape to the Aryan side, joined one of the units of the Polish underground Armia Krajowa (Home Army; AK) and took part in the

An Interview with Mirostaw Sawicki 277 wanted desperately to join them, but my father totally opposed Janek’s desire.

JBM: How did this argument between your father and Janek end up? Did your father in the end permit Janek to join the Jewish fighters?

Ms: A huge argument broke out between them and subsequently Janek ran away./° From Janek’s later post-war recollection of the events we know that at the end he did not manage to find a Jewish military unit in the area, but luck

did not desert him. Good people took care of him. In the aftermath of the Warsaw Uprising, Janek safely left the city with them. These people were still living at Krasinski Street near Stoleczna during the 1980s. I do not know the details about Janek’s further war-time experiences: how at the end of the war he was found in the Catholic orphanage based in a monastery near Krakow.'!

After the war ended, a Krakow family with two already adult children adopted Janek.'* They adopted him because they had made an oath that if all Warsaw ghetto uprising of August 1944. After the war he remained in Poland and studied medicine at the Medical University in Lodz, where he became a leading cardiologist. In the 1970s he became an activist in the KOR and was also actively involved in the Solidarity movement in the 1980s.

10 The information about Szlomo’s sudden escape from Sawicki’s home and his search in vain for units of Jewish fighters is confirmed in his testimony of 1958. After the German crushing of the Warsaw uprising of August 1944 Szlomo did not go back to Sawicki’s apartment. Together with the rest of the Warsaw civilian population he was expelled by the Germans from the city and sent to a transit camp, Durchgangslager in Pruszkow, a small town in the vicinity of Warsaw. There he was lucky to be placed in one of the last transports of civilians that went to the Krakow region in the General Government. See Gazit, ‘Al-Hik Am1’, 59. 11 According to Szlomo’s testimony of 1958, he found his first ‘new home’ in a small village near

Krakow, where his transport from Pruszkow was destined. The chairman of the village placed him with a small religious and poor family for whom he worked in the fields. He remained with them a cer-

tain time. He did not disclose to them his Jewish identity, but pretended to be a Christian Polish orphan who lost his parents in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. In his ‘new home’ he encountered expressions of traditional religious anti-Jewish prejudice voiced by the grandmother. Although the family

wanted to adopt him, he decided to run away from them. During his journey back to Krakow, he learnt by chance about a local branch of the welfare organization which allocated homes to refugees from Warsaw—Rada Glowna Opiekuncza—and upon his arrival at Krakow he turned to it. Once

again he was afraid to disclose his true identity and continued to present himself as a Christian | orphan. The organization’s representative sent him to the Christian orphanage near Krakow. See

Gazit, ‘Al-Hik Ami’, 60-1. |

12 The family’s name was Lukasiewicz and they lived in the neighbourhood of Debniki at 3 Polna Street. From the beginning Szlomo was placed in their custody as their adopted son. According to Szlomo’s testimony of 1958, there were three adult children and one teenager in this family. Like the Sawicki family, Szlomo treated the Lukasiewicz family as his own. He grew very fond of them, though at first he was careful not to disclose to them his Jewish identity. Sometime during his stay with them he converted to Catholicism and won many prizes in a religious class and as an altar boy. The departure from the Lukasiewicz family was emotionally very difficult for him. In 1958, in his new home in Israel, he corresponded with both the Sawicki and Lukasiewicz families, and kept all their letters. Gazit, ‘Al-Hik Ami’, 62-3.

278 Joanna B. Michlic the members of their family survived the war they would adopt an orphan. Thus Janek acquired new parents and siblings and became the favourite spoilt child in the family. He lived with them in Krakow, where he also | became an altar boy serving in one of the churches. And that’s when ‘individuals in high boots’, as Janek called them, began to visit him.'* These individuals demanded that Janek’s new parents give him to them. However, the new parents refused to desert Janek, arguing that Janek was not an object to be moved around from one pair of hands to another and that by taking him from the orphanage they took responsibility for his life, and therefore they were

. accountable for his well-being to the director of that orphanage. After that exchange of words, these visits, of which Janek was horribly afraid, stopped for a while.

JBM: In your view, why was Janek so horrified by the visits of members of one of

the Jewish organizations that specialized in the search (the recovery) of Jewish children? Did he speak to you about this chapter in his life?

Ms: Janek was afraid of losing once again a home in which he felt so happy. He was also afraid that the visits of these individuals would lead to the discovery that he was a Jew. He was convinced that if his new family learnt that he was

Jewish then they would stop liking him and wanting to keep him any longer—he was convinced that his new family was not aware of his Jewish roots. Yet, the ‘individuals in high boots’ appeared in his home again in the autumn of 1946, in the aftermath of the anti-Jewish pogroms in Krakow and Kielce.'* This time, they told him that if he would not leave with them, he might also become a victim of another anti-Jewish pogrom. And at that moment Janek agreed that he would go with them to Palestine.

13 In his testimony of 1958, Szlomo recollected his first meeting with a Jewish man, a captain in the Polish army. This captain told him about a Jewish orphanage in Krakow and about the ensuing departure of its young inhabitants for Erets Yisra’el. Although Szlomo was terribly afraid of losing his new

adoptive Christian Polish family, at the same time he often thought about his perished parents and three sisters, and about Jewishness. After his conversion to Catholicism, he for a while perceived himself as both ethnically Jewish and a spiritual believer in the Christian faith. Upon receiving an official letter from the local Jewish community sometime in 1946, on his own accord he joined a group of Polish Jews on their way to Palestine. Until the end of his early post-war life in Krakow he never disclosed his Jewish identity to his friends at school. Before his departure for Palestine he announced to them that he was leaving for the United States, where his family was awaiting him. Gazit, ‘Al-Hik Am)’, 62-4. '* The years 1945-7 saw an eruption of violent attacks against both individuals and groups of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors who returned to their pre-war homes or tried to settle in new areas. The anti-Jewish pogrom in Krakow of 11 August 1945 was one of the first major manifestations of this anti-Jewish violence. The Kielce pogrom of 4 July 1946, in which forty-two people were killed, was the worst manifestation of such violence in the country and became the best-known and the moststudied incident.

An Interview with Mirostaw Sawicki 279 jsm: Did any members of your family meet with Janek before his departure to his new homeland? Do you know any details about his journey to Palestine/ Israel?

Ms: By astrange coincidence exactly just before Janek left Krakow, my father and Janek crossed paths again. After the war, my father, a geologist and archaeologist specializing in Polish archaeology, supervised an archaeological excavation in the Zwierzyniec area of Krakow. And there, by chance, he met Janek walking down the street. This was a highly emotionally moving encounter

that made both of them aware that there was a strong family-like bond between them and that they should keep in touch in the future. In fact, before Janek left Poland, he visited my parents, my elder brother Ludwik, and also me—I was already born then. From Janek’s later recollections, I know that his journey to Palestine led through the centre in Lodz, next a long waiting time in Marseille in France, from where he left on the ship Exodus with a large group of children for Palestine.’° The journey on the Exodus was long and turbulent. Janek was amongst the lucky passengers who, after a long ordeal on the Exodus, succeeded in reaching the final destination. In Israel another incredible event occurred in Janek’s life. One of the local Tel Aviv newspapers published a report from Marseille about Jewish children travelling on the Exodus, in which Janek’s story was described and the photo of Janek dressed as an altar boy appeared on the first page. Janek’s real uncle, who had emigrated to Palestine before the war, read this report. Janek, of course, had almost no knowledge about the fate of his closest family and

other relatives, except for suspecting that they were all shipped to the Treblinka death camp.

It seems to me that his main memory of Poland was that of his pre-war childhood and of his emotions from that time. When Janek came to Poland in the early 1990s, he visited, amongst other places, his pre-war primary school.

His visit coincided with vacation time and the school was empty, but the school caretaker permitted us to enter the school and walk around the corridors. We entered one of the bathrooms and there Janek began to experience going back to his childhood years when he attended school. On the way back

to Spokojna Street, where my car was parked, Janek still seemed to be 15 Exodus 1947 was a ship purchased by the Mosad Le’aliyah Beit, the underground Jewish organi-

zation that specialized in helping illegal Jewish immigrants enter Palestine. The ship left port in Marseille on 11 July 1947, carrying Jewish refugees from Europe bound for Palestine, then controlled by the British. It arrived at Palestinian shores on 18 July. However, the British Royal Navy did not allow the illegal immigrants to enter Palestine. They seized the ship and deported all its passengers back to Europe. The event was widely covered in the international media. Within a year, over half of the original Exodus 1947 passengers made another attempt to emigrate to Palestine, but this time they were detained in camps in Cyprus. After the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948 all surviving Jewish refugees finally reached their original destination.

280 Joanna B. Michlic engaged in a conversation with his biological mother and his brothers. He appeared to see his family around him, waiting for him to take him home from school.

JBM: From one early post-war letter of 12 September 1948, written by your father

to Szlomo Gazit in Israel—this letter is deposited in the Department of Righteous among the Nations in Yad Vashem—what is clear is that Janek was strongly attached to your family and that the emotional ties that had developed between him and your father during the war did not diminish when the war was over, but continued to remain strong in the post-war period. Reading the letter, 1t seems that Janek continued to treat your father both as his father and as a moral authority. The same letter also reveals that Janek regarded all members of your family as his own and that he missed all of you a lot, in spite of being immersed in creating a new life for himself in Israel.

Ms: Janek displayed strong emotions towards my parents and towards our entire family, though he really knew me and my younger sister only through our post-war letters to him that my father expected us to write from the moment we both were able to hold a pen in our hands. We are three siblings: the eldest is my brother Ludwik, born in August 1943; I am the middle child, born in February 1946, and the youngest is my sister Irena, born in January 1948.'° During the war Janek lived at my parents’ house as a member of our family. However, during visits of various individuals to my parents’ home, he always had to hide behind the kitchen doors. Except for my father’s first wife Irena and a few of their closest friends no one else knew about Janek’s existence in my parents’ wartime household.*’ Neither the distant relatives nor neighbours were informed about him. jsM: Your father Professor Ludwik Sawicki was known as a passionate scholar for whom science was the great love of his life. Do you know the reasons that motivated your father to provide a shelter for a Jewish boy? Did your parents ever explain to you why they pursued an activity that could have endangered

, their own lives and the life of their own small child? Ms: My father was a highly educated man who was an agnostic and a passionate believer in science, while my mother Czeslawa had a basic education and was a devout practising Catholic.’* Their mutual care of Janek sprang neither from my father’s education nor from my mother’s strong Catholic faith, but 16 Trena Sawicka, the daughter of Ludwik and Czeslawa Sawicki, the second wife of Ludwik Sawicki, is a Polish literature teacher. 17 Trena Sawicka (maiden name Scheur), the first wife of Ludwik Sawicki, was a daughter of immigrants from Alsace, who arrived in Poland after the French—-German War of 1870—1. She was born in Poland in the 1890s, and was killed by a bomb during the Warsaw uprising of August 1944. 18 Czeslawa Sawicka, the second wife of Ludwik Sawicki, was born in 1908. She died in 1992.

An Interview with Mirostaw Sawicki 281 from their mutual conviction that if someone needed help and one was able to offer such help, one must do so even at the price of taking certain risks. JBM: How long did your family remain in touch with Janek after the war? What did this contact mean to the members of your family? Did your family, any members, recollect Janek’s presence in the family’s life after 1948? Did you have any special family stories about Janek that you share with each other or with your friends? Did your father ever publicly speak about providing a shelter to a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Poland? Ms: Janek re-established contact with my father after he settled in Israel. This contact took the form of correspondence that was not so regular. After a certain time passed, already in the 1950s, Janek began to send us parcels with citrus fruit once or twice a year. We reciprocated with parcels containing books and photographic works about Poland and Warsaw. As I mentioned already, when my sister and I learnt to write, our father passed on to all three of us the duty to stay in touch with Janek. In 1967 Janek’s correspondence ceased to arrive: we ceased to receive any response to our letters. Later Janek revealed to us that he stopped writing to us at the time because of a certain prevalent opinion in Israel that his letters might have harmed us. This was also a time when Janek changed apartments and adopted a Hebrew surname, so our letters did not reach him. jpM: Nevertheless your family’s contact with Janek was luckily re-established in the

1980s. In 1988 Janek had requested from the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem that for its wartime rescue activities your family be awarded the title of the Righteous among the Nations. Unfortunately, at that time, your father was already deceased. What did this title mean to you and to your siblings?

Ms: Qur contact with Janek was renewed in the middle of the 1980s. This 1s another story of a chain of incredible coincidences that, I think, presented themselves to Janek throughout his entire life. I must start telling this story from a digression that at first glance has nothing to do with our main story. In August 1979, my wife Paula and I were guests of Jerzy Andrzejewski at his

home during the celebration of his seventieth birthday.’? At the party, the guests spoke amongst other topics about eleven graphics that the author Jan Lebenstein had donated to KOR as a gift.2° These graphics were still located

in the cardboard tube behind our host’s wardrobe. Various distinguished 19 Jerzy Andrzejewski (1909-83) was a distinguished Polish writer who began his prolific writing career in the pre-war period. In 1976 he became one of the founding members of the intellectual opposition group KOR and was a leading dissident figure until his death. 20 Jan Lebenstein (1930-2000), born in Brest-Litovsk, was a leading post-war Polish artist. In 1959 he received the Grand Prix at the First International Biennale of Young Artists in Paris and immediately thereafter settled in Paris. He was a leading member of the Polish émigré cultural circle in France between the 1960s and 1980s. He died in Krakow in 2000.

282 Foanna B. Michhic guests had a hard time coming up with an idea of what to do with this awkward gift. Eventually Paula suggested that we should take the graphics home with us and that she would sell them to various acquaintances.*! Her offer was accepted with enthusiasm and relief. That’s how enthusiastic fans of Lebenstein’s art came to pass through our home. Both our closer and more distant acquaintances introduced them to us. Janka Woroszylska was also

amongst our close acquaintances, who one day visited us with a certain woman who was interested in Lebenstein’s graphics.27 Sometime before their visit, this woman had had supper with her friends in Warsaw, where she met another woman who had just come back from Israel. During the supper at the table the woman who visited Israel told an incredible story of the rescue of a Jewish boy in wartime Warsaw. The rescued child himself told her that story during her trip to Israel. In this story were mentioned the name of Professor Sawicki, his address at Slowacki Street in the neighbourhood of

Zoliborz, and a very detailed description of the apartment in which the Jewish boy was hidden. The child hero of the story was Szlomo Gazit, who had asked her to find out the whereabouts of Professor Sawicki’s family. At first, the woman who came with Janka Woroszylska to pay us a visit did not associate our surname with the surname from the story she was told. At that time, my father was already deceased for some years. Nevertheless, after a while she associated our apartment, in which she bought one of Lebenstein’s graphics, with Szlomo Gazit’s description of the wartime apartment. Therefore, she called Janka and Janka, in turn, called us. Although during the telephone conversation between me and Janka the name Szlomo Gazit did not ring a bell at all, I knew immediately that she was talking about Janek. Paula was selling Lebenstein’s graphics in about 1979 or 1980 and this incredible event must have occurred sometime then. Our second coincidence or perhaps our fourth lucky coincidence that led to the reunion of our family with Janek took place approximately in 1983. Next, in 1988, Janek invited me and Paula to Israel. On behalf of my parents, I planted a tree in Yad Vashem and received the awards of Righteous among the Nations that were bestowed upon my parents Ludwik and Czeslawa Sawicki and Irena, the first wife of 21 Paula Sawicka (the wife of Mirostaw Sawicki), born in 1947, is a psychologist. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s she was an activist in the dissident movement in Poland, in both KOR and Solidarity.

After 1989 she became a leading founder of independent social organizations. Currently she is the Chair of the Otwarta Rzeczpospolita (Open Republic Association), an organization dedicated to fighting racism, xenophobia, and antisemitism in contemporary Poland. 2 Janina Woroszylska (1925-2002) was the wife of the well-known poet, essayist, and translator Wiktor Woroszylski (1927—96). She was a biologist working at Warsaw University. She and her husband became activists in the dissident movement in the 1970s and during that period their home in Zoliborz in Warsaw became a centre for meetings of members of the dissident movement and a ‘literary salon’ where Polish literature and arts could be freely and openly discussed, without the interference of communist censorship.

An Interview with Mirostaw Sawicki 283 my father. Irena and my father were already divorced before 1939, but remained good friends during the war. Irena had her share in rescuing Janek. In 1988, my mother was already 80 years old and felt too fragile to embark on a hard complicated journey to Israel. At that time, there were no direct flights between Poland and Israel. My father passed away in 1972, and his first wife Irena had been killed during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. Hence in 1988, Janek visited Poland twice. He also invited my sister Irena, with whom he developed special emotional ties, to Israel. His attitude to our entire family was very warm and emotional. When Janek hosted us in Israel I had an occasion to experience first-hand that he treated me as his younger brother. He took care of me in a way that sometimes was overwhelming. He also worried about me a lot. In spite of moving apartments many times in Israel, Janek kept all the letters he received from my father and from us, from those written clumsily and shapelessly in our childhood to those we wrote when we were students. The entire upper shelf in his deep wardrobe was filled with them. During his first trip to Poland Janek was able to meet my mother. For my mother and for all of us the Award bestowed upon us by Yad Vashem is very important. On the

gravestone of our parents we decided to write one simple sentence: The Righteous among the Nations (Sprawiedlimi Wsréd Narodéw Swiata). When

they were alive my parents never publicly mentioned Janek’s story. They were silent not because they were afraid of something or someone, but because they did not have any audience interested in their story. Yet ] know

that Janek’s story was published in the book edited by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewinowna, Ten jest z ojczyzny mojes.*°

Still, we always mentioned Janek in our recollections of family history, especially from the wartime period when Janek lived with my parents. These conversations were usually conducted amongst close members of the family and close friends. But there were also occasions when someone not familiar with the story asked about details of Janek’s chapter in my family history. On

reflection, one could say that Janek was very perceptive in 1967 when he decided to cease to communicate with us in order to protect us: when I was imprisoned in the aftermath of the demonstration of 8 March 1968, one of the investigating officers asked me about Janek. Then, it was not the right thing to boast about my parents’ rescue of Janek because Moczar’s propaganda could have exploited Janek’s story for the Party’s political gains.** 23 Ten jest z ojczyzny mojej. Polacy z pomoca Zydom 1939-1945, edited by Witadystaw Bartoszewski and Zofia Lewinowna, with an introduction by Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, was first published in 1966. The book contains approximately 200 excerpts from testimonies of Polish Jewish survivors and also documents issued by members of the Polish underground movement, which assisted Polish Jews during the war. 24’ Mieczystaw Moczar, original name Mikolaj Demko (1913-86), was a highly placed member of the Polish United Workers’ Party, a member of its Central Committee from 1965 to 1981, and a member

284 Joanna B. Michhec yBM: Do you think that your parents’ wartime rescue activities in any way impacted on your decision to become an educator who dedicated his whole life to working with young peopler Ms: Did Janek’s story impact somehow on my own life? Did it influence my deci-

sion to become an educator? Perhaps yes, because when I was making certain decisions about my life I was guided by certain life experiences of my parents and their system of values. Their system of values folded into a layer of my own system of values.

JBM: What is your outlook on the way Polish rescuers of Jews are treated in Polish , media and public discourse in contemporary Poland? Do you think that enough public attention is paid to them? Why do you think they are not recognized as national heroes in the eyes of the public?

Ms: According to my knowledge there are currently 22,000 trees planted by Righteous among the Nations in Yad Vashem, and of this figure, 5,200 were _ awarded to Christian Poles. However, until the middle of the 1960s, it was not acceptable in Poland to be proud of the title of the Righteous among the Nations and of having the award and planting the tree. It was not socially

acceptable to be proud of rescuing Jews during the war. During the antisemitic campaign, also called the anti-Zionist campaign, that Moczar orchestrated in 1967, the action of rescuing Jews was exploited in a political game and because of that it was also not appropriate then for decent people to mention their rescue activities. Even today, some Righteous among the Nations do not wish to be publicly awarded the title. I am afraid that this shows that

we are still faced with some circles that look at the Righteous among the Nations with disdain and hostility. Translated from the Polish by foanna Michhic of its Politburo in 1970-1 and 1980-1. In the 1960s he headed the ethno-nationalist faction in the party, which was strongly antisemitic. Moczar was the chief architect and executor of the anti-Jewish campaign of 1968.

‘Testimony HENRYK DASKO IN THE SPRING of 1968, following the judgement of a disciplinary committee, I was one of three students to be expelled from the Szkola Glowna Planowania i Statystyki (Central School of Planning and Statistics; SGPiS; nowadays Szkola Gltowna Handlowa—Central Business School, SGH) in Warsaw. I should think that 1t was no coincidence that all three of us were of Jewish descent. The appeals committee upheld the decision and Professor Henryk Jablonski, the then minister of higher education, rejected the appeal. According to the regulations in force,

expulsion by a disciplinary committee decision meant a so-called wolf ticket (wilczy bilet) so that one was banned from any Polish higher educational institution for at least three years. Minister Jablonski’s decision was final and was not subject to any further appeals. Just a few days after the final appeal was rejected, I received my basic military call-up papers. In line with the practices employed against March students at that time, it was not a lofty call to fulfil one’s honourable duty to one’s country but a repressive decision, doubling the length of service without giving a reason. In less than a month [ had to join my unit.

In those days I had a friend several years younger than me called Magda Matcuzynska, whose father was a leading Polish journalist and TV commentator, referred to in media circles as the Polish Walter Cronkite. He was the presenter of Monitor, the most popular Polish TV commentary programme. Magda was studying for her school-leaving examinations. I used to come to her house. Magda’s mother, Dr Irena Malcuzynska, was a psychiatrist, a founder of the first Alcoholics Anonymous Club in Poland, and head of a psychiatric practice. Magda’s parents knew me as their daughter’s friend and they knew about my predicament.

They were an interesting and erudite family. Apart from his professional achievements, Karol Malcuzynski was an admired expert on Warsaw. They had a splendid library of several thousand volumes in Polish and English. For several years Karol Malcuzynski had worked as a press attaché in the PRL embassy in London. Magda phoned me one evening to say that her mother wanted to see me at her clinic, and she gave me the address. Dr Matcuzynska, a beautiful, slim, and exquisitely elegant woman, was sitting at her desk with a pile of forms in front of her. There was also a beaker full of pens and ballpoints in various colours. She spent

286 | Henryk Dasko the next fifteen minutes filling in several official forms, thus creating a fictional record of my previous visits to the outpatient clinic. Then she typed a short document. “Take this’, she said, handing it to me, ‘and deliver it to the army commission. If there is a problem, tell them to ring me.’ Two hours later my call-up was cancelled and I was handed a decision suspending my military service for two years. ‘I know that you will say nothing about this’, said Dr Malcuzynska. ‘Why did you do it?’ I asked next time I visited them. ‘Because life has taught me to oppose wickedness on every occasion and at any price.’ For the sake of this conviction, this family was ready to risk everything they had worked for all their lives: her medical qualification and his and her professional status and possibly something worse. In retrospect it is impossible to predict what the

consequences would have been had this matter come to light, and they must have been fully aware of it, considering the psychological terror raging all around them following the March events. And they did all this not for their closest relatives, but for their daughter’s acquaintance, whom they had seen no more than a few times before.

Karol Malcuzynski died in June 1984 and Dr Irena Matcuzynska in December 1998. As promised, I never said a word about it. This 1s the first time I have told this story, even though the consciousness of what Dr Irena Malcuzynska did for

me has never left me.

I did not go into the army but had to find something to do. The employment office on Karowa Street had nothing for me. I started asking around my friends and acquaintances. One of them, who was working as a photographer in the Lazienki Museum, told me that they were looking for guides. My knowledge of foreign languages came in handy as I had a good knowledge of Russian and I had been taking private English conversation lessons for a few years. So I went there.

At that time Marek Kwiatkowski, the prominent art historian, was director of the Palace and Park Museum. His deputy was Wlodzimierz Piwkowsk1. ‘They both interviewed me, but it was Kwiatkowsk1’s decision. He asked me to tell them some-

thing about myself. I told them what had been happening the last few months. ‘Have you been in gaol?’, asked Kwiatkowski. ‘No’, I replied, as was the case. ‘Are you currently under investigation?’ ‘No, I have only been interrogated.’ ‘I will take you on the basis of the recommendation’, he said. ‘No forms or questionnaires. I don’t know anything and I don’t want to know. You will guide Polish-, Russian-, and English-speaking groups. I assume that you are aware of how much our establishment is being watched because of the foreigners. I hope that you will not do anything foolish.’

Of course I didn’t and I diligently guided my groups and there were no complaints. I knew that Piwkowski, my immediate boss, thought well of me. I spent my free time improving the English version of the Palace guidebook. July and August passed without incident. But throughout the summer various of my March activist

Testimony 287 colleagues kept dropping in to see me and an endless stream of emigrating Jews were arriving to say farewell to the Theatre, the Orangerie, and the Palace. The Palace, like any other institution, had its informers. At the beginning of September the secret police paid Kwiatkowski a visit. ‘What sort of people have you been hiring here?’ they asked. ‘Some kind of Zionist students? What sort of people have been coming to see you?’ ‘I don’t know anything about any Zionists’, said Kwiatkowski. ‘I hire young people with foreign languages based on recommendations. There is no regulatory requirement to fill in personal questionnaires. These are temporary employees. I do not check on the tourists and I have no intention of doing so.’ These answers did not satisfy the policeman. He came back the following week. Kwiatkowski called me in. ‘I am sorry’, he said putting his arm around my shoulders, ‘I would like to keep you, but you know the Palace comes first. You have to leave immediately, but I shall pay you till the end of the month.’ I thanked him and said that he had already done a lot more for me than one could expect. This was the beginning of autumn. I had to start looking again. My best friend Michat Komar, who had also been expelled, managed to find what they call a cushy number. Andrzej Wajda was shooting two films that autumn: Wszystko na sprzedaz (‘Everything for Sale’) and Polowanie na muchy (“Hunting Flies’). Making a film always involves a lot of people. The producer was Barbara Pec-Slesicka. Michal, who even then was considered to be a promising young author, had wide contacts in artistic circles. He was appointed assistant props master for ‘Everything for Sale’ and he found a similar job for me in the next film, ‘Hunting Flies’, also through the intercession of the film’s scriptwriter Janusz Glowacki, whom we both knew.

At that time Andrzej Wajda was being harassed by the post-March press campaign. He cast Elzbieta Czyzewska in the main role in ‘Everything for Sale’. Gomutka ordered Czyzewska’s husband, David Halberstam, the Warsaw correspondent of the New York Times, to be expelled from Poland. She decided to emigrate. Wajda, the father of ‘the Polish film school’, was attacked for a lack of patriotism. Was he aware who was hanging around his set? I don’t know, but PecSlesicka knew very well. But not having been bothered by anyone, I made it to the end of the shooting of ‘Hunting Flies’. The Malcuzynskis, Kwiatkowski, and Andrzej Wajda’s crew—these of course

represent the highest elites of those days of whom one could expect civilized behaviour. However, the records of March 1968 present quite a different picture: mass promotion of ignoramuses, informers, or simply thugs, known in Warsaw as

‘a plague of bedbugs’—as Professor Leszek Kolakowski wrote in his essay ‘Arguments about Hope and Hopelessness’. So now a few words about this. How and why was I expelled from the university as a punishment? On Friday 8 March I was in front of Warsaw University. Only the unsheared peasant sheepskin bought for a song at the Tomaszow Mazowiecki market cushioned the blows of the thugs with armbands. Then I went home.

288 Henryk Dasko On Monday 11 March students began to gather in the multi-storey central Parachute Lecture Theatre of the Central School of Planning and Statistics and a spontaneous protest meeting got under way. I was one of a dozen or so speakers and the author of an ad hoc prepared resolution—promising to remain loyal to socialist ideals and to work diligently to serve the nation as most of them did in those days.

Suddenly, the voice of the rector Waclaw Sadowski reverberated throughout the Parachute Lecture Theatre: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, enough protesting. Please disperse. Would the speakers please call for an end to the meeting.’ After that several or as many as a dozen people spoke, including myself. No one ‘called’; the meeting ended spontaneously and the Lecture Theatre emptied as a result. A few days later I was summoned to the Mostowski Palace. My interrogator had a copy of the resolution that I had helped to draw up in front of him. He asked if I knew anything about the leaflets distributed in front of the university, but I knew nothing about it. He advised me to go home. Was that all? Yes... A day or two later a fair-haired man in glasses, whom I had never seen before, stopped me in the School. ‘I am Dr Zbigniew Klepacki’, he introduced himself. ‘You have been suspended from student rights’, he said, ‘and you are to face a disciplinary committee. As the committee spokesman I will move to have you expelled from the SGPiS. Until the committee meets, you are banned from the premises.’ ‘Expulsion? Disciplinary committee? What for?’ ‘You will hear the charges when the time comes.’ A note signed by Dr Klepacki arrived by post soon afterwards. It contained one charge, saying that I did not follow the Rector’s request and did not call on the audience to disperse. ‘I want to remind you of something’, I said at the next meeting; ‘After all, a dozen people spoke there. No one called for the audience to disperse. Are all of them going to face a disciplinary committee?’ Klepacki replied, ‘You like the SS demand collective responsibility. You are going before a committee.’ ‘And who will defend me?’ ‘I will’, he said. “The spokesman of the committee represents all aspects of the case.’ ‘I demand expulsion’, I heard him say to the committee members who met a few days later; ‘I cannot see any mitigating circumstances.’ I explained that I had already been interrogated and no charges were brought. ‘But here we have different criteria’, declared my ‘counsel for the defence’. He repeated this statement at the appeals committee, whose divided verdict was returned with a one-vote majority. The second student was expelled for a similar offence, that is, he did not oppose the dissemination of leaflets; not for distributing leaflets, but for ‘lack of opposition’. The spokesman did not explain what form this opposition was supposed to have taken. The third was expelled for taking part in illegal meetings at Warsaw 1 Warsaw Police Headquarters [Translator].

Testimony 289 Polytechnic, Warsaw University, and the Central School of Planning and Statistics, and for involvement in an anti-socialist group. No details of this involvement were given and it was quite obvious that the investigating organs failed to find any, as he came back from the interrogation as I had done. Professor Zbigniew Klepacki became a leading specialist in international relations and international law and the Polish UN deputy and was appointed to managerial positions in the Polish Academy of Sciences. At present he is a professor at the Higher School of Business and Management at Ostrowiec Swietokrzyski. He began his career in 1968, the landmark year of his biography, when this newly promoted Reader, who owed his advancement to his willingness to do the bidding of

the authorities, left the starting blocks behind him, building his career on false charges and to the detriment of other people. Translated from the Polish by Theresa Prout

THE CONTROVERSY AROUSED BY THE ROLE IN 1968 OF GENERAL WOJCIECH JARUZELSKI PERE E TE TE TE TEE FTE TF TPT EF PTE PROC TTT ROT OTE TOE TE TE OT EET

The Purges in the Polish Army 1967-1968 TADEUSZ PIORO SINCE THE END of the Second World War, the Polish army’s officer cadre has been (and continues to be) the object of occasional verification. The number of resultant dismissals has even run into the thousands. These have taken place in a variety of circumstances, for a variety of reasons, and in a variety of forms. Some dismissals were the result of periodic reductions in the armed forces. Others, however, qualified as purges, which depended neither on the state of the army nor on the ability of the professional officer involved. All shared a particular characteristic—their victims were mainly officers, distinguished by their status, and highly recommended in their annual official reports. From 1946 to 1950 the army was purged of officers of the Second Republic who had been promoted in the Home Army during the occupation. Called up for service towards the end of the war, before long they came to be viewed as a hostile and undesirable element. Soon after, in connection with the ‘rightist tendency’ in the party, a verification of the cadre took place (at the beginning of the 1950s) focusing on its ideological commitment. As a consequence, officers who had come from the

People’s Army, the People’s Guard, the Peasant Battalions, and the so-called ‘Dabrowszczaki’ (participants in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War) were dismissed or transferred to paramilitary organizations. In 1953 a few dozen officers of Jewish descent, serving mainly in the political apparatus, were transferred to paramilitary posts. This was a loyal reflection of the

Soviet situation, where a similar but significantly larger-scale action had taken place in the Red Army when Soviet Jewish doctors were accused of deliberately poisoning representatives of the highest military and political authorities. In 1955-8 there were four reductions of personnel in the armed forces, which had been excessively expanded during the ‘cold war’ period. The decrease in the number of soldiers from 410,000 to 220,000 was accompanied by the dismissal of First published in WigZ, no. 6 (1998).

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-1968 291 22,000 officers, which in 1955 accounted for almost half their number. These dismissals were guided (generally) by the criteria of professional suitability and the level of the officer’s education, since 80 per cent of the professional cadre had been educated to an elementary level only or had been accepted on the claim of a ‘partially completed secondary’ education. In October 1956, dismissals which could be termed purges extended to the security apparatus and the judiciary, but the numbers affected were small and the officers concerned were rather less than law-abiding. In none of the periods listed above, apart from the transferrals of 1953, were nationalistic criteria applied. This ‘problem’—if it should so be termed—did not appear to exist in the army. However, as emerges from the documents, a trend can be noted in the second half of the 1950s which seems to single out officers of Jewish descent in unofficial, confidential evaluations, which were made available to only a narrow group of the army hierarchy. The Six-Day War is considered to be the main reason for the purges undertaken

in the army in June 1967. In effect, this war provided a special opportunity to remove officers of Jewish descent from the army, an opportunity made all the more convenient by the fact that the signal had come from the highest political authori-

ties. Its initiator, the proponent of so-called national socialism, Minister of Internal Affairs Mieczystaw Moczar, was supported in the army by a champion of the same idea, Deputy Minister Grzegorz Korczynski, one of Gomulka’s closest men. But evidence exists which suggests that the ground for such action had been

| prepared earlier.

In the army, the first manifestations of antisemitism were noted during the political upheavals culminating in October 1956. At meetings of the officer cadre

in a number of military institutions, Jews from the security apparatus and the judiciary were often held responsible for the infringements of the past Stalinist epoch. As a result of such pronouncements, the next wave of emigration, which took place in 1957-8, included, for the first time, those Jews left in active military service. Thirty-seven officers, holding ranks mainly from major to colonel, submitted applications to leave the army. Almost all indicated Israel as their intended destination. The departure of these individuals took place legally with the acceptance of the military authorities. None was deprived of Polish citizenship or of his army rank. However, after this action was completed, military counter-intelligence prepared a report examining the extent of betrayal of military secrets by those officers leaving

Poland in which the latter, legal emigrants, were put on an equal footing with deserters who faced legal prosecution.’ 1 ‘QOchrona tajemnicy wojskowej w Swietle emigracji i dezercji zolnierzy WP’. Internal Military

Report, October 1958 (exact date not supplied). IC MON (Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej; Ministry of National Defence) Archive, confidential material of particular significance, vol.

| 606/92-29.

292 Tadeusz Pioro “The emigration movement,’ the report states, ‘which in the years 1956-7... also included soldiers, has provoked understandable anxiety about the security of military secrets . . . It should be stated that in the course of selecting [intelligence] material, it became absolutely necessary to examine the emigration problem in conjunction with that of desertion .. .’. And further, ‘From the point of view of counter-intelligence, emigration to Israel is especially significant. This is primarily because the officers for whom this was their destination . . . were familiar to a high degree with information, problems, and concrete data concerning the army.’ There is further discussion concerning individuals whose positions—according to counter-intelligence—meant that they had particularly extensive access to military secrets. They include Colonel Leopold Strasser, head of the tactics faculty at the General Staff Academy; Lieutenant Colonel Stefan Sarnowski, deputy leader

of a tank regiment (both were accepted into the Israeli army at a rank lower by one grade); Colonel Pechner, commander of the Centre for Medicine in Lodz; Colonel Bergelson, head of the faculty of tank operation at the Military ‘Technical

Academy; Colonel Dajbog, deputy head of the Finance Department at the Ministry of National Defence, and a dozen or so others. The report is notable for its suggestion that it was no coincidence that these very officers, and not others, decided to emigrate; that, obviously, precisely such people with ‘particularly extensive access’ to information about Poland’s system of defence were needed ‘over there’, and that contact with them had surely been established before now. The fact of the matter is that none of the above posts (with the exception of perhaps one—chief of the Finance Department) permitted extensive access to the military details mentioned in the report; on the contrary, their knowledge was extremely limited, as those preparing the report were undoubtedly aware. The system then in place meant that none of the headquarters of Poland’s three military regions had access to information about the general state of the armed forces, the size of the army, the supply of arms, the national system of mobilization, supplies in case of war, and so on. This applied even more to those employed in military schools as teachers and who were therefore not involved in operational activities, not to speak of deputy commanders of regiments in some obscure garrison.

The above document was prepared in October 1958. In April 1960 General Janusz Zarzycki, a man who had little sympathy for statements of this type, was removed from his position as chief political commissar. His place was taken by the head of the 12th Mechanized Division from Szczecin, General Wojciech Jaruzelski. A few weeks after this change had taken place, two administrative directors within the military political apparatus who had been actively involved

in the post-October changes of 1956, General Ignacy Blum and Fryderyk Malczewski, were dismissed from their posts. Both were of Jewish descent.” 2 ‘Rozkaz personalny nr. 0190’ of 6 June 1960, signed by Minister Spychalski, and by General Jozef Urbanowicz on behalf of the Chief of the Political Directorate (Jaruzelski). IC MON GZP (Glowny Zarzad Polityczny; Main Political Directorate) Archive, vol. 636/92/276, vol. 15/1.

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-1968 293 They were transferred to secondary functions and were dismissed from the army in 1967.

In December 1960 a strictly confidential memorandum landed on Jaruzelski’s desk from the head of military counter-intelligence, General Aleksander Kokoszyn, with the following covering note: ‘Chief Political Commissar citizen Lieutenant General Jaruzelski. In accordance with our conversation, I attach a memorandum, as requested, listing the personnel holding certain positions in the General Staff, the

central institutions of MON, and the Military Regions. Enclosure 1, sheet 8, addressee only.”°

The following are excerpts from the ‘Memorandum’: Colonel Heistejn, Abraham: from the General Staff Bureau of Studies. The above has been known to make anti-Soviet remarks and has a negative attitude to personnel advancements in the party, military, and state apparatus . . . Colonel Heistejn has relatives in Israel, the USA, and Canada... [In fact he had relatives only in Canada. TP]

Colonel Szliferszteyn, Jakob: Head of the Department of Marxist-Leninist Studies. Maintains contact with the second secretary at the Israeli embassy, Mezer . . . Mezer is a good friend of Lieutenant Szlifersztejn’s wife’s sister, who lives in Israel. The colonel’s wife contacted an Israeli citizen, Jochewed—a delegate at the recent Congress of the Federation of Democratic Women . .. During their meeting an exchange of parcels took place. Colonel Friedman, Michat: Director of Military Printers and Publishers. A duplicitous person, officially presents himself as an active party member. Amongst friends, pronounces against the policies of the party and the government. Considers all changes to be at the dictate of the USSR and a return to the old regime... . In the last few years, many commanding positions in the Staff of WL [Wojsko Lotnicze; Air Force] and OPL OK [Obrona Przeciwlotnicza Obszaru Kraju; Anti-Aircraft Defence of the Homeland Region] and in regional units have been filled by officers with a compromised past ... We have the following information concerning some of them: Colonel Aszkenazy, Henryk: head of CSD WL [Centralne Stanowisko Dowodzenia Wojsk Lotniczych; Central Command Post of the Air Force] and OPL OK. His wife’s family, with whom they correspond, is in Israel. Has a negative attitude towards the USSR . . . His daughter, Olga, travelled to Israel (family visit) in 1957... .. . Lieutenant Colonel Skalski, Stanistaw: head of the Translation Department. Pre-war pilot and officer. During the occupation served in the RAF .. . In 1947 returned to Poland and after verification served in the Air Force Command. In 1948 was arrested, accused of espionage activities ... Received the death sentence, which was commuted to life imprisonment. In 1956. . . once again recalled to the Polish army. Maintains contacts with foreign visitors to Poland and maintains correspondence abroad ... From 1 to 15 May [1960], in the course of a lecture series on the air force given in the Rzeszow region, he cast doubt on the veracity of Soviet press reports.

On perusal, one might say that these are the ordinary sort of denunciation provided by people collaborating with military counter-intelligence. However, when 3 “Notatka dotyczaca obsady personalnej niektorych stanowisk w Sztabie Generalnym, Instytucjach Centralnych MON i Okregach Wojskowych’, of 21 Dec. 1960, ibid.

294 Tadeusz Piro presented by the chief of counter-intelligence in the form of a document evaluating the situation in the army’s higher echelons, they are no longer simply intelligence or denunciatory reports; they are documents with real practical influence on personnel policy in the army. The ‘memorandum’ presented to the chief political commissar—at his request, as stated in the covering note—concerned forty senior officers. Characteristic here are the types of accusation levelled, similar to those marking the years of ‘errors and distortions’, in which a critical attitude to the Soviet Union is the sin most frequently cited. The only ingredient lacking was a plot to overthrow the regime—to that there was no return. And all this took place in the so-called ‘era of renewal’. The list of people named in the memorandum leads one to suppose that the intention of its authors was to draw attention to the potential opposition which existed, in their opinion, in the higher echelons of the army after the liberalization of dogmatic forms of state administration. The list contains both Jews and ‘pure’ Poles (Lieutenant Colonel Skalski), suggesting a need for the army to rid itself of those who were ideologically alien. Somehow, things ‘arranged themselves’ in such a way that the majority of officers on the list were of Jewish descent, comprising a fraction of the cadre; the revisionists were supplementary. In the first half of the 1960s, however, the preoccupation above all was with leaders of the highest rank who had revealed their ‘revisionist face’ after October 1956. Thus, in 1960, Chief Political Commissar General Zarzycki and the head of the navy, Rear Admiral Jan Wisniewski, found themselves outside the armed forces

(albeit transferred to significant posts in the state administration). In 1963, the 47-year-old, post-October commander of the air force, General Frey-Bielecki, was transferred to the reserve through the strenuous efforts of Soviet comrades, who disliked his independent reforms in the air force, which had been introduced without the consent of the Soviet leadership.* In 1964, the commander of ground forces, General Zygmunt Duszynski, who was openly hostile towards Soviet inter-

ference in Polish military affairs, and the initiator—in the face of Soviet disapproval—of the independent Polish Front within the Warsaw Pact (the Polish armies were previously to be included in the Russian Front in the event of war), retained a military position—not with the ground forces, however, but in a threeperson military bureau in the Polish Academy of Sciences. In that same year, 1964, 4 The attitude of the Soviet authorities to these individuals is illustrated in the memoirs of Yury Bernoyv, an adviser at the Soviet embassy in Warsaw during the 1950s. In a passage concerning the events of October 1956 he writes: ‘Some extreme Polish military personnel, such as the Chief of the Air Force, General Frey-Bielecki, and the acting chief of the Naval Forces, Rear Admiral Wisniewski, after receiving information about the movements of Soviet forces, ordered their subordinates to open fire against the Soviet forces in case of necessity. There was also some discussion of the possibility—in the case of Soviet units entering Warsaw—of arresting members of the Soviet delegation and holding

them hostage.’ This report is completely false, and is probably based on information provided by Marshal Rokossowski’s deputy for political affairs, General Kazimierz Witaszewski, who was removed from the army after October 1956.

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-1968 295 several generals who persisted in displaying revisionist tendencies were transferred to lower positions. They included the post-October chief of the Department of Cadres, General Jerzy Fonkowicz, who was replaced by a completely pliant individual who would be entirely suitable for the realization of the purges which were ever more clearly in the offing. It was considered that all these people, regardless of their ‘revisionist’ stance, were, if not favourably inclined, then certainly free of reservations concerning the

| assumption of commanding positions in the army by officers of Jewish descent. The wives of some of them (Zarzycki, Wisniewski, Frey-Bielecki) were Jewish, but this was not the main reason, 1n this case, for the changes in their positions. We come, finally, to the most significant changes. In 1964 Colonel Teodor Kufel, a graduate of the advanced classes of the NK VD in Moscow, known for his hostile attitude towards everything remotely reminiscent of ‘rotten democracy’, became

chief of military counter-intelligence on the recommendation of Miueczysltaw Moczar. In 1965 Jaruzelski (who was appointed Chief of the General Staff) was succeeded in his post as chief political commissar by General Jozef Urbanowicz. The latter was a former member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and a commissar of the Latvian division of the Red Army. He had been sent as a lieutenant to the Polish army in the USSR in 1944 and had been a Polish citizen from 1954. Kufel and Urbanowicz—respectively directors of the police and political sections of the military, representatives of a style of thinking and action reminiscent of the Stalinist era, and unambiguously compliant towards the Soviet authorities—played a decisive role in purging the cadres of ‘Zionist’ and ‘revisionist’ elements, termed by Urbanowicz ‘the dirty scum of October’.

Spychalski was still minister of defence and, although a member of the Politburo, did not try to take advantage of the little influence he had. Isolated, concentrating on self-preservation above all else, deprived of the colleagues he had chosen himself—he signed every personnel change suggested to him, even against his own wishes, in order to maintain his own position. On the other hand, the posi-

tion of Wojciech Jaruzelski, Chief of the General Staff from 1965, grew in strength from month to month.

1967 On g June 1967 leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries met in Moscow, where they decided to break off diplomatic relations with Israel. Ten days later, Wladyslaw Gomulka, referring to an ‘Israeli fifth column operating in Poland’, supplemented his statement with the specific recommendation: ‘We cannot remain indifferent to people who . . . support the aggressor, the destruction of peace, and imperialism.”° > A speech given at the sixth Congress of Trade Unions on 18 June 1967. Ten days previously, the leaders of the Warsaw Pact countries had held a meeting in Moscow at which the decision was taken to break off diplomatic relations with Israel.

296 Tadeusz Pioro In an institution as disciplined as the army, moves were made to implement this recommendation immediately. That very same month, the party organization in the air force hierarchy, with the approval of the chief political commissar and with the help of counter-intelligence in assessing the situation, requested that the following generals be removed from the party: Czeslaw Mankiewicz (commander), Tadeusz Dabkowski (deputy for political affairs), and Jan Stamieszkin (chief of staff). The pretext was that they had voiced the opinion that the Israeli system of air defence was more efficient than that of the Warsaw Pact. It was obvious, however, that the real reason was that Mankiewicz and Stamieszkin were of Jewish descent. Their wives were also Jewish. Dabkowski had defended them. After a year, all three were dismissed from the army.°®

In mid-July collective dismissals began, the overwhelming majority of which took place in 1967 but which continued, sustained by the March wave of 1968,

until halfway through 1969. ,

There were certain difficulties to overcome. Many officers of Jewish descent had Polish surnames and in some cases one had to reach far back into the past in order

to dig out their roots. This commission was undertaken by the Department of | Cadres together with the organs of counter-intelligence. It transpired that the former was already well prepared for the task. It met its obligations in accordance with the party line and the lists contained both those ‘under suspicion’, and those whom it was positively difficult to suspect, but whose removal was demanded for the ‘good of the cause’. ~The Department of Cadres divided those dismissed into six categories:

1. Those dismissed for disciplinary reasons ‘for maintaining a political stance inconsistent with that of the position of the government of the PPR and the party line, and the loss of moral-political values binding on officers of the Polish People’s Army’.

2. Those who had refused to accept a lower position. 3. Those who had reached the upper age limit for a given rank in the army. 4, Those who were considered by the military medical commission to be unfit for professional service. 5. ‘Those who had not completed secondary education. © In 1942 Mankiewicz was sent to Auschwitz for his underground activities on behalf of the Polish Workers’ Party, which had been established in January 1942. After his release he became head of the cabinet of Marian Spychalski, deputy minister of political affairs at the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was arrested again in 1950 for ‘rightist leanings’ and tortured (among other things, he was kept in a cell with mentally ill patients). He consistently refused to support accusations levelled at Spychalski, who had also been arrested. After October 1956 he found himself once more in the army and reached the rank of lieutenant general. In 1967 Spychalski signed without comment an order for Mankiewicz’s removal from the army on criminal grounds.

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-1968 297 6. Those dismissed at their own request.’ The first group, those who had been dismissed for disciplinary reasons, consisted

of seventeen officers: ten colonels, six lieutenant colonels, and one major. Those | among them who decided to emigrate to Israel were stripped of their officer’s rank.® These were officers from a variety of military institutions throughout the country, recognized as ‘demonstrably sympathetic’ towards the Israeli cause in the June conflict. During the course of the party procedure (they were all removed from the party prior to their dismissal), some did indeed express such a position, but not the majority. Why this group was singled out and publicly punished for the Six-Day War remains the secret of the counter-intelligence service. The dismissal of the rest took a variety of forms; the outcome, however, was invariably the same. Those who agreed to be demoted, who demonstrated no health problems before the medical commission, and who declared that their views conformed with the party line were also dismissed. Attempts to explain anything during the party proceedings were meaningless; no one troubled to establish the truth of the denunciations contained in military counter-intelligence material which was used by the commissions conducting the proceedings. The final verdict was expressed in one of two terms: ‘pro-Israeli stance’ or ‘revisionism’. After the completion of this phase of purges, hurriedly carried out according to summary orders, the elimination of undesirable elements within the army took on an organized form. In November 1967 the minister of defence, Spychalski, issued the following ‘Order’:” 1. Inorder that the initiatives aimed at the further improvement of the quality of the officer cadre should be properly realized, I am establishing a commission comprising: Head—Chief of General Staff Major General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Deputy Minister of National Defence. Members: Chief of the Main Political Directorate of the Polish Army, Major General Jozef Urbanowicz; Chief of the Wojskowe Stuzby Wewnetrzne (Military Security Service; WSW), Brigadier General Teodor Kufel; Chief of the MON Department of Cadres, Brigadier General Stanistaw Wytyczak.

2. The Commission will examine proposals put forward at meetings to be held at least once a month.

3. The Commission’s conclusions in the form of appropriate personnel recommendations will be presented to me by the Chief of the Department of Cadres. ™ Imienny wykaz oficer6w WP pochodzenia zydowskiego zwalnianych z zawodowej stuzby wojskowej w 1967 1 1968 r.” Document of the Cadres Department drawn up in 1990 for a commission established to examine the legality of dismissals made from 1944 to 1989 ‘undertaken as a result of party-political factors’. Author’s duplicate copy. 8 All justifications for the dismissal of officers in this group are identical, regardless of what a given individual represented. ° ‘Rozkaz Ministra Obrony Narodowej nr 0546’, 21.11.1967. IC MON Archive, vol. 636/92.

298 Tadeusz Piro 4. The order will come into effect on the date of signature. Minister of National Defence Marian Spychalski Marshal of Poland.

Thus was the leading role of military counter-intelligence in decisions concerning

the composition of the officers’ corps acknowledged for the first time since October 1956, a role identical to that which it had played from 1949 to 1955.

Two weeks later, members of the highest party authorities were given a con-

fidential ‘Official memorandum’ signed by the Chief of the Department of Cadres.!° It announced ‘further improvements in the qualitative formation of the officer cadre’ (emphasis added), justifying this need by indicating ‘the development of a whole series of irregularities, mainly in the area of average age within the cadre and its distribution mainly at senior official level . . . There are plans to dismiss around 2,000 officers in 1968, including seventeen generals and 180 colonels.’!? Andrzej Garlicki published this memorandum in the weekly Polityka (no. 5, 16 Nov. 1993) with the following comments: “The Six-Day War became a comfortable

pretext for an anti-Zionist campaign in Poland . .. The purge in the army was closely connected with these events, although there 1s not a word on this subject in the memorandum.’ This is only part of the truth. The plans for 1968 concerned not only Jews (by the end of 1967 there were no more than fifty left in the military); it was more a question of ‘straightening out’ the political cadre after October 1956, and of dealing with the ‘revisionists’, among others, who, having deviated from the only correct party line, still remained in the ranks. In any case, the age issue was not the

main reason for the ‘irregularities’ which had occurred in the selection of the cadre’s senior members: at that time, the majority of people holding leading positions in the army were not over 50, and the average age of officers was 36.

1968 For the military, the events of March did not prompt the great repercussions that they did for civil society. Nevertheless, the army did become immediately and unambiguously involved in this nationwide action. It was obvious that this would be the case: at that time the army took part in all of the party’s political actions; it could be done merely with greater or lesser commitment. 10 “Notatka stuzbowa 7 grudnia 1967 r. Tajne’. Archiwum Akt Nowych, sygn. 1354, p. 201, vol. 42, k. 140-3. ‘1 The so-called ‘natural erosion’ of the cadre in therg60s comprised 700-800 officers annually. In

1967, 979 were dismissed, including six generals and 117 colonels. According to the same ‘Memorandum’, “The list of generals dismissed includes T: Dabkowski, T: Jedynak, S. Malko, J. Pazdzior, T. Pioro, J. Wojcicki, W. Jezak, 1. Lapinski’. It was anticipated that another ten generals would be dismissed in 1968. In all, in the 1960s, out of a total of 130 to 140 generals, thirty-nine were either dismissed or demoted.

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-19685 299 | In publications describing this period, the military actions—due to the exclusiveness of the organization, perhaps—are hardly mentioned, and any accounts testify rather to the lack of knowledge and incompetence of the authors. It 1s true that three extensive articles about ‘March’ published in March and October 1992 by the military historian Edward Nalepa in Polska Zbrojna explain a great deal, but

the circulation of this military newspaper was too limited for the material contained to be noted by scholars of the period. He wrote: As early as 9g March 1967 the officer cadre of central institutions and some other military units in Warsaw found themselves fully prepared to assist the local party authorities. This readiness, generally speaking, consisted mainly of officers donning civilian clothes (they also received militia truncheons and ORMO armbands), assembling in particular institutions and military centres, and waiting for the order to go out on the streets to back up the activities of the so-called workers’ activist groups./”

Similarly on g March, that is the day after the demonstrations at the University of Warsaw, meetings took place in all the central institutions of the Ministry of Defence (MON) and detachments of the Warsaw garrison at which the officers of the political department reported on the ‘anti-party, anti-state, Zionist-revisionist’ student demonstrations. Two days later, the Central Political Office directed telephone messages to all army units recommending that they should ‘strengthen discipline and vigilance’ and quell rumours ‘sown by hostile forces’. They were also ordered to hold ‘explanatory’ sessions for soldiers. On 12 March the MON Party Committee debated how the cadre should be uti-

lized to maintain order in Warsaw. The following day saw the circulation of ‘Guidelines from the Polish army’s Chief Political Commissar concerning the principles of utilizing party activists from the professional military cadre in order to maintain order in the country’s larger academic centres’. It was, above all, a question of exercising influence over the students during meetings organized at educational institutions in order to restrain them from demonstrating. The ‘explanatory action’—as it was called—thad 500 officers assigned to it from 15 to 21 March,

mainly from the political apparatus (including 170 people from the Military Political Academy and the General Staff Academy).'? These officers met with students from the country’s seventeen largest institutions of higher education, and explained, within a format dictated by their superiors, the role of ‘troublemakers’ and ‘ringleaders’—with emphasis on their Jewish descent—in the disruption of university courses, striking at the unity of state and party. The statements from these meetings were used to create a more extensive confidential report (twelve pages of basic text and sixteen annexes on seventy-seven pages of typescript) which were sent at the beginning of April to the first secretary of the party (Gomutka):"* 12 E. J. Nalepa, ‘Wojsko Polskie w marcu 1968r.’, Polska Zbrojna, 47, 6 Mar. 1992. 13 Td., ‘Marzec 68 w ocenie 6wezesnego kierownictwa GZP WP’, Polska Zbrojna, 52, 13 Mar. 1992. 14 “Informacja z dziatalnosci propagandowo-wyjaSniajacej, przeprowadzonej przez oficerow w okresie 15—21.03.1968 w niektorych osrodkach akademickich’. Prepared by the Central Political Office of

300 Tadeusz Pioro During the first few days, the atmosphere during the meetings with students was quite tense and characterized by suspicion on their part. As time passed, thanks to the great political acumen of the officers and the strong arguments they employed during the conversations and discussions, the students began to demonstrate trust and even sincerity towards them... As a result, they accepted the version of events that was presented to them, although they did not always agree with its justification. The outcome—uin the judgement of the Political Office—was successful. The dialogue conducted by the officers with the students concluded with a notable sowing of seeds of mistrust towards the agitators and self-appointed ringleaders, and also a hostility towards the enemies of socialism and of Poland.

This edifying information is undermined, however, by less official evaluations which were closer to the truth. I quote an academic who was employed at the Military Political Academy at the time: I was also a participant in the events of 1968 . . . I stood on the party and Veterans’ Union [Zwiazek Bojownikow o Wolnos¢ 1 Demokracje; ZboWiD] side of the barricade at the time ... for two weeks I met with students . . . I must say that it was quite an experience, and left me with a certain view of the affair... I regard the claim that 1968 was our victory with a little scepticism. It was a victory, but a bitter one, for it was attained with the help of truncheons aimed at the backs of the students . . .*°

Not only of truncheons. On 17 March a document was issued stamped ‘confiden-

tial, important’: ‘Instructions from the Chief of the General Staff regarding the call-up and carrying out of military service by students penalized with expulsion or suspension of student rights’.1© The instruction demanded the ‘immediate’ call-up to the army of those people listed by the regional military staff on the basis of information gained from the authorities of academic institutions and the militia, regardless of whether they had been granted a reprieve or of their state of health (with the

exception of category ‘D’—which meant completely unfit for service). Those expelled served for two years and were directed to ‘units in distant garrisons. . . maintaining the principle of dispersal’. If a student’s rights were restored to him, he could gain a discharge ‘not before completing twelve months of service’. Those who had been suspended, however, were absorbed into specially organized battalions for this purpose in Braniewo, Hrubieszow, and Zagan, where they completed their service without arms, ‘with particular emphasis on political-educational work’. The document’s final point ordered the heads of military districts to report to the Chief of the General Staff (Jaruzelski) on the position of the conscripts every two days until the action was over. the Polish army, 15 Apr. 1968. Substantial sections have been published by E. J. Nalepa in Polska ZLbrojna, 52, 13 Mar. 1992.

15 Record of comments made by Colonel Jozef Czerwinski, an academic at the Military Political Academy, at a meeting of the Ruling Council of ZBoWiD in Oct. 1968, Polska Zbrojna, 47, 6 Mar. 1992.

16 “Zarzadzenie Szefa Sztabu Generalnego nr 0026/Sztab’ of 17 Mar. 1968. Centralne Archiwum Wojskowe, Sztab Generalny 1703/87/35, 186-9.

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-1968 301 On 19 March, Gomutka spoke in the Congress Hall of the Palace of Culture condemning the ‘Zionist renegades’. The following day, a gathering took place in Warsaw of the leaders and political deputies of large front-line units (from divisions upwards), the commanders of military academic institutions, and those heading central MON institutions. Spychalski summed up their achievements: The action of our armed forces . . . contributed greatly to the party-political, organizational, and policing work of maintaining peace and relieving tension. Throughout this time,

the armed forces were an important source of calm, a pillar of strength supporting the party and people’s rule—a rock which . . . firmly resisted the ganged-up forces of reaction in their various guises, fully supporting the party’s policies and its leadership alongside Comrade Wiestaw.*”

After this meeting, similar meetings took place in all military districts, divisions,

and regiments. The whole army was taken up with condemning ‘the ganged-up forces of reaction’ and supporting Comrade Wieslaw (this support lasted for two

years, until the events on the coast in 1970, after which Gomutka was removed from power). A similar declaration was made on 23 March by the officers of the General Staff following a lecture given by Jaruzelski in a similar spirit. Three days later, an ‘information briefing’ took place attended by directors of military studies from all the country’s institutions. The presence of all MON vice-ministers, the

chief of the Cadres Department and of the Military Security Service, viceministers, and directors of departments from government bodies dealing with secondary education testified to the great importance assigned to this information. The evaluations of the military were more highly valued than the statements of rectors of educational institutions. Despite such energetic activity, the situation was considered unsatisfactory. On 3 April an editorial appeared in Zo/nierz Wolnosci entitled ‘Attention—Political Sabotage’, where a finger was pointed at the army for the first time in public: ‘The events of the last few weeks in our country indicate not only the activity of enemy forces, but also the extent of the ideological infiltration of our society, including the army (emphasis added). In this same article the readers were informed that Jozef Swiatto (the deputy head of a department in the Ministry of Public Security who defected to Germany in 1953) was Izaak Fleischfarb, that Tykocinski (head of the military mission in West Berlin at the end of the 1950s who died in unexplained circumstances) was Tikhotiner, and that Colonel Pawel Monat, former head of the department of military attachés, had defected (though it stated neither whither

nor when—this had taken place ten years earlier). These post-March articles

appeared in the military press until the end of April, after which a silence descended until August. From August to November 1968, the military daily published a work by Walery Namiotkiewicz, Gomutka’s personal secretary, which had

been submitted for publication but which had never appeared in print, entitled 17 Zolnierz Wolnosci, 21 Mar. 1968.

302 Tadeusz Pioro ‘Marxist Political Thought and Revisionism’. It suffices to list the chapters: “The

Battle against Sectarianism and Opportunism’, ‘Revisionism as a System’, ‘Revisionism by the Agents of the Bourgeoisie’, and so on. Thus ended the contribution of militant military journalism to the events of 1968.

Events did not progress without some unexpected troubles. When the time came to tone down the antisemitic campaign, it appeared to have acquired its own impetus and had slipped out from under the control of its instigators. In Warsaw, in the central institutions of MON and units of the Warsaw garrisons, two pamphlets were distributed: “To the Whole Party, to the Workers!’ and ‘Who and What is Zenon Kliszko?’ The first, indicating the historic dangers inherent in Zionism,

expressed anxiety that the battle with this phenomenon should not be relinquished; the second singled out Zenon Kliszko (the next most important person in the Politburo after Gomulka) as the one who had prematurely removed this issue from the propaganda campaign. In several military units, meetings took place at which demands were made to take further action against persons of Jewish origin in the country’s party and administrative apparatus. There was an energetic response: the military prosecution was charged with an investigation, which resulted before long in the naming of the instigators and executors of this action that was ‘ideologically mistaken, out of step with the party’, and that struck at ‘the basic principles of party and military discipline’.1° A dozen or so officers (including General Julian Pazdzior, the head of the OPL WL—Obrony Przeciwlotnicze} Wojska Lotniczej; anti-aircraft defence) were expelled from the party, discharged from the army, or reprimanded and demoted. Some were even held under arrest for a few days. It proved necessary to ‘explain’ that the action of purging the army of unwelcome elements had ended, that its continuation was harmful, and that those attempting to do so would be punished. This was done by Defence Minister Jaruzelski on 6 October 1968 at a briefing of all leaders and their deputies for political affairs, and also by the chief political commiussar (Urbanowicz) at a briefing of heads of political bureaus and party committee secretaries in military districts. Achievements were summarized and resolutions were adopted, thus ending—at least theoretically—the onerous period of purging the army of Jews and revisionists. But not completely, for future action was outlined. ‘Among the activities aimed at fostering socialist and patriotic attitudes’, wrote Zo/nierz Wolnosci the following day, ‘precedence is taken by the question of the struggle against revisionism and hostile ideological sabotage on the part of anti-communist spokesmen of any camp—against reactionary, Zionist forces.’!* The army’s final ‘vagaries’, as they were termed, startled the Politburo to such a degree that Gomultka demanded an explanation. Jaruzelski sent this on 26 October in the form of an ‘official memorandum’ produced in the Central Political Bureau. 18 ‘Official note’ submitted to Gomulka by Jaruzelski, 26 Oct. 1968. Published in Zofnierz Wolnosci,

23 Nov. 1992, entitled ‘Sytuacja polityczna w Wojsku Polskim po Marcu ’68 w ocenie Owczesnego

kierownictwa MON’. 19 Zotnierz Wolnosci, 7 Oct. 1968.

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-19685 303 It condemned independent acts of antisemitism, which were contrary to military discipline, describing such acts as an attempt ‘to weaken the political cohesion of the armed forces’, and setting out the party and professional consequences for any officers involved in such incidents.”° At the same time, there is an attempt in the memorandum to justify the actions in question and an undisguised acceptance of them. ‘In March 1968’, we read, in response to excesses in the capital and other university cities, the army voluntarily gave active assistance to the forces of order. All in all, 13,000 military personnel took part in the actions over a period of 4—7 days .. . Negative phenomena. . . are fundamentally out of character within the armed forces and concern a few party organizations of the Warsaw _ garrison. Furthermore, they are the result particularly of excessive sensitivity on the part of

some party members concerning the Zionist question which led, in some cases, to an approach to the problem which was incompatible with the party line. (emphasis added)

Further: ‘It seems that susceptibility to this type of harmful activity is due, to a certain degree, to a long-standing hostility towards certain generals and officers .... Here follow the names of particular revisionists and officers of Jewish descent who had been removed from the army. ‘Revived memories from a former period ... of acts of betrayal which certain officers had committed . . .’; and again the names of Jewish officers who escaped abroad over ten years earlier are cited, although the number of ‘pure Poles’ defecting in this manner was a dozen times larger. After a short time, following an appeal to higher authorities, almost all those removed from the party for antisemitism had their penalties quashed; those dismissed from the army returned to service.*? This happy ending was reflected in General Jaruzelski’s speech at the Fifth Party Congress on 1 November 1968: ‘In the Polish People’s Army, a climate of sensitivity and resistance to revisionist activity has developed, as well as an aggressive attitude to all reactionary forces—including nationalistic and cosmopolitan-

Zionist ones.’”” |

How did this ‘purgative action’ remain in the memories of those people most heavily involved in it? Franciszek Szlachcic, the interior minister in the first half of the 1970s and a member of the Politburo, gave this reply to the question: Among the older officers of the Polish army, the defeat of the United Arab Republic prompted a nervous anxiety about the state of the country’s system of defence. The officers demanded an increase in the level of military competence [Israel’s victory had apparently threatened Polish sovereignty. TP]. At the same time, they demonstrated a lack of faith in 20 See n. 18.

21 See n. 18. Also ‘Notatka stuzbowa dotyczaca rozpatrzonych spraw czlonk6ow partii przez instancje partyjne i Komisje Kontroli Partyjnej w sitach zbrojnych za tzw. antysemityzm 1 postawe lewacko-dogmatycznq’. The document was prepared by Colonel Adolf Starzec, secretary of the Polish army’s Commission for Party Control. Copy in the possession of the author. 22 From the address of W. Jaruzelski at the 5th Congress of the PZPR (Polish United Workers’ Party), 1 Nov. 1968. Film recording at the Central Film Archive, Warsaw. Copy in the possession of the author.

304 Tadeusz Piro certain leaders. Under this pressure the leadership of MON relented and dismissed a few dozen older officers of Jewish descent; they were considerately transferred to the home front. This was the first time that antisemitic manifestations had come to light to such a

degree. (emphasis added)? |

HOW MANY OFFICERS FELL VICTIM TO THE PURGES IN 1967-1968? HOW MANY EMIGRATED? In the mid-1970s, Major Michal Checinski, a former employee first of the Polish military counter-intelligence, and then of the political apparatus, published a work

in Israel entitled “The Polish People’s Army before and after March 1968’. According to this author, ‘of around 40,000 officers in active service in 1967, no more than 150 were of Jewish descent. Even if one were strictly guided by the Nuremberg criteria, their number would not exceed 200.’** The Department of Cadres lists 104 names for 1990: seven generals, ninetythree officers ranking from major to colonel, and four captains.*° They were dismissed in large numbers: seventy in 1967 and thirty-four in 1968. The 1968 group does, however, include a few non-Jews and, furthermore, the list fails to register at

least forty names, omitted perhaps by mistake, or perhaps deliberately (the Department of Cadres later claimed haste and a partial lack of documents). On 2 October 1969 the Bureau of Passports and Identity Papers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs drew up a document entitled ‘Information on Emigration to Israel from 1955 to August 1969’,”° during which period 66,000 Jews left Poland. It appears from this that emigration was at its height in 1957, comprising 30,000 people. In the years 1967-9, 11,185 emigrated, but, dragging on, it rose notably, according to some claims to 20,000.7/ A list was attached to the MSW documents of names of those who had formally

requested permission to emigrate between 1967 and 1969, divided into social groups. Fifty-five MON employees are named, but this section is far from complete; according to information gleaned from émigrés, that number should be doubled.

In the years 1970-80, all officers and NCOs of Jewish descent who had emigrated from Poland were demoted (more of this later). There are 115 names (not including thirty-two ensigns) on the lists of officers in active service (demotion also affected reserve officers), which confirms the view that the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ list does not include even half the surnames which should appear. On the other hand, there were seventy to eighty officers left in the country, according to approximate data. If one accepts the above figures as more or less accurate, then one 23 EF Szlachcic, Gorzki smak wladzy (Warsaw, 1992), 83.

24M. Checinski, ‘Ludowe Wojsko Polskie przed i po marcu 1968’. Quoted from a section published

in Zeszyty Historyczne (Paris), 44 (1978), 1-30. 25 See above, n. 7. 26 ‘Informacja o przebiegu emigracji do Izraela z okresu od 1955 do sierpnia 1969 r.” IC MON Archive, T. 29/92-2. The full text has been published by Colonel Dr J. Poksinski, in the monthly

Literatura. , 27 K. Kerstenowa, Polityka, 4 Aug. 1990.

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-1968 305 can assume that, in the years 1967—9, around 180 officers of Jewish descent were dismissed from military service, around a hundred of whom left Poland.?°

These are not large numbers, then, particularly if one takes into account the 40,000-Strong officer cadre. For those involved, however, it was a great personal tragedy. These people were completely assimilated, distanced from Jewish culture and traditions (observing such Polish holidays as Easter or Christmas), and, most importantly, had served with commitment for a quarter of a century 1n the Polish People’s Army. The majority had worked in the political and propaganda apparatus, but some had held front-line positions. Subjected to psychological terror by those hunting out their forebears, tormented with threats and brazen surveillance, unsure of the morrow, and, what was worse, of the fate of their children, who, in a large number of cases, did not even have any knowledge of their Jewish descent, entangled in family arguments on the subject of ‘how to be’, they decided on emigration as a final answer, with the feel-

Ing that they would have to begin all over again. ‘The antisemitic campaign could be said to have recalled them to their Jewishness, forcing a somewhat desperate leave-taking of their country. An additional cause was that wives, following in the wake of their husbands, found themselves dismissed from work, and schoolchildren were subjected to indiscriminate persecution within their milieu. It was often at school that they first learned that they were Jews. These persecutions operated within the moral, but not the material, sphere. All

those dismissed from the army, although they were far from retirement age, received a pension equivalent to their current salary (such were the pension arrangements in the army at the time), retaining all the privileges of active service: army flats which were redecorated every four years at the army’s expense, medical care, military holiday homes, even a free annual rail trip for the entire family. The seventeen officers who were dismissed for disciplinary reasons, apart from a reduc-

tion in their pensions by half, were left with everything that an officer in active service received.

DEMOTIONS The Fifth Party Congress, convened in November 1968, essentially ended the debate on Zionism and also on revisionism, which was lodged in the minds of the ‘defenders of the faith’ like a dangerous memento. Nevertheless, in February 1971, at the plenum of the party’s Central Committee, the army’s chief political commussar General Jozef Urbanowicz, when discussing changes in the army after October 1956, said of the years 1967-8: The ideological confusion of those years [post-October] did not pass the armed forces by since the commanders at that time, and particularly the Main Political Directorate of the 28S. Dronicz, Wojsko nieocenzurowane: Od Lenino do Drawska (Warsaw, 1997), gives a figure of 341 dismissals, which includes both officers of Jewish descent and ‘revisionists’.

306 Tadeusz Pioro Polish Army, were unable to decide a positive and aggressive programme of action, giving

way to revisionist and suppressive pressures. We, too, experienced . . . the destructive effects of revisionism . . . in our military organization. [Revisionists in the military] were able to disseminate their views freely and without punishment, bringing about the erosion of healthy forces in our society. [But when the army’s leadership changed then], thanks to correct and consistent cadre policies . . . it was led onto the right path and an appropriate - programme of action was drawn up in this regard.*9

It was within the framework of this programme that a decision was taken at the beginning of 1970 to demote a// officers of Jewish descent who had decided to emigrate. This affected both professional soldiers and those who had nothing to do with the army proper since they were reserve officers. ‘The basic argument supporting this move was their renunciation of Polish citizenship, although it was common knowledge that without fulfilling this condition no one could obtain permission to leave. The official justification was the same in all cases: On the basis of article 68 of the act of 21 November 1967 concerning the general obligation to defend the Polish People’s Republic (Dziennik Ustaw, no. 44, entry 220), I removed the rank of officer from the individuals named below, currently not in active military service, on the grounds of lack of moral values, and declare their return to the ranks.°°

There were six demotion orders, signed by Defence Minister Jaruzelski and his deputy for political affairs: 28 February and 17 September 1970; 26 March 1971; 26 April 1972; 3 August 1974, and the last after a six-year gap——7 March 1980. The largest was the first—8g1 individuals. In all, 1,348 officers and ensigns were deprived of their military rank: 147 1n active service and 1,201 outside the army; this included fifty-four colonels, seventy-nine lieutenant colonels, and 131 majors. Those outside the army were people from academic, cultural, and artistic walks of

life, representatives of various professions, very often outstanding specialists. Many of them had gained their officer’s rank during the war, serving in a variety of military units; more than one had been awarded high orders of the PPR, which, in the confusion, were not taken away. It is notable that when the list was presented for signature, information was added to its justificatory introduction concerning the departure of an offender to Israel, though it was known that the majority had

left for other countries. |

Today, it is difficult to discover why this demotion was undertaken at a time when world opinion had turned against Poland and when the government should have been anxious (and surely was) to hush up an affair that was basically over. Nor

do we know who was behind this initiative, obediently put into practice by the select leadership group of MON over the entire ten-year period, with actions concealed even from individuals who were highly placed in the military hierarchy. The 29 Zotnierz Wolnosci, Feb. 1971.

3° Personnel directives: no. 092, 28 Feb. 1970; no. 373, 17 Sept. 1970; no. 45, 26 Mar. 1971; no. 87, 26 Apr. 1972; no. 139, 3 Aug. 1974; no. 34, 7 Mar. 1980; IC MON Archive, Department of Cadres 636/92-177, 182, 188, 220, 276.

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-1968 307 Department of Cadres prepared materials identifying reserve officers of Jewish descent from a mass of several thousand emigrants, which was no easy task and, no

doubt, demanded the participation of regional recruiting boards and military archives where their personal files were kept. Counter-intelligence was undoubtedly helpful, having 1n its possession materials enabling the discovery of family surnames. Even those who had been demoted did not know they had been deprived of their rank. They knew, however, that they appeared on a ‘blacklist’ and were deprived of the right to cross the Polish border. Their names were circulated to all Polish embassies and were held by all border control centres and airports (these lists continued in existence until 1992). RETREAT In 1990, a commission was set up to examine the claims of former professional soldiers concerning injustices they had experienced during the period 1980—9.*! Cases from the period 1944-79 were also examined, including a list of 104 individuals who had been dismissed from the army in 1967 and 1968. The commission, made up for the most part of officials from the Department of Cadres and the Central Political Office, recognized that seventeen of those dismissed for disciplinary reasons had suffered repression, but waived the pertinent orders only in the

case of eleven. Dismissals ‘for health reasons’ were recognized as justified, although it was known that the medical boards had declared those examined as unfit for service on the recommendation of the authorities.

The commission also came to the conclusion that the data concerning the purges of 1967—8 ‘are probably not complete, since in many cases it was not possible to identify people of Jewish descent on the basis of their personal documents’.*”

In 1991, the last military minister for national defence, Vice Admiral Piotr Kolodziejczyk, circulated a ‘good will’ letter to most, but not all, of those dismissed from the army and still resident in the country: The far-reaching changes in our country have led to a different way of viewing many affairs and incidents in the past ... Wiser in experience, we regret that the relinquishment of your uniform was accompanied by bitterness and a sense of having been wronged. To consign this to oblivion will be difficult, but I hope it will be possible. The conviction that in the work of strengthening the Republic there is room for everyone, allows me to believe that long years of conscientious service in the ranks of the Polish army will remain a source of personal satisfaction for you, and a feeling of duty well done. With thanks, once again, for

your participation in strengthening the defence of the country, I wish you much good health and every success. With best wishes . . .°° 31 Sejm resolution of 7 Dec. 1989 concerning the restoration of employment rights. 32S. Lukaszewski, ‘Ostatnich siedmiu’, Polska Zbrojna, 7 Mar. 1991. 33 Copy of a letter in the author’s possession.

308 Tadeusz Pioro A few years later, all army émigrés were given the pensions due to them accord-

ing to their last position (paid in zlotys into the accounts they had opened in Poland). With no explanation, they were granted the military rank they had held before demotion. Widows were given the pensions due to them. Those who wished to return to Poland (there were a few) were given official apartments in the city of their choice. ‘Blacklists’ were removed from embassies. However, the demotion orders were never officially waived, and the injustice was not condemned. That which had happened was regarded as non-existent.*4 Among the decision-makers of the time, the only person who has publicly referred to his own actions in 1967—8 was Jaruzelski. Halfway through the 1ggos, in an interview for the Swedish magazine Aftonbladet, he said: In the years 1967—8, I was the Chief of General Staff and for that reason / had perhaps a little less to do with these affairs. At that time, many officers and generals who were viewed as not entirely trustworthy were dismissed from the army. I speak of those times with pain in my heart, since I was not bold enough to withstand that wave. (emphasis added)*°

A little earlier, in conversation with the German author of his biography, Manfred E. Berger, he stated: After 1968, after the March incidents, meetings were held, there was a loosening of discipline, and the search began in the army for Jews and non-Jews. There was simply a need for a man who could restore order. I believe that I was quite successful in this respect. I regret to this day that I accepted [the reference is to the position of minister of national defence], since later I could have avoided all those torments in which I had to participate. That was one of my greatest mistakes.*°

Questions remain. What form did the decision process take at the highest levels of authority in those years? Who initiated that great antisemitic movement which, under the wings of those in power, spread throughout the entire country, affecting all institutions? Who was for, and who against; what orders were carried over to the executive apparatus; and to what extent did the executors palliate or exaggerate these orders? The documents I have uncovered do not answer these questions; they cover only a limited aspect of these events pertaining to the military milieu. Nor can one rule out the total impossibility of obtaining documented sources—that the ‘departure’ documents simply do not exist. After June 1967 and March 1968, Gomulka in-

creased the pace of events, inspired by people close to him, influential people who were waiting for an opportunity to rid Poland of the unwanted, of those who did not fit in with their chauvinistic outlook. Later, decisions directing the course of the purges were given verbally, on the run, without instructions and written 34 “Imienny wykaz oficerow WP pochodzenia zydowskiego zwalnianych z zawodowej sluzby wojskowej w 196711968 r.’ 35 M. Punkko, Aftonbladet (an organ of the Swedish Socialist Party), Apr. 1995. 36 M.E. Berger, Jaruzelski (Krakow, 1991), 21.

Purges in the Polish Army, 1967-1968 309 orders. In ‘those’ times there were many actions of which no trace was left in the form of a document. Affairs with far-reaching consequences were discussed privately at an appropriate level, and then everything took place on the basis of verbal recommendations.

The circumstances which in June 1967 brought about a break of diplomatic relations with Israel are obvious: economic interests were most decisive in the unequivocal public support for the Arabs on the part of Warsaw Pact members. However, none of these countries (apart, perhaps, from the Soviet Union, which suffered a clear defeat in the Six-Day War) adopted as organized and universal a campaign against citizens of Jewish descent as did Poland. No Warsaw Pact country (apart from the Soviet Union) forced their collective exodus by its behaviour. Revisionists also fell victim to the 1967—9 purges—one can bear no grudge over that; they were the result of growing divergences between specific fractions in the military milieu and those outside it. Particular people were singled out for ‘expulsion’ and those at the top stayed at the top. Nevertheless, nothing can justify the persecution of officers of Jewish descent since it was directed not against individuals but against a collectivity, without any political or ideological basis. Nevertheless, however one looks at it, this fragment of post-war military history was far less severe in extent and consequence than the repression and purges which took place during the period of consolidation of power in the People’s Republic. Translated from the Polish by Anna Zaranko

A Painful and Complex Subject WOJCIECH JARUZELSKI IN THE June number of WieZ, an article appeared by Tadeusz Pioro entitled ‘Purges in the Polish Army 1967-1968’. The 29—30 August issue of the newspaper Zycie published an article by Jerzy Morawski entitled ‘Rugi marcowe’ [The March Expulsions]. The latter refers directly to the above article by Tadeusz Pioro, who has been publishing a variety of controversial pieces on the subject of the Polish People’s Army for some years. Everyone is free, of course, to come to his own conclusions. The matter becomes more difficult when there is clear tendentiousness and selectivity in the choice of material used, not to speak of a number of imprecisions. Jerzy Morawski’s piece distinguishes itself in all these respects, along with its ‘adjustment’ of the facts, and even obvious falsehoods. A wide-ranging commentary would be necessary in order to deal with these articles in greater depth and in a more concrete manner—both formally and factually. Constraints of time, and the state of my health (my eyesight in particular), do not permit me to undertake such a task at this time. After thirty years, one’s memory becomes unreliable, especially under the huge weight of later situations and developments. It is therefore necessary to obtain essential additional information from

different competent individuals in whom one can have confidence, as well as contacting at least some of those people who represented the committees, organizations, commissions, and institutions (from the highest to the lowest) of the time, in order to hear their explanations concerning their actions and the motives which

inspired them, and to set them against the accounts of individuals who were wronged at the time which were given to the authors of the above articles. Finally, there is much previously unstudied archival material to consult, as well as the need to verify those materials to which Tadeusz Pioro and Jerzy Morawski refer. It is

surprising, for example, that in two ‘crowning’ documents—I have recently acquired archival copies of them—there is not the slightest evidence that they ever reached my desk; there are no annotations of any kind, nor are they marked by any seal of secrecy or confidentiality, even though both the above-mentioned authors write that these were ‘strictly confidential’ documents. Furthermore, the authors

stress that many former soldiers who emigrated at different times from Poland were deprived of their military rank by the Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowe; First published in WieZ, no. 11 (1998).

A Painful and Complex Subject 311 (Ministry of National Defence; MON). Today, I take a highly negative view of those decisions, particularly taking into account the circumstances that generally determined those emigrations; what is more, I see their senselessness. However, I cannot state what mechanisms determined which individuals should be affected by those decisions. Formally speaking, it was the automatic consequence of an act in force at the time: ‘Ustawa 0 powszechnym obowiazku obrony PRL’ [Act concern-

ing the universal obligation to defend the PRL] of November 1967. After some amendments, the former article 87 stating that ‘a soldier forfeits his military rank in the event of relinquishing Polish citizenship’ retained its wording and was now numbered 78. Article 88 comprised a kind of verbal superstructure to it, stating that ‘a soldier not in active military service can forfeit his rank by committing an act demonstrating the abandonment of the necessary political or moral values’. In the amended version (art. 79) only moral values are mentioned. As the former head of the MON Cadres Department, General Zygmunt Zielinski, reminds us, directives formulated on the basis of this statement were a result of the legal interpretation and reasoning of the Office of the State Council and the Office of the Council of Ministers at that time. In order to gain an objective picture of the highly complex situation at that time, it is not enough to make a selective choice of accounts and materials. One must _ Investigate—and also critically analyse—material such as the minutes of Military

Council meetings and those of the supreme council of the Ministry of National Defence; information, statements, notes, evaluations, and conclusions originating from those individuals heading Military Regions and Armed Forces, from tactical unions and military academies, from the military sections of civilian departments, from the political apparatus and the party authorities, including the Secretariat and

Administrative Department of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, and, above all, the organs of the Military Security Services (Wojskowa Stuzba Wewnetrzna; WSW) from the Ministry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrznych; MSW), etc. In other words, one must take into account the complexities of the entire situation, extending far beyond the background of simply internal army affairs with their co-dependencies, aspects, and repercussions. Of this, the authors of the articles in Wigg and Zycie do not speak. Instead, they have taken the path—ever more clearly demonstrated in some political circles—of an unceasing ‘persecution’ of Jaruzelski. This is why there is such a jumble of various facts and dates which, for those readers less familiar with the realities of the army, could create the impression that regardless of what happened, when, and in what kind of times, my ‘demonic’ intentions, omnipotence,

and actions can be detected everywhere. This must be one of the reasons why complete silence is maintained regarding the disciplinary dismissals in the army which occurred only in 1967, and which (according to data from the Ministry of Defence Department of Cadres) involved seventeen officers, not one of whom was employed by General Staff Headquarters, which I headed at the time. There 1s also

312 Wojciech faruzelski no mention that on my orders, as minister of national defence, a few officers were punished or dismissed from the army for antisemitic activities (nota bene that, many years later, some of these men became leading activists of the ‘Grunwald’ group). Nor is there a word about the fact that not only were generals and officers with ‘post-October’ leanings dismissed or ‘side-tracked’, as the articles suggest, but also some—unfortunately, not nearly enough—individuals with conservative tendencies. This was inspired both from above, on the cadre-political level, and by the very nature of the army, whose doctrinal-organizational framework, rigour, and discipline were not amenable to liberalizing democratic tendencies and initiatives. I do not write all this in order to minimize the scale of the affair. It was, after all, a dark and murky page of our recent history. ‘That era, however, was made up of many levels and political, social, and psychological conditions. It must be evaluated in a historical context, within a general situational and political framework. At various stages, I had a variety of positions and possibilities open to me. I do not, however, attempt to avoid a critical evaluation of that which I could truly have influenced. I am pained by the symptoms and facts which were ‘on the prowl’ during the second half of the 1950s and in the 1960s. In the army, they reached their explosive apogee in 1967. After the so-called June war, a shocking strategicprofessional signal appeared in our armed forces and in the whole of the Warsaw Pact. In what was then an antagonistically divided world, there arose an obsessive sensitivity concerning the safeguarding of secrets, the problem of loyalty, and the fear of a surprise attack, especially from the air. It was then that the large-scale construction of concrete hangars at airports took place. All these things accumulated and were intertwined. A peculiar psychosis emerged which grew to become national in scale (the famous term ‘fifth column’). It fed suspicion, provided the inspiration and pretext for accusations and all kinds of undoubtedly fabricated

information, and led to politico-personal contests which reached their peak in March 1968. President Aleksander Kwasniewski, when awarding Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski the order of the ‘White Eagle’ (Order Orla Bialego), said that, in those days, ‘reason slept and phantoms stirred’.

I could, of course, expand upon the various circumstances and factors listed above. I could quote a variety of formal and factual circumstances, and relate a number of personal histories and ‘records’. I will not do so. Regardless of the obvi-

ous, many-sided negative consequences of that situation, the most fundamental thing is its disgraceful moral dimension. This cannot be justified. Harm done to even one person is a Shameful fact. How much worse, then, when it is characterized by primitive collective categorization and involves many people, including some who have merited trust and respect throughout their careers in the army. Here, I can name only those who are well known to me as an example: the generals—Bronislaw Bednarz, Jan Drzewiecki, Marian Graniewski, Edward Pfeffer; colonels—Miuichat Bron, Abraham Heisteyn, Zygmunt Hofman, Arnold Juniter, Ludwik Kan, Leopold Kozlowski, Adam Laski, Stanislaw Nadzin, Edward

A Painful and Complex Subject 313 Nowik, Zenon Welfeld, and Pawet Wildstein, and many others dismissed at different times, in different ways, and for different reasons—whether factual or formal. Finally, I wish to mention the names of those very close to me—Michal Dodik,

and particularly Michal Sadykiewicz, who is mentioned in Jerzy Morawsk1’s article. But here is one example of ‘stretching a point’. First, Colonel Dodik was not a witness at my wedding; secondly, when I became vice-minister of national defence I brought about, at his request, his transfer to an appropriate position from Szczecin to Warsaw during the early 1960s; thirdly, and finally, when, as a result of

the atmosphere that had arisen, he turned to me with a plea for help to gain permission to emigrate—seeing the complicated nature of his situation—I strenuously supported him. The other circumstances I cannot discuss without Colonel Dodik’s consent. Colonel Michal Sadykiewicz. Here I will cite part of an interview which I gave to the weekly Bez pardonu (it appeared on 8 June 1996). To the question: ‘Do you have any close friends? Can one still have close friends on reaching high office?’ part of my reply ran: “There are friendships which continue and which have a long history. These are above all those with whom I travelled a long road as a soldier . . . Colonel Michal Sadykiewicz—a very interesting personality, but also a distressing one, the exemplification of many Polish fates. An excellent, worthy soldier. At the front he fought in the rst Kosciuszko Division, and then held a number of commanding and staff positions. In 1968, what tended to happen at the time happened also to him. I tried to help him, but it was not easy then. I admit, too, that I was not

sufficiently tenacious and decisive at the time; I am ashamed of this... But we remain sincere friends.’ The next question ran: ‘Is there anything you regret in your lifer’ My reply was: “That in 1968 I was not sufficiently strong and decisive enough to oppose the prevailing psychosis. This I will always regret.’ I have stated this both officially and unofficially, in some Polish newspapers (including Gazeta Wyborcza), and in a number of articles and interviews published abroad. So I am not silent; this is not the first time I speak of this. I speak all the more bitterly, since those who have known me for a long time know that I have never harboured prejudices or enmity towards any nationality or any national background. Quite the opposite. Perhaps I am mistaken, but declarations of this kind are largely isolated. True, a

number of books, debates, and publications have appeared concerning those events, evaluating and condemning that evil. But they are usually written by people like Mieczystaw Rakowski, for example, or a number of others who have the

moral right to speak out with heads held high, in a clear voice. Those who were direct victims or activists of the former opposition also write. Finally, there are the politicians, historians, and journalists, often with a delayed reaction, who make up

for it with sharp but often shallow one-sided evaluations and judgements. But this evil came into being and existed in particular state cells—from the highest

to sometimes the lowest levels—and also in economics, education, culture,

314 Woyctech faruzelski journalism, the health service, and so on. There were many executors and observers, to a varying degree. And there were many ways in which society was infiltrated by this faint-hearted and mean-spirited psychosis, which sprang also from below. Each one of us should at least honestly admit this to his own conscience, though, at the same time, we should not forget to pay the recognition and respect due to those who did not allow this wave to carry them along. So many years have passed and the affair still festers, lives, and causes pain. What is more, in the last few years and months, and even weeks, incidents have occurred which indicate that certain conclusions and lessons emerging from those © times have been forgotten. However, despite some suggestions, this is not the legacy of People’s Poland. The sources reach far deeper. This is a traditional, rather right-wing ‘speciality’. It seems that various eternal forms of xenophobia, chauvinism, and antisemitism are being revived once more. What, though, should never be allowed to be forgotten? In the land where the Nazis carried out the terrible crime of the Holocaust, not only sensitivity but hypersensitivity is necessary towards everything that might strike at that memory, feelings, and pain. It is in this respect that I look with deep self-critical sorrow at the situation which developed, particularly in the last years of the 1960s. It is also hard to be tolerant when such a painful and complicated subject is treated in shallow and short-sighted terms in some articles. Translated from the Polish by Anna Zaranko

Reply to General Jaruzelsk1 TADEUSZ PIORO I HAD not intended to write about the antisemitic purges in the military in the years 1967—8. In the military archives I sought material dealing with what has been described as the ‘dirty scum of October’, high-ranking officers, engaged in the initial stage of change after October 1956, dismissed from their posts and the military

throughout the whole decade of the 1960s. During this research I came across documents which shocked me, particularly the brutal treatment of Poles of Jewish origin—mainly people who had nothing to do with the military for years, who held reserve officer ranks, primarily from the war years. These documents enabled me to reconstruct some moves, over thirty years ago, which were directed against persons remaining on the roll call and inside the range of the decision-making of the Ministry of Defence, regardless of the occupation they were carrying out at the time. In some cases, cabinet-level suggestions, resolutions, and orders, which had to precede the implementation of a printed execution order, were not recorded. Undoubtedly, we will never know about them. I understand that the publication of materials known only to a tiny circle of military people, until now, was bound to arouse persons engaged in these matters. However, I do not understand why General Jaruzelski attributes to me ‘a jumble of various facts and dates’, which, reputedly, create the impression that the source of every abuse in those days was his “demonic” intentions’. I am far from suspecting General Jaruzelski of any kind of national prejudice or national antipathies. On ‘demonic intentions’ I wrote clearly: ‘the signal came

from the direction of the highest political authorities. The initiator was the Minister of Internal Affairs Mieczystaw Moczar, supported in the military by Vice-

Minister Grzegorz Korczynski, one of the people closest to Gomutka.’ And, a little further: Colonel Teodor Kufel and General Jozef Urbanowicz, ‘respectively directors of the police and political sections of the military . . . played a decisive role in purging the cadres of “Zionist” and “revisionist” elements’. These facts and the

dates, then, I did not invent. I scooped them up from documents, written and signed, found in the archives. These are executive orders (akta wykonawceze). It is not mentioned—Jaruzelski claims—that while he was defence minister he

punished and removed from the military ‘several officers for instances of antisemitism’. First published in WeZ, no. 12 (1998).

316 Tadeusz Pioro It is not unmentioned. ‘In several military units’—I wrote—‘demands were made to take further action against persons of Jewish origin . . . There was an ener-

getic response ... A dozen or so officers were . . . expelled from the party, discharged from the army, or reprimanded and demoted.’ It is merely that this only occurred when the antisemitic wave reached the gates of the White House [party headquarters], which responded to defend the highest party authorities. In order to clarify the events described by me, ‘it is therefore necessary’— Jaruzelski says—‘to obtain essential additional information from different, competent individuals in whom one can have confidence’. This is true. It is always better to have dealings with a trusted opponent than with someone who is not trusted. The fact is, however, that the competent individuals are either dead or they are unwilling to speak on this subject. In the general’s opinion, to obtain an objective picture it would be necessary to get to know many documents from the sittings and meetings of different military institutions, among others the information from ‘the political apparatus and the party authorities . . . and, above all, the organs of the Military Security Services

[Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrynych; MSW] and of the Ministry of Internal Affairs [Wojskowa Sluzba Wewnetrzna; WSW], etc.’. I did indeed familiarize myself with a definite part of this sort of ‘trustworthy’ (actually very scanty) material, and, in my day, I also felt their provocative character on me. Let us speculate that—as General Jaruzelski points out to me—some of

the documents published by me were not ‘strictly confidential’, but only ‘somewhat confidential’; that the annotated inscriptions on them come not only from

one person; that my interpretation of the actions of the top leadership of the MON [Ministerstwo Obrony Narodowej; Ministry of National Defence] during the years 1967-8 (and therefore also General Jaruzelski) does not take into account all the realities of those years. This does not change, however, the recorded pronouncements concerning the essence of the events, which Jaruzelski himself, in his rejoinder, called ‘a dark, murky page of our recent history’. And with this I agree completely. Translated from the Polish by Leszek Gtuchowski

THE CONTROVERSY AROUSED BY THE 1968 EVENTS IN 2006

°e2

A Meeting with Jacek Kuronas Reported by Secret Collaborator Return’ (Leslaw Maleszka)

¢)

A Contribution to the Discussions about the Events of March 1968 PIOTR GONTARCZYK THE SiEUZBA BEZPIECZENSTWA (Security Service; SB) archives belong to the

most valuable source of information about Poland’s most recent history. In the very nature of things, while planning, conducting, and analysing its own operations, the communist political police had to gather, compare, and verify an enormous amount of information about the social and political life of the country. The SB documents also include information about facts which form part of our history , that was difficult or even impossible to verify earlier. Many of them relate to the plans, views, designs, and real intentions of opposition activists that had been seriously distorted by accounts given some dozen or even several dozen years later.

Such documents containing factual written accounts and events (known from apartment and telephone bugging, stenographic records of meetings, or reports by

particularly trustworthy secret collaborators) are enormously valuable at this time. One such document consists of information about a meeting between members

of the Krakow opposition group and the Warsaw KOR (Komitet Obrony Robotnikow; Workers’ Defence Committee) activist Jacek Kuron. It contains significant information about Kuron’s views and the activities of his closest circle. Kuron was the second activist invited to a meeting in the academic year 1977-8 within the programme of the Discussion Club organized by the Krakow Student This article first appeared on the website of the Instytut Pamieci Narodowej and was subsequently published as ‘Relacja TW “Return” ze spotkania z Jackiem Kuroniem: przyczynek do rozwazan na temat wydarzen marca 1968 r.’, in Aparat represjt w Polsce Ludowej 1944-1989 (Warsaw, 2005), nos. I-2, 363-72.

318 Piotr Gontarczyk Solidarity Committee (Studencki Komitet Solidarnosciowy; SKS). The first one was Leszek Moczulski, an activist of the Movement for the Defence of Human and Civil Rights in Poland (Ruch Obrony Praw Czlowieka 1 Obywatela; ROPCiO) of that time. After arriving in Krakow, Kuron complained to the SKS activists that it was Moczulski and not he who was inaugurating the Club’s activities and this led to a confrontation.*

The main meeting probably took place on 13 November 1977 in Boguslaw Sonik’s flat on ul. Florianska 43/5A in Krakow, but its unofficial part in Ziemowit Pochitonow’s flat on ul. Przekopy 75. Despite the fact that he is not mentioned in

the note in question, Leslaw Maleszka took part in both. ‘Return’ transmitted detailed information to the SB. On the basis of some of the features of the document presented below, one can suppose that Maleszka’s account was registered on a magnetic tape and only later the officer in charge of ‘Return’, Captain Stanislaw Nowak, head of Section IIIA Subdepartment III of the Provincial Headquarters of the Komitet Wojewodzki Miulicji Obywatelskiej [Province Committee Citizens’ Militia; KW MO] in Krakow, prepared the note. A transcript was made (including part of the original text) concerning Kuron’s views and opinions. This document was sent by SB’s Subdepartment IIIT KW MO in Krakow? to Subdepartment III,

Department III of the Munistry of Internal Affairs (Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnetrznych; MSW). At that time this unit was conducting ‘Wasale’ [ Vassals], a cryptonym for Exposition of Operational Matters, which included actions directed against the Student Solidarity Committees coming into being in certain academic circles in People’s Poland. This document is presented below.® ‘Return’s’ original information from which the above transcript was made was probably destroyed with the ‘Ketman’ TW file or maybe the ‘Return’ or “Tomek’ files, or by Leslaw Maleszka himself, one of the most valuable SB agents within the opposition. In the first part of the note, from the official meeting in Bogustaw Sonik’s flat, Kuron read a paper about Polish social and political issues and answered questions about his letter written with Karol Modzelewski in 1964. He also spoke about his activities in the scout movement. During the second part of the meeting, in Ziemowit Pochitonow’s flat, the Warsaw guest, ‘a born raconteur’,* related his prison experiences and talked about the March 1968 events. The information recounted by Kuron provides significant details related to the ‘commandos’ circle as well as circumstances related to his part in the protest action against the ban of Forefathers’ Eve (Dztady). It must be pointed out that the ‘commandos’ themselves (including Kuron) left memoirs and accounts which leave no serious doubts as far as the origins of their engagement in the March protests are concerned. Their position in the face of the ban of Forefathers’ Eve is supposed to have had a deeply moral meaning: ‘we were bearing witness to the highest national and universal values. . . . I think that if, at * Bogustaw Sonik’s account of 30 Mar. 2005 (personal interview). 2 This SB unit was in charge of ‘operational control’ of the SKS circle.

3 TPN 0222/701 vol. vi, k. 183-9. 4 Boguslaw Sonik’s account of 30 Mar. 2005.

A Meeting mith Ffacek Kuron 319 the present time, one were to specify an ideological manifesto for March ’68, then one would have to choose the message of Herbert’s Pan Cogito: you did not survive just to live, you have to bear witness.’°

Because the basic book about March 1968 does not mention any of the key archival documents? and is based on accounts given by the ‘commandos’, its author says that the issue of Forefathers’ Eve and the events that followed it contributed to the intense boosting of the national element in the ‘commandos’ powerbase; at least some of them had not seemed previously to value national traditions . . . of course this does not mean that before that the ‘commandos’ were national nihilists and cosmopolitans as later March propaganda claimed; it is just that they did not emphasize the national element as much as it should have been.’

This ‘national’ aspect is still being described as the main driving force of the activities of the ‘commandos’. For this is what was supposed to have impelled the above circle to draw up a petition to the Sejm in protest against the ban on Forefathers’ Eve: ‘a group of young people, including Teresa Bogucka, Jan Gross,

Jakub Karpinski, Jacek Kuron, Andrzej Mencwel, Adam Michnik, and Barbara Torunczyk gathered in Irena Grudzinska’s flat on 31 January. They agreed that the protest against the ban on Forefathers’ Eve is essentially a demonstration to defend

national values.’ Thus the discussion centred mainly around the question of the effectiveness of such actions as signing protest petitions.® But this vision of ‘March’ arouses doubts. Already the very comparison of the above statements with the text of these petitions should give food for thought. For this document is not concerned with any ‘national traditions’ but is a protest ‘against

the policy of cutting oneself off from the progressive traditions of the Polish nation’.’ Taking account of the real sense of the party’s newspeak used both by the ‘commandos’ propaganda and by the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party; PZPR), this fact changes everything. But in some studies, authors dealing with the history of the ‘commandos’ opposition group frequently raise this circle to the level of the leading defenders of national values. According to one version, Karol Modzelewski was supposed to have invented, and according to another to have been the first publicly to chant, one of the most important ‘March’ slogans, ‘independence without censorship’. To support this, these authors refer to the collected source base, mainly accounts by Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski.'° > Cited in Jerzy Eisler, Marzec 1968 (Warsaw, 1991), 192—3.

© “The main source base of this work includes unauthorized accounts and archival materials from private collections brought together by me. .. . As far as archival records are concerned, it seems that some historians overestimate their value’ (ibid. 9). T Ibid. 184—5. 8 Tbid. 158. This information has been given on the basis of Kuron’s account. , 9 J. Kuron, Wiara i wina (Warsaw, 1990), 282; Eisler, Marzec 1968, 159. 10 See Kuron, Wiara i wina, 283; A. Friszke, Political Opposition in the PRL 1945-1980 (London, 1994), 239-40, 266; biographical entry of Karol Modzelewski by the same author in Opposition in the PRL: Biographical Dictionary 1956-1989 (Warsaw, 2000), 247; Eisler, Marzec 1968, 156.

320 Piotr Gontarczyk The document presented below gives new information about the ‘commandos’ ’ position and origin of their activities in 1968 and it should be introduced into academic circulation. How credible 1s it?

The principal narrator, Jacek Kuronh, was the main driving force behind the activities of the ‘commandos’ circle at the time of the March events. It would be difficult to find anyone more likely to be better informed about this subject. ‘The document came into being in the 1970s, thus much earlier than the serious academic lectures and accounts recorded by Jerzy Eisler referred to above. Experience

derived from historical research suggests that the closer an account is to the described events, the fewer later accretions it will contain, and the narrator himself remembers more and better. It also seems probable that, due to the ideological evo-

lution that part of the ‘commandos’ circle was undergoing at a later stage, their accounts proffered in 1988 may have contained significant distortions. It is also worth remembering that ‘Return’s’ report relates Kuron’s opinions and

views given to a narrow group of SKS activists. As a rule, such documents are worth a lot more than written lectures based on memory read at annual celebrations. Furthermore, the person relating Kuron’s statements deserves the highest credence from the point of view of knowing his source. There is no doubt that Maleszka was one of the most perceptive and intelligent observers of opposition activities while working for the SB. Scores of his archived reviews, notes, reports, and other disquisitions testify to this fact. Colleagues from the Krakow opposition called him the ‘high protein computer’; this was supposed to describe his excellent memory. It should also be kept in mind that ‘Return’ submitted his account of the report of Jacek Kuron’s visit to Krakow immediately after the event. It is hard to point to any logical reasons why Maleszka would want to distort Kuron’s views.

Boguslaw Sonik, who hosted the meeting, described ‘Return’s’ account as ‘accurate’.*! What picture of ‘March’ did Kuron present at the Krakow meeting? He portrays

the events as a vast provocation by Mieczyslaw Moczar’s nationalist faction in an attempt to take power in the PZPR. Nevertheless it suffered a crushing defeat, owing __. to the part played by the ‘commandos’. But the historiographic conclusions are not the most significant thing here. In fact, the picture of ‘March ’68’ that emerges from the Warsaw guest’s tale is fundamentally different from the one found in Eisler’s book. It indicates that the chief motive was not a deeply moral one. In this case, tactical ambitions seem to be more significant, for it became necessary to make a choice, as the ‘commandos’ realized that the ‘atmosphere at the university was becoming such that, sooner or later, it would end in demonstrations and that this was inevitable’.'? Kuron’s account also indicates that it had nothing to do with a moral stance based on [Zbigniew Herbert’s] Pan Cogito (1974), but rather was a struggle for power of two

rival factions inside the PZPR. Independence, freedom, or other transcendental values were less important. The ‘commandos’ acted because they wanted the “party

11 Bogustaw Sonik’s account of 30 Mar. 2005. 12 TPN 0222/701, vol. 6, p. 86.

A Meeting with Jacek Kuron 321 revisionists’ (with whom Kuron’s circle was connected) to prevail over Mieczystaw

Moczar’s faction. In a wider ideological context, ‘as unreservedly orthodox Marxists’,!? the ‘commandos’ were acting in defence of communist internationalism and against the ‘nationalism’ that was seen as a threat to the party. So this is what the origin of the petition to the Seym drawn up by the ‘commandos’ circle was supposed to have been. As the ‘commandos’ feared that any further

patriotic demonstrations connected with the Forefathers’ Eve issue might make the ‘nationalist faction’ in the PZPR stronger, they wanted to use the petition to limit the effect of nationalist and patriotic slogans (also identified as chauvinism). Thus they thought of a substitute formula (the petition) that was supposed to provide an outlet for the wave of protests in the spirit of the ‘progressive traditions of the Polish nation’. ‘The wider backdrop of the ‘commandos’ ’ protest in defence of Forefathers’ Eve shows a link with the above portrayal of their activities. ‘Students and intellectuals could not fail to react to an assassination attempt on national values’, claims the author of Marzec 1968. But, as the document below shows, they could, as they were not that keen to defend national values.'* They joined in, first of all, by taking part in the internal conflict in the PZPR. So it is obvious that after 1968 the ‘commandos’ circle was fiercely attacked by journalists and ‘historians’ connected with Moczar’s group. Propaganda accused Kuron and his colleagues of national nihilism. It also portrayed the ‘commandos’’ part in the March events as a political contest. Such statements are described as unfounded insinuations in the only available monograph devoted to March 1968.'° The document reproduced below throws a rather less ambiguous light on the subject. TRANSCRIPT Source—‘Return’’® Krakow, 15.11. 1977.

Received by Nowak CONFIDENTIAL — SPEC. SIGNIFICANCE 14.09.77 MK ‘Wanda’ Copy rt.

OPERATIONAL INFORMATION . Re[ference] meeting with [ JACEK] KURON in [BOGUSLAW] SONIR’S flat.

KURON was answering questions. He talked about the SKS,!7 what a KOR-type organization is like, the Ruch Obrony Praw Czlowieka i Obywatela (Movement for the Defence of Human and Civil Rights in Poland; ROPCiO), and the distribution of Polish opposition forces at the present time. These facts were basically known, but Kuron was very skilful in putting things in perspective in a sober and logical manner and filling in all the details. What KURON said about the SKS was that an independent, in the strict sense of the word, student organization would have to be created in the near future. Then he said a few words about an ideological declaration, and that was all, unless there were some specific questions.

Kuron did not say anything new that could not be read in Gios, in published programmes, or in one or the other. His theories on economic subjects are generally

13 Tbid. 4 Thid. 186. 1° Tbid. 193. 16 Lestaw Maleszka. 17 Student Solidarity Committee. 18 Workers’ Defence Committee.

322 Piotr Gontarczyk well-known issues at the present time. As this topic has already been chewed over endless times, one tends to focus on the nuances rather than the heart of the matter. He described how he had started playing the game beginning in [19]64, how he and [Karol] Modzelewski wrote a letter to the Party and to other signatories, summarizing this letter ideologically, as a simple consistent following of the Marxist line, which was supposed to lead to simple proof of the inappropriateness and inadequacy of the criteria of Marxist analysis to explain our reality.‘? How he later went to prison for no reason and then was imprisoned again in March, how he came out, and how KOR was created, etc. He talked about the origin of the [19]56 uprising. Then people asked questions about an earlier period, e.g. questions about his activities in the Scout Movement with its conflicts and conflicting procedures in the movement. At one time he had been against the Polish Scout

Movement adopting the methods of the World Organization of the Scout Movement [WOSM]. After [19]56, the WOSM model was considered to be radically anti-regime and in favour of a revival of the Polish Scout Movement, etc. At that time Kuron, with his principle of action psychology, was considered to be something very alien and individual. When the WOSM model was being eliminated from the Scout Movement, some of the leaders thought that it was Kuron’s fault and, as it happened, this was not true, because elimination of the WOSM also resulted in a complete elimination of the Walter groups led by Kuron and everything was shaping up in a different way, with the socialist school-affiliated Scout Movement model, etc., being introduced.”° [Page 185]

The following seem much more interesting: an ideological declaration, predictions, economic group, statistical analysis group, consumer group, plans of an already working group and making no headway, the matter of calculating a basket of goods for a Polish citizen considering the level of inflation, general economic concepts, a change in the structure of management, and decentralization of the economy. These are the only catchwords one can talk

about here. A change in the structure of agricultural management, the present crisis in agriculture, and outflow of agricultural capital. Next Kuron spoke about his idea that ROPCiO is using the principle of a centralist movement in relation to the opposition. ‘This could have proved to be a more interesting subject as it is hitherto less well known and less publicized. The make-up of the listeners kept changing, with some arriving and others leaving. Among them there were some surprises, e.g. last year’s Room 441 from ‘Zaczek’ [a student club] with [Zbigniew] Jankowski and the rest all came, a rather unexpected array of people came, as well as [Adam] Szostkiewicz. There were also Franciszek Grabczyk, etc., [ Jacek] Nowaczek with his wife, [Lukasz | Swierz, [Tadeusz] Kensy, nearly the whole Sonik group, consisting of fifteen people, [ Jozef] Ruszar, [Father Adam] Boniecki, but [Lilianna] Batko was not there as she was in Zakopane. One could say that anyone who had anything to do with the opposition was there.*1 The meeting finished about 10.00, after which only the core group went to Ziemowit Pochitonow’s flat. The discussion there centred mainly on 19 This refers to the ‘Open letter to PZPR members’, in which Kuron and Modzelewski not so much pointed to the inadequacy of Marxist analysis to describe reality, but rather criticized how the PRL was functioning from the point of view of the principles of communism. 20 Jacek Kuron played one of the more prominent roles in attempts to eradicate the Polish scout movement, which was beginning to revive after 1956. See Kuron, Wiara t wina, 136-68.

21 ‘Those listed were activists in and/or sympathized with the Krakow SKS, but Father Adam Boniecki (who was temporarily living in Pochitonow’s flat) was connected with the 7ygodnik Powszechny circle.

, A Meeting with Jacek Kuron 323 prison and Kuron’s reminiscences. Kuron is a born raconteur and such stories tend to be very long, sometimes improbable, i.e. at the moment I am at a loss how to keep the probable and improbable bits apart. For example, I cannot believe that it is probable that a person who was spying for West Germany would be imprisoned in Poland. In any case, Kuron described such a man, making the whole story sound true. He told stories about a thousand criminals with a prison mentality and about some personal matters. He also spoke about [1968], of whether or not it was a provocation. He finds talking about this subject very fas-

| cinating. This is how he presented it: It all started as a small demonstration with one placard after [Kazimierz] Deymek’s production of Forefathers’ Eve. The Walter group had nothing to do with it and it was all the work of the Czajkowski people? and it obviously created a kind of subtle situation within the party, i.e. that the whole issue could, at any time, be exploited by Moczar for his own advantage on the assumption that this matter and the degree of nationalism that this issue imposed on society [page 186] would be something useful for Moczar’s propaganda, who had found himself in a peculiar position as, on the one hand, he had large popular support but, on the other, a young party cadre group was joining him because they thought that he was just the fellow who would be able to adopt a new line which would create new jobs and introduce new people into the party pyramid. So, in this case, the young cadres placed their hopes in him and at the same time such a demonstration could encourage a number of additional demonstrations. Quite simply, it was touch and go and at this moment Kuron and the ‘Walter’ group also decided that, at this juncture, any demonstrations might, in effect, lead to purges, or that there was a choice between just going for what it’s worth for the party machine or for a programme of demonstrations, except that in a case like this demonstrations are pointless. At this time they decided that it was better to compose a letter and petition, which was signed by approximately 5,000 people from the whole university in Warsaw and some 1,000 people from Wroclaw after being smuggled there. This was done by the Walter group and it rather disrupted the ranks in this rather complex cycle, for one needs to imagine an organization where everyone is tied up somewhere. Czajkowski’s boys, who started the whole thing after forefathers’ eve [sic], were tied to Moczar”? in one way or another and the commandos were tied to the revisionists, and it was an open secret and, quite simply, it came as a slight shock to such high-ranking party officials, who were the most likely people to understand it. Whichever way you look at it, they did not believe that the commandos went in for it, as go per cent of them were recruited from the people and they were all unreservedly orthodox Marxists or ideologically internationalists, so it was not likely that they would go for such a yarn as suddenly having to defend such an object of Polish national devotion as Forefathers’ Eve. At that time these people who belonged to a party organization were revisionists who consciously rejected everything that they called nationalism on the basis of a certain strategic manoeuvre in order to erect a kind of wall between themselves and the Moczar faction at that time, and such reasoning would imply that the commandos would not agree to join in the Forefathers’ Eve affair. In truth, the commandos were not keen to do it. If Kuron and Modzelewski managed to convince the commandos, it was because, according to their strategic assumptions, the atmosphere in the institutions of 22 This is probably a reference to Bogdan Czajkowski, one of the most active organizers of the protest at the Warsaw polytechnic. 23 There is no evidence that B. Czajkowski was active in inspiring M. Moczar’s group. This conclu-

sion should be treated as emblematic of Kuron’s thinking; his habit was to ascribe dishonourable intentions or even collaboration with the SB to anyone not acting in accordance with his thinking.

324 Piotr Gontarczyk higher education was such that sooner or later it would end up in demonstrations and they were inevitable. With the atmosphere in the universities so heated, if the commandos did not act now, then Czajkowski would urge people to demonstrate and objectively all this would only help the Moczar faction, and it was not the commandos’ intention to take over organizing protests as it might well end in a massacre. [Page 187] They should be given a different activity so they can let off steam, to find a substitute. So

they thought up the letter. This letter was well planned, but this plan completely shocked the so-called party apparatus, as the party apparatus did not expect such a thing from the commandos just as the system was finished, and even if developed in such a way, when suddenly and rapidly the commandos started to gain influence at the university, precisely on the strength of this petition, which was being discussed on behalf of the commandos and at the time, quite simply, the party apparatus came to the conclusion that either they should manage to eradicate this pest or all this would result in a rapid radicalization of the universities, which had already started making very extreme demands of the government. Thus, choosing the best time and place, the Party as it were suggested that it had become necessary to act, simply because just then [Adam] Michnik and [Henryk] Szlajfer had been removed.”* This expulsion of Michnik and Szlajfer was senseless and based only on entirely superficial reasons because the party simply had no evidence that Michnik and Szlajfer had been the ones who passed this document to a journalist and it probably never had any proof of this, and all they knew, literally, was the fact that Michnik and Szlajfer had got into the journalist’s car and went with him to a hotel and nothing else. This document would have been published in the West but anonymously, and it was only when the party, as a shot in the dark, plainly imposed its interpretation that it was Michnik and Szlajfer who passed the document over, even though there was no evidence for it, that the decision was made in the West “to publish’ this document, as the party revealed who its author was all over the country, adding in passing that it had not been signed by all the authors because more people had been involved in drawing up this document than Szlajfer and Michnik, and this is how I got hold of it. This was the sort of game being played. Michnik’s and Szlajfer’s expulsion must obviously have led to the protest rally in a situation where leaflets inciting protest rallies connected with the Forefathers’ Eve affair and the commandos were not doing any of it, and this produced some very complicated arrangements because the ZMS [Zwiazek Miodziezy Socjalistycznej (Socialist Youth Union)] split in strange ways over this. Some ZMS members would rip up these leaflets, but others were already producing their own bizarre leaflets, which were widely distributed, saying that they were against this decision connected with the Forefathers’ Eve affair and that they supported a discussion with the commandos while not sympathizing with their ideological position, but that this discussion would have to be thorough and open, and this idea was ambiguous because, even if it happened, a protest could still have happened and any discussion could have led to a protest. And the Party chose the most opportune moment for which, of course, this was the most suitable move, and one thing was typical that absolutely no one, and especially the Party, was able definitely to foresee; they were certain that it would end quickly, that it would only

24 On 4 Mar. 1968 it was announced that both had been expelled from Warsaw University.

A Meeting with FJacek Kuron 325 [Page 189]*°

develop into a row which would make it possible simply to throw out all the guilty parties. Quite simply the whole commandos staff was arrested on 8 March and nobody could have anticipated that it would continue in Warsaw for twenty days. Second- and third-rank peo-

ple who were not hitherto in the forefront and were not considered important, such as [Antoni] Maciarewicz [Macierewicz], Goska Blajfer, or [Mirostaw] Chojecki, would take the lead in the whole affair. No one could have predicted whether or not all this would spread to Krakow or to various other universities. This reaction carried too much risk. But then a strange thing happened. It turned into a complete disaster. If there was anything else typical of this trend, it was the fact that it was a disaster for the Moczar faction and not just a social disaster, but one affecting the people who, while organizing and aggravating the situation, suddenly found themselves in a position where they could emerge from all this unscathed only by a sharp suppression of all this, and this they did but at the same time they lost everything, that is, the revisionist faction was obviously dissolved, but the nationalist faction was also defeated. Quite simply, even during the initial stage, they had gone too far into this whole process, so it became impossible to tell what the possible consequences of their actions would be of such a factional struggle even after a possible victory, like something resembling Romanian socialism, that is, in Kuron’s view, a kind of extreme nationalist and slightly anti-Soviet despotism. As it happens, according to Kuron, among the Security Service staff, those who proclaim

their friendship with the USSR too loudly are not the ones who are held in the highest esteem and are not very well liked, as the mood there seems distinctly nationalistic. Moczar did not manage to build up his own apparatus and, after December, contrary to

expectations, this resulted in [Edward] Gierek and not Moczar taking over from [Wladystaw] Gomolka [Gomutka]. However, this apparatus included absolutely moderate people who did not have the slightest idea what was involved in taking on jobs in the apparatus; this is basically how it happened and the regression process developed more or less in this way. Moczar lost just because he had an idea. People asked if this was a provocation. In

some way, these were certain entangled Party factions, but essentially what followed involved too many spontaneous processes to make it possible to assign a category indicating whether it had or had not been a provocation. This is more or less how it appeared.

The following were present at the meeting in Pochitonow’s flat: Kuron, Pochitonow, [Ewa] Zalewska, Father [Adam Count Fredro] Boniecki, and Sonik. For conformity [Handwritten signature, Stanistaw] Nowak.

Translated from the Polish by Theresa Prout 25 Pagination error: there is no number 188.

The Institute of National Remembrance Slanders Jacek Kuron 2

WOJCIECH CZUCHNOWSKI and SEWERYN BLUMSZTAJIN “THE CHIEF MOTIVE [behind the commandos’ actions] was not a deeply moral one’; they were only concerned with taking part in ‘a struggle for power of two rival factions inside the PZPR’. The Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamieci Narodowej; IPN) published an article containing such statements about the leaders of March ’68.' According to Professor Henryk Samsonowicz, this article brings historical research into disrepute. ‘It brings disgrace upon historical research’, adds Professor Michat Gtowinski (see below). ‘Commandos’ was the popular name given to a group of students and intellectuals who organized a demonstration against the ban on Adam Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve (Dzitady) 11 Warsaw in January 1968 and a famous rally in the

University of Warsaw on 8 March which culminated in militia stormtroopers entering the university and beating up the students with their truncheons. This was followed by a wave of student protests and strikes against censorship and political repression all across Poland. Even secondary school pupils joined the protests (for example in Tarnow). These demonstrations were suppressed with force by the militia and party activists and resulted in trials and prison sentences for some of the protesters. Many were expelled from the university or lost their jobs. They became the target of attacks by the communist media. The crackdown

on the ‘commandos’ became part of the antisemitic purges in Poland. It also launched a huge anti-intelligentsia campaign in the press by followers of General Mieczystaw Moczar, the minister of internal affairs at that time. In historiography, the March events are seen as a patriotic rising by students in defence of democracy and have been recorded alongside other crucial dates on the road to independence.

Published in Gazeta Wyborcza, 12 Feb. 2006. ' For an English translation, see above, pp. 317-25.

The IPN Slanders Kuron 327 GONTARCZYK’S CONTRIBUTION For the past fortnight, an article entitled ‘A Contribution to the Discussions about

the Events of March 1968’ has been available on the official IPN website () and has also been printed in volume 2 of The Repression Apparatus in People’s Poland 1944-1989 (Aparat represji w Polsce Ludowe] 1944-1989). The article is a ‘contribution’ only in its title. Its author, Piotr Gontarczyk, a historian and deputy director of IPN’s archives, recommends near the end of his article that his arguments ‘be introduced’ into ‘academic circulation’.

Gontarczyk’s text is an analysis of a report by a Security Service (Stuzba Bezpieczenstwa; SB) functionary quoting an account by the agent Leslaw Maleszka. Maleszka took part in Jacek Kuron’s meeting with representatives of the

Krakéw opposition in November 1977. At these meetings, among other things, Kuron described the events of March 1968. In his report, the Secret Service agent focused on this part of his account.

Gontarczyk states that a ‘fundamentally different’ picture of 1968 from the hitherto accepted view emerges from this Secret Service report. He also states that this is a much more credible picture than that view, because this account was a relatively early one and Maleszka ‘deserves the highest credence from the point of view of knowing his source’. For Gontarczyk, the report of the conversation with Maleszka attached to the

text is made the basis for formulating his revolutionary arguments: ‘the chief motive was not a deeply moral one’. Neither were the actions intended to show support for the values of Pan Cogito,” but rather were part of a struggle between two factions inside the Polish United Workers’ Party. ‘Independence, freedom, or other transcendental values were less important’, writes the IPN employee, and he adds: “The “commandos” acted because they wanted the “party revisionists” . . . to prevail over Mieczyslaw Moczar’s faction.’ As ‘unreservedly orthodox Marxists’,

‘the “commandos” were acting in defence of communist internationalism and against the “nationalism” that was seen as a threat to the party’. Gontarczyk also writes that by defending Forefathers’ Eve, one of the main works of Polish literature, what the ‘commandos’ really wanted was ‘to use the petition to limit the effect of nationalist and patriotic slogans’. According to Gontarczyk the students ‘were not that keen to defend national values’. ‘[T hey joined 1n, first of all, by taking part in the internal conflict in the PZPR’, Gontarczyk concludes.

DENUNCIATIONS AS A PRICELESS SOURCE OF INFORMATION For the IPN historian, the Security Service agent’s note is a faithful reproduction of Kuron’s views, even if he questions the credibility of the conclusions reached 2 Reference to one of Zbigniew Herbert’s poems from his cycle Pan Cogito, where Pan Cogito

, becomes an advocate of uncompromising truth at any price.

328 Wojciech Czuchnowski and Seweryn Blumsztajn by Professor Jerzy Eisler (currently also employed by IPN), author of the most extensive monograph about March. Among other things, Gontarczyk finds fault with Eisler because the latter based his work primarily on accounts from participants in the events, including Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski. But is it possible to draw reliable conclusions only from the Security Service notes?

This is clearly stated in Gontarczyk’s introduction: ‘The SB documents also include information about facts which form part of our history that was difficult or

even impossible to verify earlier... . Such documents containing factual written accounts and events (known from apartment and telephone bugging, stenographic records of meetings, or reports by particularly trustworthy secret collaborators) are enormously valuable at this time.’

SAMSONOWICZ: ILL WILL OR IGNORANCE? ‘This text brings historical scholarship into disrepute. I have an extremely negative impression of the professional training of the author of this material. One cannot

| set the SB report from a friendly meeting against Eisler’s wide-ranging scholarly work containing a wealth of documents and witness accounts’, remarks Professor Henryk Samsonowicz, the Nestor of Polish historians and democratic opposition activist during the Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa; PRL), whom we asked to carry out an academic assessment of the IPN publication. ‘Even in their first year, students are taught that any source used by a historian should undergo critical analysis. Above all, this applies to secret service documents, including the SB. Uncritical treatment of such materials would be as meaningless as citing articles from 7Trybuna Ludu® as an all-embracing source of information about the PRL period’, explains Samsonowicz, who emphasizes that the SB report is a third-hand account. “There is no way of knowing how much of it consists of interpretation by the agent and how much originates from ideas of the student protest conveyed to SB functionaries through official channels.”* Professor Samsonowicz adds that when Gontarczyk quotes evidence that the ‘commandos’ were motivated by Marxist and not patriotic reasons, he refers to an expression from their petition to the Sejm against the Forefathers’ Eve ban. In it they referred to the ‘progressive tradition of the Polish nation’. The author does not take account of the times and the language of that period. After all, Kuron and Modzelewski’s letter to the party, which landed them in prison, was written in a similar style and was an act of resistance against the totalitarian regime. This is one more mistake resulting either from inadequate preparation or from ill will, 3 The official party daily. During the 1970s and 1980s its circulation was up to 1.2 million. The newspaper was completely subordinated to the PZPR. It treated successive PZPR first secretaries completely uncritically and was the chief party propaganda machine; its role was slightly reduced only when television took over the main PRL propaganda role in the 1970s. 4 Personal communications.

The IPN Slanders Kuron 329 according to Samsonowicz. He sums up by saying: ‘Either the author is making basic errors when analyzing the source, or he is adopting a well-known political position dating back to former times under the pretext of academic research.’

GLOWINSKI: MURKY ALLEGATIONS OF MOCZAR’S PROPAGANDA

Without indicating the source, we read fragments of Gontarczyk’s paper to Professor Michat Glowinski, the best communist propaganda language specialist in Poland. ‘It sounds like it came from Nasz Dziennik,° but it also echoes the language of

Moczar’s press during the late 1960s. In any case, it is horrible to hear it’, said Glowinski, who could not believe that the quoted material came from an IPN publication.

‘I see a depressing continuation of Moczar’s propaganda in these allegations that present a conspiratorial world view where rebels have base intentions and are foreign agents. Even worse nonsense was written about the “commandos” in 1968 and it still continues. The League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich Rodzin; LPR) and people such as Zygmunt Wrzodak have returned to it. Posting something like this on the IPN website brings this institution into disrepute’, says Glowinsk1.

WHO IS GONTARCZYK? Gontarczyk is a 36-year-old historian renowned for his extreme right-wing views. In his publications he has attacked the IPN’s findings concerning the Polish inhabitants’ co-responsibility in the Jedwabne crime. In a book entitled 7ajne oblicze AL, GL 1 PPR (The Secret Face of the People’s Army (Armia Ludowa; AL), People’s

Guard (Gwardia Ludowa; GL), and Polish Workers’ Party (Polska Partia Robotnicza; PPR)) (which he co-authored with Marek J. Chodakiewicz and Leszek Zebrowski) he treats materials obtained by coercion and sometimes under torture by the Stalinist Secret Service (Urzad Bezpieczenstwa; UB) investigators as a reliable source of information about that period. Gontarczyk’s books form the stock of antisemitic bookshops and mailing houses such as the Warsaw ‘Antyk’ bookshop. Recently Gontarczyk has been appointed to a high post in the IPN. His nomina-

tion surprised even those who sympathize with IPN’s new chairman, Janusz Kurtyka. ‘Gontarczyk has been appointed to this post deliberately. It 1s a kind of demonstration’, says one historian in the Institute, who wishes to remain anonymous. ° A Catholic, very conservative, and nationalist daily published since 1998.

330 Wojciech Czuchnowski and Seweryn Blumsztajn IPN: VIEWS, A GREAT NUMBER OF THEM We asked the IPN if, by displaying Gontarczyk’s views on their website, it identifies itself with them. We also asked if the Institute recommends the use of their webpage to history teachers in schools and Gontarczyk’s article as an honest educational aid that could be used in history lessons. ‘In the columns of its publications, the IPN presents the views of many historians who work from documents and they have a right to evaluate and interpret them’, replied Dorota Koczwanska-Kalita, the Institute’s spokeswoman. She also explained that the materials recently posted on the internet ‘were intended to serve the purpose of open discussion and they fulfilled this function’. ‘Each academic article based on documents may serve as a subject for the discussion of recent history within the framework of freedom of academic research and publications’, wrote KoczwanskaKalita. “The IPN carries out its educational activities by editing educational materials and various forms of collaboration with teachers’, the spokeswoman assured us.

COMMENTARY—GONTARCZYK OR GONTARZ— BY SEWERYN BLUMSZTAJN It appeared as if by now some matters were left behind me. I thought that never

again would anyone dare repeat the nonsense of the March propagandists— Gontarz, Kakol, Kura, or others belonging to this rabble. This was their favourite argument, namely, that the ‘commandos’ or a group of young people at Warsaw University who started the so-called March events were concerned only with supporting former Stalinists in the PZPR against the current of the healthy, patriotic core of the party. In every newspaper I received in my cell in March 1968, I was able to read: Jewish children of the UB and red bourgeoisie have betrayed Polish youth, making them go out in the streets in the name of Zionist interests. What is to be done and how many years must Kuron or Modzelewski spend in prison to put a stop to any whippersnapper daring to question their patriotism? When I reread all this as an academic argument in a publication by the Institute of National Remembrance, I have the feeling that no barrier of decency and pro-

fessionalism exists in this institution any longer. In March 1968 all this was unpleasant, not least because such press articles translated into long prison sentences. But in those days we were described in this way by the regime’s leaders and propagandists whom we fell foul of. Mr Gontarczyk, on the other hand, is backed up by the authority of a Polish democratic institution, which makes it much more painful. And terrifying. Because Mr Gontarczyk is the deputy director of IPN’s archives. Archivists in this institution have the power to pronounce civil death sentences against which there 1s no appeal. Translated from the Polish by Theresa Prout

I Am, Therefore I Write Uses and Abuses MACIEJ RYBINSKI YESTERDAY’S Gazeta Wyborcza published Wojciech Czuchnowskv’s article “The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Slanders Jacek Kuron’ as well as a com-

mentary by Seweryn Blumsztajn, ‘Gontarczyk or Gontarz’. The matter concerns an article by the IPN historian Piotr Gontarczyk about March 1968 based on a Stuzba Bezpieczenstwa (Security Service; SB) report of an account by Leslaw Maleszka, or ‘Ketman’, about a conversation with Jacek Kuron in 1977. From this document Gontarczyk concludes that the March events were organized by the ~ communist commandos led by Kuron as part of the struggle of the party revisionists with Moczar’s nationalist faction. I am speaking out on this subject as an ordinary rank-and-file participant in those events in order to say that, like thousands of my colleagues, I never took part in any factional battles while in the Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza (Polish United Workers’ Party; PZPR). I did take part in actions to demonstrate disagreement with the Polish reality of those times, particularly in the cultural sphere. We regarded both Moczar’s ‘Partisans’ and Gomutka’s bureaucrats equally as a threat to Poland and its national interests. We would not have taken to the streets for either faction. I also cannot accept that we were nothing but a blind, helpless tool in Kuron’s demonic hands. Knowing the realities of those times, I also do not believe that he was a main player in the struggle inside the party. This is sheer nonsense. All this amounts to speculations without regard to history. Recently, my colleague from those days, Agnieszka Arnold, and I were reminiscing about an adventurous escape through a window from an SB horde. Bearing in mind that Agnieszka made a film about Jedwabne, this fact provides fertile ground for young historians to indulge in speculations and show what they can do. And the fact that one of the most active participants in the March events in Warsaw University, Janusz KorwinMikke, is today a monument to liberalism could also be milked for all it is worth. At the same time, using Gontarczyk’s text to devalue the IPN archives and cast doubt on the research being carried out cannot be justified. Moreover, researchers must not be deprived of their right to interpret material. If it is absurd, one should First published in Rzeczpospolita, 13 Feb. 2006.

332 Macie] Rybinski argue. If we have freedom to appraise the present, so must we also have freedom to evaluate the past. Such an approach carries with it a risk of being wrong.

Finally, the source of all this is Leslaw Maleszka, a member of Gazeta Wyborcza’s editorial staff. One could ask him what Kuron actually said at that time

and what he himself told the SB agent. I am counting strongly on Maleszka. Perhaps he is not quite as implausible as the rest of the SB. Translated from the Polish by Theresa Prout

Selective Indignation RAFAL ZIEMKIEWICZ GAZETA WYBORCZA reports with indignation that the ‘IPN [Instytut Pamieci Narodowej; Institute of National Remembrance] is slandering Jacek Kuron’. Yet in the title itself there is slander, because, apart from the legitimacy of such a statement, it is not the IPN that is ‘slandering’, but a specific historian. It would be like advertising that once notorious book by Dariusz Ratajczak under the title: ‘Opole

University denies the Holocaust’. But let us ignore the title. The entire text penned by Wojciech Czuchnowski betrays an enormous oversensitivity about any statements about Jacek Kuron that are not pronounced while genuflecting and, ina

commentary by Seweryn Blumsztajn, attention is drawn to the closeness of Gontarczyk’s surname with Gontarz, the March propagandist, and the historian is described as a ‘whippersnapper’. The slander is supposedly embodied in the statement that, while Kuron organized the student protests in 1968, the objective of the so-called commandos was to get involved in the internal factional struggles of the PZPR [Polska Zjednoczona Partia Robotnicza; Polish United Workers’ Party]. Kuron himself was supposed to have said that to an SB [Stuzba Bezpieczenstwa;

Security Service] secret informer a few years later, who reported it, and Gontarczyk quotes this report. And it is precisely the fact of referring to the secret police files that has led the authors of Gazeta Wyborcza to a state of moral turmoil. The authors of Gazeta Wyborcza insist that, in principle, the denunciations in the SB operational archives are not credible. How can they be sure? Perhaps they checked the source. For it just so happens that the name of the informer, whose denunciation of Kuron was used by Gontarczyk, is Lestaw Maleszka, who, while apologizing, continued to tell outrageous lies after being unmasked, and remains an editorial colleague of Czuchnowski and Blumsztajn. For some reason, only known to the editorial board, the actual perpetrator of Kuron’s ‘slander’ is being protected from ‘revenge’. The only one who arouses indignation is the historian who investigates and quotes his denunciations. Wyborcza’s anti-lustration hysteria has only succeeded in tying itself into knots, without even realizing it. First published in the Polish Newsweek, 26 Feb. 2006.

Attention, Moczar Lives! An Interview with Karol Modzelewski ADAM LESZCZYNSKI KaROL MODZELEWSKI, a medieval historian, was born in 1937 1n Moscow.

From 1959 to 1964 he worked as an assistant in the Department of History, University of Warsaw. In 1964 he was arrested for being the co-author (with Jacek

Kuron) of the ‘Open letter to PZPR members’ and sentenced to three and a half years in prison. He was arrested again in March 1968 and sentenced again to three and a half years. During 1980—1 he became a ‘Solidarity’ activist. He was interned

during martial law and then arrested and imprisoned until 1984. From 1989 to 1991 he was a senator from the Parliamentary Citizens’ Club list, and from 1992 to 1995 a Labour Union politician. He was awarded the title of professor in 1990, and in 1998 he received the Order of the White Eagle. His most important publications include Economic Organization of the Piast Dynasty of the roth—13th Centuries

(1975) and Barbarian Europe (2004). Since 2004 he has been a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences.

AL: Recently, Piotr Gontarczyk, an employee of the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamieci Narodowej; IPN), published an article where, among other things, he writes that the initiators of the March 1968

protest were not concerned ‘with a moral stance based on [Zbigniew Herbert’s] Pan Cogito (1974), but rather [it] was a struggle for power of two rival factions inside the PZPR. Independence, freedom, or other transcendental values were less important.’ According to Gontarczyk, the protesting students were nothing more than tools in this contest.

KM: In March 1968 there occurred one of the most complex crises in the history of the Polish People’s Republic. There was no workers’ revolt, as was the case in 1956, 1976, or 1980. Instead, a power struggle developed between the rul-

ing groups which coincided with a conflict between those in power and the intelligentsia and university students. At this juncture, the most influential party and security service circles decided to make use of xenophobic and antisemitic propaganda in the internal contest in order to discredit and 1isolate the student protest internally. First published in Gazeta Wyborcza, 3 Mar. 2006.

An Interview with Karol Modzelewski 335 The ‘commandos’ who initiated the protest were a small student circle. It consisted of several dozen friends from various groups, mainly from Warsaw

University. Some young people from the Theatre Academy who were socially associated with the ‘commandos’ and shared their line of thinking, led by Andrzej Seweryn, organized a demonstration in front of the National Theatre on 30 January 1968. Both in the PZPR University Administration Committee and I think also in the Warsaw one, these young people were called the ‘commandos’.

AL: Why exactly ‘commandos’? KM: Because of their habit of bursting into and interrupting official meetings and asking so-called wrong questions. By doing this, they disrupted the political

and educational models prepared by the party. For example, Walery Namiotkiewicz [at that time the personal secretary of party chief Gomulka| made a historic speech at a large convention commemorating the October revolution in November 1967 which, among other things, included the argument that Soviet policy during the Second World War was in no way incompatible with Polish national interests. It was then that the student Adam Michnik stood up and quoted a speech by Foreign Minister Molotov made after the signing of the Ribbentrop—Molotov pact, where he stated that Poland had finally disappeared from the map of Europe, that ‘bastard of the Versailles Treaty’. Then he asked how, in the lecturer’s opinion, this statement by Molotov expressed Polish national interests. AL: Was he not evicted from the hall? KM: ‘Things were not as bad as that, but the ‘commandos’ irritated the authorities very much. They formed the only clear opposition group within the Warsaw Pact. ‘They also remained under the clear influence of the revisionist postulate that combined ‘real socialism’ with democracy. Its radical version, such as can be found in the open letter to the party written by Jacek Kuron and by myself in 1964, was an emphatic rejection of the system. In this letter we

wrote about the necessity of overthrowing the system by revolutionary means, but we also accused it of trampling on the very ideals that 1t was proclaiming. Thus, we were still connected with the official doctrine by an umbilical cord of these ideals.

AL: Ideals of the left? KM: Of course! Revisionism looked like a leftist movement. In the 1960s, revisionists were still quite numerous among university teachers, but they no longer formed part of the ruling party circles. Coteries still existed, called factions to allow for a bit of growth, but they mainly formed around personnel division lines, sometimes against the slogans of those who wielded power. There was certainly no one there who exhibited the type of thinking typical

336 Adam Leszczynski of the Czech revisionists Dubéek, Smrkovsky, or Kriegel. In short, there were no advocates there of what took the form of the Prague Spring in 1968. The so-called Pulawy group [a PZPR faction postulating partial liberalization of the system], which played a significant role in October 1956, was already in full retreat in the middle 1960s. It was not able to send any type of

signals to the public. ,

AL: What was Wladystaw Gomutka’s position at that time?

KM: You will have to ask someone who is conducting research on the history of

the party about this and preferably not in the light of the denunciations collected in the IPN archives. Certainly, the Ministry of Internal Affairs archives play a role. For example, I have the impression that Gomulka let himself be conned by the Ministry of Internal Affairs reports put on his desk every day. It was probably these materials placed under his nose that gave rise to his famous speech at the Trade Union Congress where he spoke of the Zionist ‘fifth column’. He also said similar things in the Congress Hall on 19 March 1968, but it appears that the party activists gathered there made it clear to him that he had gone down a road that might lead to disaster and cause power to slip from his grasp. AL: Who was supposed to take over? KM: Mieczystaw Moczar, the minister of internal affairs since 1964 and leader of the ‘Partisan’ faction, banding together the former ‘consolidators of people’s power’. ‘Today he is frequently referred to as a nationalist, which, in my opin-

ion, he was not, even though his faction used chauvinist rhetoric. It was barely disguised antisemitism, in conformity with Soviet phraseology officially called ‘anti-Zionism’. At no point did Moczar’s faction question Soviet

domination in Poland or aim to expand Polish sovereignty. Thus, in this sense it is meaningless to talk about a nationalist or ‘patriotic’ faction. At most what can be said on the basis of such rhetoric is that what Moczar was proposing was ‘national communism’, not because it was similar to Titoism, but on the contrary, because its rhetoric was reminiscent of national socialism.

Moczar’s action was aimed at Gomulka, and not at the more liberal ‘Pulawy’ faction, which no longer counted. Clearly, Moczar wanted to get rid of those who still held any sort of position. He was planning a great purge in

, order to gain the support of a new generation of party apparatchiks. Young wolves from the ‘ZMP generation’ [the Zwiazek Mlodziezy Polskiej; Union of Polish Youth] were eagerly looking for positions and, from 1956 onwards,

not even the Central Committee typists had been replaced. The young activists were becoming more and more discontented. ‘They were just looking for a banner to march under.

An Interview with Karol Modzelewski 337 AL: However, Moczar lost. Why?

KM: In my opinion Russian misgivings played an important part in this. Stefan Jedrychowski, one of the last ‘Pulawy’ people still holding a position in the PZPR, understood and formulated these well. During the Central Committee plenum in July 1968 he said that ‘nationalism in Poland can have many faces but, in the end, it will show its anti-Soviet claws’. Of all the leaders, Gomutka was the most zealous advocate of intervention in Czechoslovakia, thus demonstrating his absolute loyalty. As a result, he finally managed to shunt Moczar onto a siding. But in March this contest was just entering its critical phase.

AL: Why is it that the highest authorities in a country with a population of over 30 million were so perturbed by a group of students? What harm could a few provocative questions at meetings do? KM: And why did the authorities feel so terrified by the dissemination of the ‘open letter to the party’ to put us in prison for three and a half years? Just fourteen typewritten copies of a letter because we did not even have a copier! Of course the text ended up in the West, was published by Ku/tura in Paris, and was read on Radio Free Europe, and even this may seem insignificant. But the effect of the letter was that of a bomb blowing up the dam which forced the population to keep silent. This is why the ‘commandos’ were important. But their role must not be exaggerated. Their mass public actions such as protests against cancelling performances of Forefathers’ Eve (Dziady) and the public meeting at Warsaw University on 8 March were really for self-protection. In general, within the scope of the social conflict between the party and the intelligentsia, it was a kind of refusal by the intelligentsia to be deprived of what it considered to be its achievement, namely, a margin of cultural and academic freedom. In comparison with other communist countries, we had a much wider range of creative and academic freedom. The authorities used this as a kind of safety valve. Within a limited professional sphere they allowed the intellectuals a

| degree of freedom in order not to antagonize them. But when they noticed that these freedoms were becoming not just a valve but a crack releasing pop-

ular discontent, the view that such freedoms should be abolished began to prevail within the ruling group. Among other things, these freedoms involved the appointment of university rectors and deacons, the ability of departments to recommend staff decisions and curriculum, and guarantees for students and research workers who were threatened with dismissal for political reasons. This could not be done without a public disciplinary procedure where the verdict was issued by academic staff and where the accused had the right to choose their own defence. This is why the authorities did not manage to expel Adam Michnik and his

338 Adam Leszczynsk ‘commando’ friends from the university, even though they tried to do it on two occasions. The authorities were not very pleased about this. AL: How did the fact that ‘commandos’ continued to be influenced by revisionism affect the March protest?

KM: This fact was of no great importance. The first event that triggered the protest was the ban on Forefathers’ Eve, an extremely upsetting thing for everyone, for the Warsaw branch of the Polish Writers’ Union as well as for the students. And the rally at the university on 8 March was a reaction to the breach by the rector—albeit following a proposal by the minister—of the

Act on Higher Education protecting students against arbitrary expulsion from the university for political reasons. This had to do with the expulsion of Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer from Warsaw University without any disciplinary procedure, while, at the same time, the rector said that he was treating it as an exception, but, if need be, he was prepared to treat it as a precedent. In academic circles the fact that a Higher Education Act was in preparation which would completely abolish autonomy was an open secret. Regardless of their convictions, the ‘commandos’ behaved in line with the entire intellectual community. Abolition of this island of professional freedom left to the intelligentsia could not pass without protests. At the same time the protesting writers and students treated this margin of creative and academic freedoms as an alternative to civil rights. So the initiators of the protest wrote and said that they were defending civil rights and constitutional freedoms under threat by the policies of the authorities. AL: Did the ‘commandos’ lead this protest? KM: No. Not only were they few in number, but after the rally of 8 March, they were being arrested. Their role had been to ignite the whole thing. The mass student movement proceeded without them. Later on, they attracted attention, as many

Opposition activists came from their ranks, including Antoni Macierewicz, whose role in this group had been peripheral but who was also arrested in 1968. After the rally, Poland was flooded with an unprecedented wave of propaganda modelled on Stalinist campaigns and Nazi rhetoric. This was not sur-

prising, as it was the work of people with experience, such as Klaudiusz Hrabyk, a pre-war extreme right journalist. This propaganda did not originate in 1968 and did not abate when Moczar lost the struggle for power. Its centres of activity remained among the Security Service workers and parts of the party apparatus, which was on the ascendant at that time. Both then as well as later on, extreme right nationalist emigration groups were under the clear influence of this communo-fascist propaganda, a fact that brings their mental and political talents into disrepute because, after all, if one may paraphrase a recent well-known speech, it really was pseudo-fascism, and the rightists were beguiled by its supposed similarity to fascism.

An Interview with Karol Modzelewski 339 The word ‘communo-fascism’ must be attributed to the late Professor Edward Lipinski, who called the newspaper Zolnierz Wolnosci [Soldier

of Freedom] published by the Political Directorate of the Polish Army ‘communo-fascist’ at the Solidarity Convention in September 1981. This newspaper used clichés from the March propaganda in their struggle against the ‘S’ Reserve Officers’ Circle. They were cultivated in extreme despotic communist groups such as the ‘Grunwald’ Patriotic Association or Rzeczywistosc (‘Reality’), a publication of this group. They are going strong to this day among the extreme Polish right. This cliché is quite simple. It treats the March conflict between the party and the intelligentsia as a simple shift in the internal conflict at the highest echelons of the party interpreted as a struggle between national patriots and Jewish Stalinists. ‘The thesis that the ‘commandos’ were associated with one of the factions was popular because society was convinced that nothing could happen without the party’s, or at least the faction’s, will. It also suited the needs of the Moczar faction very well. What is interesting is the fact that these communists discredited their opponents by presenting them as a variant of

their own communist establishment. This communo-fascist propaganda stereotype continues to be repeated by the extreme right to this day.

AL: Not only by the right. By historians as well. KM: Which historian? AL: ‘Those like Piotr Gontarczyk.

KM: Apparently he has defended his Ph.D. thesis recently, but I don’t know where. It’s true that the text of Gontarczyk that you mention does, in fact, repeat the communo-fascist propaganda against the ‘commandos’ group. It cannot be denied that this text keeps safely within the confines of free

speech. Just like the publications of Jerzy Robert Nowak or Kazimierz Kakol, who recently published a book about 1968 where he writes the same things he wrote as a party propagandist at that time. However, Kakol is closer to communism within this communo-fascist agglomeration, even though neither seems alien to him. Today, at the very most, only the Auschwitz lie and Mein Kampf fall outside the limits of free speech.

However, while keeping safely within the confines of free speech, Gontarczyk’s publication does not keep within the boundaries of historical research. Its text also differs from Kakol’s book in that the IPN posted it on the web as a teaching aid. The IPN is a state institution and everything it publishes bears an official hallmark. An IPN spokeswoman came out in defence of this text and said that it was intended to initiate a scholarly discus-

sion and that it has achieved just that. The spokeswoman referred to Professor Henryk Samsonowicz’s statement, who quite rightly denied that Gontarczyk’s article had any scholarly value.

340 Adam Leszczynsk In historical research—lI don’t like this term but it is commonly used—the boundaries of free speech are narrower than in politics or ideology. Scholars do not tend to hold discussions with ignoramuses. One also does not discuss

propaganda that may become the subject of research but does not enjoy equal rights with scholarly research.

AL: Where did Gontarczyk go wrong?

KM: His entire text is embarrassing from the point of view of knowledge of sources. He considers a paper by a Security Service officer who only refers to what he was told by the agent Leslaw Maleszka, a source that he considers above criticism. At times he quotes directly some of Maleszka’s statements. He has not given any thought whatsoever to the question whether all this has

any connection with reality. He accepts Security Office dossiers as gospel, as | IPN historians who do not have sufficient professional qualifications sometimes do. This case relates to a paper by a Security Service officer in charge of

, Maleszka who, in his official report, reiterated the propaganda stereotype that was always present in the Security Service records. But Gontarczyk treats his source as proof of the authenticity of the Security Service stereotype!

According to this stereotype, Gontarczyk describes the ‘commandos’’ engagement in the protests against the ban on Forefathers’ Eve as a political initiative that did not originate in any convictions but rather in tactical factional

requirements. As proof, he offers the fact that the protest letter written to the Sejm mentions the censorship of ‘progressive national traditions’, and states that this is due to the influence of newspeak. This strange explanation is contradicted by the ‘commandos’’ chanted slogan (on my initiative): ‘Independence without censorship’, not resembling newspeak at all. Gontarczyk suggests that this is an unreliable piece of information derived from stories told no earlier than the late 1980s and recorded by Jerzy Eisler, whereas any historian

may easily find this information in the grounds stated for the judgment of January 1969 against Jacek Kuron and myself by the Provincial Court (document reg. no. IV K 99/68). Gontarczyk is either unaware of this (in which case

we are dealing with ignorance), or is deliberately passing over it in silence, which is typical for people involved in propaganda but disqualifies anyone claiming to be a member of the scholarly fraternity.

If the IPN publicly launches such a text, if its author has been appointed deputy director of the archive department, and if the IPN spokeswoman defends the scholarly value of a publication as if she did not know the difference between a scholarly and a propaganda text and its president remains

silent, then one is forced to draw conclusions not about Gontarczyk but about the Institute. One is forced to conclude that the IPN under its new management gives no guarantee of scholarly reliability.

An Interview with Karol Modzelewski 341 This conclusion is important. It is useful to know this when a new act 1s

under preparation by the Law and Justice Parliamentary Club (Prawo 1 Sprawiedliwos¢; PiS) which is supposed to charge the IPN with the task of conducting a mass extra-judicial survey of citizens. Mr Gontarczyk is the deputy head of the archive department and he came to the IPN from the Public Interest Spokesman’s Office. Thus one can presume that he will be in charge of it. If so, then this survey will not be very reliable. Translated from the Polish by Theresa Prout

Between the Institute of National Remembrance and Gazeta Wyborcza The Cracked Code , TADEUSZ WITKOWSKI TO MY MIND, there is nothing particularly distinctive about Polish political dis-

cussion, but every time I read something in the daily press that reflects some group-interest conflict, I get the impression that I used to encounter a similar style of holding discussions during the times of the Polish People’s Republic. It is quite true that in those days words had very specific meanings, so that the classic definition of truth was, for all intents and purposes, worthless and a special code was required in order to verify the received message. And the principle of this

verification was, perhaps, best illustrated by the series of popular jokes about Radio Erevan that discussed whether what was being reported by the TASS agency was true. For example, if a radio listener, referring to an announcement by the said agency, asked if it was true that Mercedes cars were being given away in Red Square on the anniversary of the October Revolution, Radio Erevan would reply: ‘Yes, but not on the anniversary of the Revolution but on the birthday of Mikhail Akakievich Putin, director of the nearby kolkhoz; not in Red Square but in the Moscow suburb of Petushki; not Mercedes cars but bicycles, and they were not given away but stolen from the said Mikhail Akakievich and his drinking companion, Pavka Bashmachkin, in front of the off-licence shop.’ I am aware of the fact that my generation may be fed up to the teeth with such jokes, but who knows, they might prove something like the cracked Enigma code during the current spate of journalism paying homage to that produced by TASS.

| On 12 February 2006 Gazeta Wyborcza published an article by Wojciech Czuchnowski entitled “The Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) Slanders Jacek Kuron’ (see above, pp. 326-30). Were any reader of this daily to ask me if what this title says is true, then in a surge of irritation I might possibly reply that, yes, it is true, except that it is not the IPN but one of the historians employed by First published in Gos, 4-11 Mar. 2006.

Between the IPN and Gazeta Wyborcza 343 this institution . . . who is not slandering but praising . . . and not Jacek Kuron, but Lestaw Maleszka, a former employee of the newspaper, for his conscientious performance of his functions as a secret Security Service agent, not least for his narrative talent demonstrated in the report of his meeting with Jacek Kuron which took

place in 1977 in Krakow. But if I were a bit less irritated, I might just correct myself and add: ‘he does not slander but assesses . . . the value of this document which is the Maleszka report in the light of previous knowledge about the student protests of 1968’. But this does not at all mean that I agree one hundred per cent with his assessment.

I am referring to Piotr Gontarczyk’s introduction entitled: ‘A Meeting with Jacek Kuron as Reported by Secret Collaborator “Return” (Lestaw Maleszka): A Contribution to the Discussions about the Events of March 1968’, published together with Maleszka’s report in volume 2 of the IPN journal entitled Aparat represji w Polsce Ludowej 1944-1989 (The Repression Apparatus in People’s Poland 1944-1989 (see above, pp. 317—25)). What is the nature of this account? It refers to a meeting in Krakow in 1977 between Jacek Kuro and a group of those protesters from the Student Solidarity Committee (first in Boguslaw Sonik’s room, then in a smaller gathering in Ziemowit Pochitonow’s residence). ‘The IPN archives contain a report by the secret agent Lestaw Maleszka, who took part in this meeting. A sec-

tion of the report referring to the second part of this meeting, where Kuron describes the course of the protests after Mickiewicz’s Forefathers’ Eve was closed down in the National ‘Theatre, includes comments on the subject of the behind-

the-scenes secret activities of the rebellious communist youth circle connected with Kuron (which was usually referred to as the ‘commandos’). According to the IPN historian, this description contradicts the widely held opinion about the motives behind the commandos’ actions. It was precisely this part of the disquisition that was used by the journalist from Gazeta Wyborcza as a ‘pretext for the vulgar attack’. Piotr Gontarczyk used the word ‘contribution’. This signifies a short academic dissertation intended to provide lesser known details as supplementary material facts ina given field. But clearly, the Gazeta journalist knew better what the article was for, as he wrote: ‘The article is a “contribution” only in the title. Its author, near the end of his text, Piotr Gontarczyk, a historian and deputy director of the

IPN archives department, recommends that his ideas be introduced into “academic circulation”.’ My own experiences in March 1968 have made me distrustful and I have developed a habit of checking that I have not succumbed to an illusion

when reading anything improbable. So it turned out this time. It turned out that Wojciech Czuchnowski is, quite simply, lying. Dr Gontarczyk’s text refers only to

the introduction of the published document, that is, the account by Leslaw Maleszka (‘Return’), into academic circulation. But, worse still, this misrepresentation cannot simply be put down to a spur of the moment polemic impulse. In summarizing Gontarczyk’s commentary, the Gazeta Wyborcza journalist lies, as it

344 Tadeusz. Witkowski happens repeatedly and with premeditation. Because, as I have already said, it is hard to believe any of it, and I will quote the relevant paragraphs from both statements to compare the original with the summary.

THE ANATOMY OF DECEIT Piotr Gontarczyk writes: What picture of ‘March’ did Kuron present at the Krakow meeting? He portrays the events as a vast provocation by Mieczystaw Moczar’s nationalist faction in an attempt to take power in the PZPR. Nevertheless it suffered a crushing defeat owing to the part played by the ‘commandos’. But the historiographic conclusions are not the most significant thing here. In fact, the picture of March ’68 that emerges from the Warsaw guest’s tale is fundamentally different from the one found in Eisler’s book. It indicates that the chief motive was not a deeply moral one. In this case, tactical ambitions seem to be more significant, for it became necessary to make a choice, as the ‘commandos’ realized that the ‘atmosphere at the university was becoming such that sooner or later it would end in demonstrations and that this was inevitable’. Kuron’s account also indicates that it had nothing to do with a moral stance based on [Zbigniew Herbert’s] Pan Cogito (1974), but rather was a struggle for power of two rival factions inside the PZPR. Independence, freedom, or rather transcendental values were less important. The ‘commandos’ acted because they wanted the ‘party revisionists’ (with whom Kuron’s circle was connected) to prevail over Mieczystaw Moczar’s faction. In a wider ideological context, ‘as unreservedly orthodox Marxists’, the ‘commandos’ were acting in defence of communist internationalism and against the ‘nationalism’ that was seen as a threat to the party.

This is how Wojciech Czuchnowski summarizes the above section: For Gontarczyk, the report of the conversation with Maleszka attached to the text is made the basis for formulating his revolutionary arguments: ‘the chief motive was not a deeply moral one’. Neither were the actions intended to show support for the values of Pan Cogito but rather were part of a struggle between two factions inside the Polish United Workers’ Party. ‘Independence, freedom, or other transcendental values were less important’ writes the IPN employee and he adds: “The “commandos” acted because they wanted the “party revisionists” . . . to prevail over Mieczyslaw Moczar’s faction.’ As ‘unreservedly orthodox Marxists’, the ‘ “commandos” were acting in defence of communist internationalism and

against the “nationalism” that was seen as a threat to the party’. Let me just say that the ellipses are not mine but the journalist’s. He introduced them anywhere where verba dicendi and other words in Gontarczyk’s statements have a metalinguistic character and testify to the fact that the IPN historian relates Jacek Kuron’s views, summarized by Maleszka. If the reader does not look at the original, he may reach the wrong conclusion that these are Piotr Gontarczyk’s opinions. Thus we are dealing with a common scam, but one not big enough to have any propaganda value. “The greater the lie, the greater the chances that some-

Between the IPN and Gazeta Wyborcza 345 one will believe it’, said a politician with a German surname. We are lucky to be living in times when it is more difficult to tell big lies.

From the point of view of propaganda, there is nothing more important than historical truth. Joseph Goebbels said that it is neither truth nor lies that determine the effectiveness of persuasion, but credibility. For forming opinions he recommended using expressive platitudes and emphasized that these should be uttered by persons of authority. Because Piotr Gontarczyk towers over any Gazeta journalists in terms of his education and academic achievement, to underpin his argument Czuchnowski uses the authority of an eyewitness, Seweryn Blumsztajn, —

who immediately asks the rhetorical question: ‘how many years must Kuron or Modzelewski spend in prison to put a stop to any whippersnapper daring to question their patriotism?’ and he juxtaposes the surname of the IPN historian with the surname of a party propagandist of those days, giving the readers to understand that Gontarczyk is nothing more than a diminutive Gontarz (a rhetorical figure called paronomasia or pun). Henryk Samsonowicz, a history professor, and Michail Glowinski, an eminent literary scholar, also joined the debate. There is no doubt that both of them know what they are talking about, but their experiences of those times are somewhat dif-

ferent. During the time when students were being expelled from universities (1968), Professor Samsonowicz held the post of the History Department deputy dean of Warsaw University and was a member of the Historical Section of the Educational Committee of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ — Party in 1969. As far as I know, Michat Glowinski did not belong to any such organization and he is the author of an anti-communist book entitled Marcowe gadanie. However, the problem is that he had not read Maleszka’s report preceded by Gontarczyk’s introduction and could only utter an opinion based on fragments heard on the telephone which sounded ‘horrible’. What was the purpose of this smear campaign, as academic monographs have no chance of reaching a wider reading public anyway and they can only have an impact among specialists? I think that this has not so much to do with Jacek Kuron as with Piotr Gontarczyk and his, according to the Gazeta journalist, ‘extreme right-wing views’: the fact that in Czuchnowski’s opinion ‘he has attacked the

IPN’s findings concerning the Polish inhabitants’ co-responsibility in the Jedwabne crime’ (which is not true, for Gontarczyk only challenged Jan Tomasz Gross’s findings, which, as an IPN investigation proved, turned out to be false); that he is the co-author of 7ajne oblicze AL, GL 1 PPR (‘The Secret Face of the People’s Army, People’s Guard, and Polish Workers’ Party’); and (most deserving of condemnation!) he had recently held ‘a high post in the IPN’. To dispel all doubts, the journalist quotes an anonymous historian at the Institute, according to whom ‘Gontarczyk has been appointed to this post deliberately. It is a kind of

demonstration’. That is all there is to this whole mystery: the wrong person appointed to the right position but not one of us...

346 Tadeusz Witkowski ‘PROGRESSIVE TRADITIONS’ BUT A POLISH QUESTION There 1s no doubt that Czuchnowskzi’s article is not worthy of a rejoinder; however,

the question of historical truth and knowledge about those times still remains. Because not everything is obvious. It 1s quite possible that March 1968 originated as a provocation by General Moczar, the Minister of Internal Affairs of that time, but the events began to grow out of his control. In my opinion, the origins of the commandos’ activities during 1967—8 are indisputable. On the other hand, the story of how their group evolved politically, adapted slogans similar to those of the independence circles, and also its rapprochement with Catholic circles, and, more precisely, with WigZ and Znak in the post-March period, is not obvious. I

think that two articles written by Leszek Kolakowski in 1973, ‘Sprawa polska’ (“The Polish Question’) and “Odwet sacrum w kulturze swieckiey’ (“The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture’), can be accepted as the symbolic boundary in

the political discourse of this grouping (at this time Jacek Kuron and the most active commandos had already been released). At the very most one can seek a harbinger of later changes in the leftist ethos in the period of the March events and

those preceding March 1968. , The rhetoric used in the petitions following the closing down of Mickiewicz’s forefathers’ Eve in the National Theatre does not contribute a lot to the issue. The linguistic imagery of the protest ‘against the policy of cutting oneself off from the progressive traditions of the Polish nation’ simply reminds one of the language used in secondary schools of those times. At that time progressive and reactionary romanticism was discussed in Polish lessons. Had someone staged Krasinski’s The Undivine Comedy, with its Holy Trinity trenches and Choir of Converts, at that time and if for political reasons the authorities had decided to close the play down, it would probably not have led to protests. Mickiewicz produced quite different associations. On the one hand he was a symbol of the opening up to Jewish culture and, on the other, as the author of Part III of the Forefathers’ Eve, he became part of the canon of the anti-Russian tradition. One American Slavist said to me after reading this work that she had never seen anything as hostile towards Russia before. Whatever one’s views, one has to accept the fact that after the Six-Day War in the Middle East, groups allied with party revisionists who gathered around the so-

called Pulawy group had no reasons left to love Big Brother. The Israeli military

victory over the Arabs who had been supported by the Soviet Union caused Moscow not just to order its brotherly countries to break off diplomatic relations with Israel (only Romania managed to break ranks), but also to start itself an ‘antiZionist’ campaign and give its assent to comrades from brotherly parties to carry out appropriate purges at home. This was the time when the fate of the circles

from which the commandos emerged was sealed. By March only the remaining survivors were being liquidated. It is not easy to say to what extent young people from Kuron’s circle were aware of the fact that

Between the IPN and Gazeta Wyborcza 347 inevitable defeat awaited them, but there is no doubt that Moscow policies were reinforcing anti-Soviet sentiments in the group and this, in turn, could not remain

unnoticed by persons outside the circle whose line of thought was directed towards independence. It was only a few years later that political conclusions were being drawn from these facts but, already in March, a chance of reaching an agreement began to emerge. There were various reasons for going out into the streets

and not just for the commandos derived from Walter scout troops,’ but also for individuals who nowadays are associated with the right, such as Janusz KorwinMikke or Antoni Macierewicz. Surely, this speaks volumes. In his analysis of Jacek Kuron’s statement on the subject of his decision to call a rally on 8 March, Jerzy Eisler wrote: ‘Above all, Kuron’s decision may have been made on moral and not

political grounds.’* This juxtaposition is misleading and this is why Piotr Gontarczyk was right to illustrate what forming opinions solely on the basis of a political moralist’s available auto-commentary can lead to. Politics and morality are concepts of a different order. ‘Their relation to each other is the same as means are to the end or technology to ethics. The fact that a politician begins to write about his moral dilemmas only means that he is including moral problems in his political discourse. And the opposite is also true: keeping silent about ethical questions does not at all mean that someone who is taking political decisions is not being guided by moral principles. As far as the articles published by the commando circles are concerned, it can be said with absolute certainty that large sections were characterized by a moralizing tone. But, clearly, without a basic knowledge of the individual biographies, it would be impossible to ascertain whether or not this was translated into ethical practices. Asking these types of questions in other situations does not make a lot of sense.

MY CONTRIBUTION Can one believe Maleszka’s account? According to Dr Gontarczyk, Boguslaw Sonik, who was present at the meeting with Jacek Kuron, does not question the truth of the described facts. Kuron himself mentions the event in one of his books, but without quoting any details. He writes: The meeting finished [referring to its first part] and then I was taken to a beautiful old house near Krakow. The house belonged to the family of Ziemowit Pochitonow, one of the Student Solidarity Committee spokesmen, and, as it was said, Witos himself had once slept there. Actually, Adam Boniecki was renting a room there and it was there that we sat late

into the night with a group of the most active Student Solidarity Committee members ' The Walter scout troops were a left-wing alternative to the traditional scout movement which took its name from General Karol Swierczewski (pseudonym Walter), who was killed fighting Ukrainian partisans in the immediate post-war period. 2 Marzec 1968: Geneza, przebieg, konsekwencje (Warsaw, 1991), 192.

348 Tadeusz Witkowski drinking red wine and chatting about life in a friendly atmosphere, understanding, and friendship.°

Topics other than just those discussed during more official meetings were discussed in this selected group. In such situations using public discourse would have been quite simply unacceptable. But this is how the rules are. There is always a purpose and sociological technology which is subordinated to it and is known only to the inner circle. But it does not, by any means, mean that a historian should stop researching the former. Quite enough is known about the March events already, but a little less about the motives of the actions taken by people who had nothing to do with the authorities in power at that time but who, nevertheless, came out into the streets. So perhaps | should also have my little say. During the academic year 1967/8, Janusz Pawlowski, a fellow student from the Polish Studies Department of Warsaw University, and I were renting a room in a building on Al. Niepodlegtosci (161) near the intersection with Rakowiecka Street. This address is important because, as it turned out later in March 1968, this building was under observation (Wiodzimierz Brus lived on the floor below) and one night (16 March at 00.45) we were caught carrying a can of

paint and a brush by the Security Service near the Chemistry Department on Wawelska Street. But before this happened, during the period between the ban on Forefathers’ Eve and the 8 March rally, we were taking part in the leaflet distribution war. None of us had anything to do with the commando circles. It seems

that Janusz met Irena Grudzinska (apparently by chance through Andrzej Mencwel) and she invited him to several meetings of the group (I am talking about a less initiated group, but without whose help not a lot could have been achieved).

And this is how it all started. I took the typewriter borrowed from Krzysztof Zaleski (today a well-known theatre director) to Przasnysz outside Warsaw. My mother and wife made many copies of the leaflet and sent them by trusted persons and we posted them mainly on nearby buildings of the Main Agricultural College and Main School of Planning and Statistics (today Main Business School). No one seemed to take much notice of us, a fact that must have made us lower our guard. - One day we were surrounded by a Socialist Youth Union group in the main hall of

the Main School of Planning and Statistics and a scuffle broke out. At that moment, a militia major happened to walk into the building. The young comrades immediately reported to him how they had caught us red-handed, but he (to their surprise!) did not even ask to see our papers and only asked us to leave the premises. It was at about that time that I began to understand how provocation works. After the 8 March rally, protesting students were being arrested; however, before the rally Moczar’s people did everything to provoke large-scale disturbances in order to be able to suppress them by force and crack down on their opponents once

and for all. , |

3 ‘Stellar time’, quoted from . Accessed 4

June 2007.

Between the IPN and Gazeta Wyborcza 349 Because I considered this event to be significant, I told several people about it many years later, including Antoni Macierewicz and . . . Jacek Kuron, of all people. In November 1994 Kuron was invited to visit the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. There was a meeting with a local academic group. Because I was a lecturer

in the Polish language and vice chairman of the local section of the PolishAmerican Community, the hosts of the event asked me to take the Polish visitor to

Orchard Lake and arrange a meeting with the Chancellor of Polskie Zaktady Naukowe, the prelate Stanislaw Milewski. Thus we had quite a bit of time (approximately three hours) for a private conversation about the true story of what happened in March 1968 and we talked in the presence of a third party driving the , car. Of course, he was not surprised by my story, and what I heard at that time coincided to a great extent with Maleszka’s ‘report’. Am I slandering Jacek Kuron

by mentioning this today? If I were in charge of the IPN archives, Gazeta Wyborcza would probably describe me as an iconoclast and representative of the extreme right, a fanatical supporter of lustration, and God only knows what else. Happily, Iam only an independent journalist and publisher. Translated from the Polish by Theresa Prout

‘Gniazdo’ The Moral Bankruptcy of the Security Service TERESA BOGUCKA THE SECURITY SERVICE (Stuzba Bezpieczenstwa; SB) files contain no undisclosed facts about the opposition and its agents. Only the SB certainty that human motives are contemptible and low. And contempt for those who want to be free. The SB gave the poetic name ‘Gniazdo’ (Nest) to the action initiated in 1972 to exercise surveillance over the ‘commandos’ circle, or people who were sent to prison for organizing the March 1968 events. ‘These archives were made available to me by the Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamieci Narodowe}; IPN) as a so-called victim of the ‘Akacja’ case, concerning leaflet-distributing groups from the spring and summer of 1968 (which I described in the 11-12 Mar.

2006 edition of Gazeta Swigteczna). | ‘Akacja’ had a certain dramatic tension connected with finding the leaflets, a criminal investigation, arrests, interrogation, trial, and sentences. Crime and pun-

ishment; operational and judicial success. By contrast, what was involved in ‘Gniazdo’ was surveillance of a well-known circle and preventative measures, that is, the security organs’ everyday routine activities. At the time the action was instituted, this circle involved ten people and their contacts. By the time it was wound up in 1976, it had become a movement linking a large number of circles, which were shortly planning to appoint a Workers’ Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony

, Robotnikow; KOR). So how did it happen that a well-known, monitored, and phone-tapped small group surrounded by agents did not disappear but that quite the reverse happened?

GIEREK AND POLITICAL RELAXATION For those who view this matter in a simple and conspiratorial way, according to which SB was the decisive force in Poland, it is obvious that it was a deliberate con-

cession to the opposition; this view circulated among marginal political circles, First published in Gazeta Wyborcza, 14 Apr. 2006.

The Moral Bankruptcy of the Security Service 351 which, until recently, lacked their own history of resistance against communism. Now it can also be found on public television, frequently supported by various historians. In addition, the excitement generated by the opening of the security apparatus files is beginning to obscure the apparently obvious truth that it was the Communist Party and not the security services that ruled in the Polish People’s Republic (Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa; PRL). So, Edward Gierek, who succeeded the puritanical and doctrinal Gomulka in December 1970, decided, perhaps accepting historical inevitability, to give up ideological dogmatism. He replaced grey egalitarianism with a certain relaxation in the spheres of consumption and hostility to imperialism with a certain opening to the West. He also developed a desire to become a civilized leader who was received in the West. This meant that by the 1970s he was no longer able to arrest opponents. As aresult, he placed the communist system in an internally contradictory position. The nature of communism was such that it required a continuous reinforcement of the fear that had been inculcated during the years of terror, which meant punishment for every insubordination and a mandatory obligation of perpetual declarations of support to make every malcontent feel isolated among the masses who were supporting ‘the party and the government’. Any open or unsuppressed opposition constituted a threat to the whole structure of forced obedience. Thus the SB was faced with an impossible task: to track down the enemies of the regime, but not to subject them to the treatment required by communist doctrine, namely to liquidate them. The historically traditional methods included shooting, eviction, expropriation, arrest, and expulsion from the country. During the 1970s the two latter methods were proposed, but Gierek, man of the world that he was, ruled them out. Consequently, the SB were supposed to see to it that the ‘commandos’ did not disseminate their wickedness but, at the very most, all they could do was to keep harassing them. This gave rise to a strange situation where the authorities were aware of an active opposition circle that no longer had to hide its existence. Moreover, the tenet of isolating opponents made it possible for them not to have to take part in the rituals of support for the Polish United Workers’ Party (PZPR), that 1s, marches, actions, and elections. So this situation turned out to be an advantage, as one could say what one thought without lowering one’s voice and without looking around in fear or running the bath. It was possible to abandon the earlier schizophrenic lifestyle, that is, one way of behaving at home, another outside, one thing privately, another in public. Consequently, even though the ‘commandos’ had no professional prospects, they had some freedom, and many people found this status appealing, thinking that it was worthwhile to give up advancement, a passport, coupons, and other privileges handed out by the party. So the circle grew and lived from meeting to meeting with conversations and discussions held quite openly. Books published

352 Teresa Bogucka abroad but not approved by the censor were circulated with only moderate discretion. The only deeply conspiratorial activity was sending materials and information to the West.

THE ESSENCE OF THE SYSTEM REFLECTED IN A DROPLET The SB’s grappling with this small dissident group can be seen today as an example of the impotence of communism that permeated all aspects of life. For did the PZPR not want productive agriculture and industry and solutions to the problems of queues, meat shortages, and all the other problems that were stirring discontent among the public? Of course it did, but the doctrine of the pre-eminence of public over private and collective over individual made it impossible even to perceive the causes of the perpetual shortages, let alone to make sensible decisions. The same applies to ‘Gniazdo’; even the group to which this cryptonym applied was perceived according to an ideological world view. The ‘commandos’ group was regarded as yet another vector of resistance, an infectious and incurable disease, which explained how anyone could even imagine that communism was not the very best thing that ever happened to Poland. In any case there was no way that any aspect of the regime could be the source of opposition, only the characteristics of its critics. The most important of these was their alienation, due to the mixture of Jewish, intellectual, and noble origins. Anyone with peasant and proletarian roots was regarded as a corrupted victim.

These people were seen as united by unique links whose essence was their hatred of People’s Poland, so perverse that they were even ready to face imprisonment. They were infected by this hatred, seemingly a personal emotion, by outside forces, like Kultura and Radio Free Europe. Thus, blind adherence and subjugation to others when making decisions formed another important link. Everything the former ‘commandos’ did was due to submission to foreign affiliations and to each other. This is why discussions were dubbed political-training sessions; the circle—a supervised group, passing books around—distribution of hostile literature; and meeting new people, or coming to an understanding and speaking at a public meeting, carrying out orders. The selection of individuals for these actions was held to exemplify this view. Thus, there was a core group hostile to the PRL

and socialism led by Adam Michnik, then Jan Litynski, Barbara Torunczyk, Boguslawa Blajfer from the ‘Akacja’ leaflet, myself, and others who played the role of agents who were sent out to other groups. Accordingly, one person under surveillance—to an extent that nowadays may arouse general envy—was Krystiana Robb-Narbutt from the Fine Arts Academy

(Akademia Sztuk Pieknych; ASP). Agents, secret photographs, monitoring all contacts: it seems that all this effort was intended to establish that she continued to be hostile to socialism. Essentially all this was a show of determination to combat

the influence of the ‘commandos’. In 1968, Krystiana was the link between

The Moral Bankruptcy of the Security Service 353 Warsaw University and the ASP; consequently this was viewed as evidence that the student demonstrations in other educational institutions resulted from actions by external emissaries, and once she had been planted in the role of liaison officer spreading the miasma of evil she continued to act as their agent among the artists.

She was not the only one. The group congregated around the Salon of the Independent, a cabaret created by Jacek Kleyff, Michal Tarkowski, and Janusz Weiss, ‘was far more remarkable and more interesting from the operational point of view’. It was dangerous because of its great popularity among students and its role was to sow contagion there. ‘It presents malevolent views using the pretext of constructive criticism about observed irregularities and shortcomings. Its particularly malicious attacks are directed towards the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MSW) and the party’s cultural and economic policies’, read an analysis. The SB also discovered an agent of the ‘commandos’, namely Leszek Szaruga, in the young writers’ and poets’ circle. His father, Witold Wirpsza, lived in Berlin, so it was obvious that he was transmitting instructions from the German revisionists and anti-Polish forces. Waldemar Kuczynski was supposed to be exercising his influence on the economists. The most important of those in the opposition—the ‘commandos’—reserved for themselves specific groups; thus Adam Michnik, a key member of the ‘commandos’, targeted distinguished writers, and I was supposed to have had the task of infiltrating Catholic circles, first of all the Catholic Intellectuals’ Club (Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej; KIK) (I had come to an understanding with Krzysztof Sliwifiski).

And so, this ideological prism drastically hindered a straightforward police analysis of the circle and its relations. Selecting individuals for surveillance according to the clear nature of their hostile anti-socialist activities resulted in many friendships, contacts, family connections, and collaborations in evading the attention of the authorities. If someone had a Jewish-sounding surname, then all he had to do was to have the slightest contact with a ‘commando’ and he was subjected to full invigilation: he was bugged, his correspondence was read, and his passport was blocked. But if he did not have such ‘interesting’ origins, he was able to visit us, store books, meet foreigners, and be given something to take out of the country.

CONSPIRACY AND THE ENEMY Is it then a fact that the first evident layer of truth in the files is knowledge about the SB’s ideological fixation? Intellectual opposition circles, who for many years have endeavoured to describe reality, have recognized that the 1968 hate episode was an attempt to bring back the doctrinal and propagandist concept of Stalinism, that is, an identically conceived menace by hostile forces, except that at that time the crew consisted of exploiters, moneyed classes, and clergy, also manipulated

from abroad. Analogies with fascism (the enemies were Jews, communists, and

354 Teresa Bogucka abroad) justified an examination of totalitarianism in general as a system that corrupts societies.

Intellectuals during the time of the Third Polish Republic after 1989 at first regarded the revival of the vision of a hostile conspiracy of foreign powers—1.e.

the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Germans and Jews responsible for it all, together with their internal agents such as the elite, the ‘Polish-language’ press, and those conditioned by their origins to harm Poland— with indulgence and then with anxiety. Today the intellectual elite seems to have lost some of its influence and is being cautioned, rebuked, and driven away by the political class. And the following concept is being voiced by the latter: there is a conspiracy against Poland, everything, the great system has penetrated everything, destroying the country and selling it abroad. It is controlled by our enemies. One only has to look into the secret files and public registers; who is not with us is an enemy with low intentions, ignoble goals, and the usual connections. So, even today, it can be seen that the SB’s vision of Poland was not something specific to communism and included the perhaps instinctive knowledge that it is easy to awaken layers of tribal anxieties about the external world full of hatred for other strange people, with essentially base motives.

Most of those who belonged to the opposition idealized society and also assumed that the support of the PZPR seen all around them using such methods was the result of coercion and that it was possible to awaken a longing for discovering truth about the world, mutual solidarity, and desire for freedom. This faith lent them wings.

IDEOLOGY AND EFFICIENCY Needless to say, there is a difference between using the ‘conspiracy and enemy’ ploy by a totalitarian state where the regime is in charge of every aspect of life, particularly the media, and using it as part of a democratic political struggle where it represents one of many views. But there is some similarity, as this concept veils reality very effectively, for if one can ascribe all sorts of failures to the manipulations of an enemy, why bother to try and understand their reasons? The SB also made no attempt to inquire into the reasons why the circle continued to grow and concentrated entirely on the once and for all defined enemy. As if they were not a police force judged by their efficiency but an ideological avantgarde reassuring the PZPR that it had the support of all of society and that only very few were plotting against it. Consequently the SB continued to tap wires, to spy, to read the post, to thrust its agents everywhere, and despite all this, every_ thing seemed to catch them unawares, from various manoeuvres by the opposition to strikes.

The SB used several sources of information about the subjects of ‘Gniazdo’, including phone tapping (PT), bugging (PP), monitoring correspondence, and

The Moral Bankruptcy of the Security Service 355 reports by secret agents (TW). As far as the bugging and correspondence are concerned, it does not appear that the information obtained was sensibly collated to draw any conclusions or make assumptions. On the contrary, everything was seen separately, and mainly details confirming the opponent’s image according to the doctrine were selected from the collected material. This is what happened to a fragment of a tapped phone conversation between the emigré Eugeniusz Smolar and Adam Michnik in December 1972, when Smolar was supposed to have demanded an increase in the group’s activities. For several years, the officials quoted this in their quarterly reports as visible proof of control by the West, saying, well here you have it, the principals are not happy with the work of their representatives and are demanding more intensive efforts in their quest to damage socialism. It should be pointed out that at that time it was inconceivable that emigrés would urge colleagues in Poland to act, particularly those who had just been released from prison. On the contrary, we were more likely to be asking them for all sorts of help. Smolar must have been joking by parodying propaganda machinations and said something like: my, you are not trying very hard. He never imagined that he had created evidence that the SB would use for many years to come. Today it is clear that we overestimated both their intelligence and their diligence. They did not know a lot and they were incapable of drawing conclusions from what they heard or they simply could not be bothered to do so. For example, they recorded some irrelevant conversations from the bugs and it seems that it did not occur to them that at that time we were writing things down on paper and that

something was being planned. Or perhaps they preferred not to know, for this would have required them to mobilize and to make an effort to establish whether the matter had to do with passing on books, sending materials, or collecting signatures, and this would have been difficult in any case. One managed to lead a normal life despite the wire tapping, except that when it became necessary to utter a protected name, the date of a planned action, or other sensitive details, one would write on a piece of paper while talking about something else. As a result, the files contain official notes with information about personal and intimate subjects, briefly something like: those present exchanged remarks about the weather and then they had sex. Do the original recording and shorthand reports still exist? And do they form part of the store of truth that is supposed to liberate us all?

ZEALOTS, HEAD BOYS, AND HABITUAL LIARS Secret agents provided the richest source. Twelve (Ws were required to open a case involving ten randomly selected suspects under surveillance. But only in theory. The SB only managed to get near very few of those being followed, while Adam Michnik, in whom they were most interested, remained essentially unapproachable. The agents represented a whole range of characters, from recalcitrant

356 Teresa Bogucka to zealous, from reticent to overproductive, from those who tried not to do harm to others who knew more than there was to know. Only one appeared to have been

blackmailed and flitted backwards and forwards, and was resolutely disciplined by an SB official. But one cannot say that they were used for any sophisticated games. Usually they were told to visit various people, to keep in contact and inform about everything, sometimes to make a list of acquaintances and to find out someone’s address. There is no evidence the TW was put on alert after information was obtained from bugs about several people who visited Michnik, spoke about literature, and

left. The SB mobilized according to its own rhythm. The reasons were always

related to PZPR plenums or national council elections. The agents’ ‘tasks’ included finding out what the ‘commandos’ were thinking and planning in relation to an event, and their reports saying that we were not thinking about anything and we were not particularly interested produced disbelief and irritation.

Initially the most active TW was ‘Ludwik’, and his numerous reports were mainly about banquets, our views, and banned reading materials, and he always emphasized the fact that what the group had in common was access to foreign pub-

lications. But when required to do so, he also found out where family members worked or who had organized collections to help the prisoners four years earlier. In

order to complicate matters, his principals caught him red-handed helping an emissary from France without telling them about it. ‘Ludwik’ did awaken susp1cions and, following a man-to-man talk, he admitted to Jan Litynski that he had

been roped in while in prison in 1968. | TW ‘Kos’ also said yes while in prison. He was clearly suffering from an inferiority complex. Unlike ‘Ludwik’, he did not like us and he was quite keen to produce unflattering characterizations. He diligently attended the Warsaw Dominican Friars’ semi-opposition KIK (Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej; Club of the Catholic Intelligentsia) meetings and the history lectures organized by Jan Jozef Lipski, but he found writing summaries difficult, a fact that irritated the SB. His task was to become a KIK member, but he complained that, unfortunately, at first I encouraged him and then refused him entry into the club. I remember that at one stage he

confessed that he was entangled, but nevertheless wanted to keep in touch as a loyal member, of course. I turned him down and told him that he could come back when he managed to untangle himself. After a while he came back engaged to a woman we knew, and asked me to be a witness at their marriage. After that I did not | see him again and no marriage ensued. Now, among the documents, I keep finding his denunciations of her and a declaration that he had proposed to her for the sake of the operations. TW ‘Szczesny’ attended drama school. As an agent he was rather more obedient than creative. He also had problems with sensibly rendering summaries of conver-

sations, but he made up for it with zeal. So, he agreed to make a copy of the key to Boguslawa Blajfer’s flat. He reported on her secret postbox. He gave details

The Moral Bankruptcy of the Security Service 357 (accurately?) about her personal life. He supplied a list of books she had ordered from her year in Holland and, at the same time, he reported that, among her colleagues, Anna Romantowska and Piotr Zaborowski were also intending to bring back publications by Kultura. TW ‘Maria Wolska’ reported extensively, mixing truth and fiction, and it 1s difficult to assess whether this was a deliberate camouflage or a result of mythomania. At some stage the SB started checking up on her reports and came to the conclusion that she had provided a false address for Slawomir Kretkowski, assigned a wrong fiancée to him, and described trips which seemed not to have taken place. At this stage she disappears from the files.

Then ‘Jan Lewandowski’ makes his appearance. He mainly informed on Litynski, of whose household he was virtually a member. He seemed to have had a very weak insight into the workings of the group and named the wrong persons and also wrong fiancées. But it was not lack of knowledge that led him to jump to idiotic conclusions such as that Jan Jozef Lipski was losing support because, at a banquet, he was seen standing against the wall on his own, and that Jacek Kuron was intending to publish a crime novel under a pseudonym and all his friends were going to give him up. He was making things up, not quite as absurdly as ‘Maria

Wolska’, however with deliberate ill-will, accusing various people of betrayal, mutual enmities, and deceptions. He recounts who said what about whom to make people fall out. He phoned his SB contact to search Litynsk1’s flat because his wife had hidden some blotting paper in the sofa or to catch him out on a train, as he was sure to be travelling on a false student ID card. He copied the key to his flat. He

demanded that Anna Dodziuk fail to get the job she wanted badly. He went to no end of effort to make trouble for people and the officials began to find his ingeniousness somewhat tiresome. The TW ‘Franciszek Pawlowski’ stands out in particular. A note from an SB meeting describes the history of his work, when he informs them that he has decided to resign: that he had taken on this work only for purely patriotic reasons as he wanted to combat people of Jewish origin, because once in the past Jozef Dajczgewand took him for a Jew and disclosed secret Jewish plans. But, after all these years of collaboration, nothing had been achieved and the security organs were not doing anything to eliminate Jews from the scene. The officials decided to terminate his collaboration but to reappoint him as their operational contact some time later. So, after three months ‘Pawlowski’ came back (presumably with a rise) and took it upon himself to sign up in the KIK but then realized that, after all, he was supposed to be combating Jews and not Catholics, and he resigned. Nevertheless he voluntarily took up work in the poet Barbara Sadowska’s circle and put together some eye-catching reports. January 1974—Barbara confides to him that, following a poets’ evening, a certain Mr X, aged 60, introduced himself and started visiting

her, and seeing her situation, got her a job in the Society for the Propagation of Physical Culture (SPPC), which is ‘entirely staffed by Jews’. He told her that

358 Teresa Bogucka between 1932 and 1935 he had been a member of the Polish Communist Party (Komunistyczna Partia Polski; KPP), and edited the party magazine Gong. He

declared himself to be a Jew and an enemy of Poland and said that Kuron and | , Karol Modzelewski, whom he did not know, had betrayed Zionism. He offered Barbara a job of liaison officer in connection with his political activities. She took it as a provocation and broke off the relationship. February 1974—‘Pawlowskv’ ‘calls a meeting again’ and gives the following account: recently Y, aged about 70, tall with grey hair and pale eyes, has been com-

ing to see Barbara Sadowska. He says that he is acting on behalf of the London emigré National Democratic Party (Narodowa Demokracja; ND) and has recently returned to Poland and was publishing the 7ygodnik weekly. He is critical of the Warsaw uprising. He thinks it 1s time to take political action and this is why he is founding a secret organization, the Polish Central Committee, which he would like Barbara and her circle to join. Here we have a riddle for anybody seeking the truth: Zionists and ND members

are recruiting supporters among poets? SB is checking up on TW loyalty? Sadowska attracts lunatics? The TW is making things up because he needs money? To make it even more ridiculous, both the right and left editors appear to be real persons. Or possibly someone is impersonating real people? But there are not many such curiosities in the ‘Gniazdo’ archives.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SB Most of the reports are trivial and have one thing in common, even though there is nothing said about this in the ‘tasks’, namely that the nature of SB expectations is such that Ws recount conflicts and disputes. They are zealous about summarizing unfavourable opinions, negative judgements, and epithets. Statements uttered in irritation, ironically, jokingly, or in passing, crudely noted down by an informer, are today regarded as significant documents and historical testimony. And they can hurt. Sometimes a lot more than a disclosure of a lover, a child’s real father, or marital infidelity. The TWs attract media attention not just because of their emotional perversity (the more they attempt to harm, the more they strive to be liked), but also because there is an element of suspense, as in a spy movie (will they be exposed or not?). For to tell the truth, if one listens intently to the excitement around the lustration campaign, it becomes obvious that the viewers expect to have ‘those from the headlines’ exposed, hoping that, in the end, the ones they do not like will turn out to have been agents—that they will be presented with evidence that great manipula-

tors and secret agents stood behind the opposition and Solidarity and that this whole conspiracy which determines the fate of Poland will finally be disclosed. Thus, from this small fragment of history represented by ‘Gniazdo’ it appears that the secret collaborators were just petty, uninteresting, and not very intelligent

The Moral Bankruptcy of the Security Service 359 people who compensated for all their inadequacies by acting as informers in the belief that what happens to other people depends on them. But it did not depend on them at all, and, at most, they were just wretched helpers. First and foremost it depended on those lording it over People’s Poland, i.e. the party apparatchiks. They gave a free hand to the SB to make decisions about the forms of oppression best suited to the moment. And the SB officials became the executors and were given a large margin of freedom. Their daily work can be seen in the archives. The fact that they refused to issue passports, carried out border searches, and allowed people’s closest relatives to enter the country can all be read in their accounts. But the SB found it equally straightforward to block Jacek Tarkowski’s employment in the Centre of Research into Public Opinion (Osrodek Badania Opinii Publicznej; OBOP), to fix it that the Polish Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy and Sociology did not accept Barbara Torunczyk for a Ph.D. course, to prevent Bogustawa Blajfer from getting the job as assistant director in the Documentary Films Studio which Bohdan Kosinski, the documentary film maker, arranged, to see that Jacek Kleyff was unable to make a commercial film, and that the Medyka Club and Radio Trojka! would not allow the cabaret group Salon Niezaleznych (Salon of the Independent) to perform. KIK and various artistic associations attempted to resist such pressures, as did 1.6dz University, which was advised to ‘create difficulties with a master’s thesis’ but did not do so. Nonetheless, as a rule it was accepted that the apparatchiks’ wish was their command. ‘The universal and deeply instilled perception was simply that they could do whatever they liked. And one should remember or be aware of this in order to understand these archives. The dry and cold notes of some unsuccessful recruitment attempts are proof of great courage. Wojciech Staszko was questioned about living conditions: he had a wife and a small child, earned barely enough to support them, and lived in a rented flat. But without registration, adds the official. Such a remark implies a threat of eviction and likely sacking from his job. “Taking account of his present material and housing situation, I suggested that arrangements could be made so he would no longer risk any registration problems at his present address and even offered some financial help to pay his rent.’ Staszko refused and explained that he had had no further contact with the ‘commandos’. The SB replied that he had just attended Muiroslaw Sawicki’s name-day party and they know everything. Staszko explained that he only dropped in for five minutes to get the baby’s bottle and he did not remember who was there, and more precisely, that he would not name such persons and, in general, he refused to inform on the ‘commandos’ for moral reasons. he document ends with the observation that Staszko turned him down and the following description: ‘He wears his hair long in a “hippy” style. He is dressed simply and in a quiet style. His facial features clearly indicate a Jewish background.’ ‘A Polish national radio station broadcasting since 1 Apr. 1962, directed at young adults.

360 Teresa Bogucka | The circle was learning how to turn down the SB. The ‘Gniazdo’ files contain a standard protocol of the Dominican friar Jacek Salij’s interrogation, or rather a note, as he did not reply to a single question. The official wrote that he is ‘stubborn and limited’. Through a word with the provincial father superior it was suggested that he be removed from his lecturing post in the Catholic Theology Academy. After four years of reporting by the authorities that the group had been isolated and broken up internally and successfully discouraged from action, ‘Operational Reports’ and ‘Verbal Threat Descriptions’ appear. All of a sudden it turns out that the ‘Gniazdo’ suspects knew other suspects involved in other matters (including even Jacek Kuron), carried out joint actions connected with the issue of Poles in the USSR, organized resistance against the Kowalczyk brothers’ death sentence, and together sent a letter to Sakharov. And now they were organizing new actions to collect signatures, planning to create a society for political prisoners in People’s Poland and constituted a threat since they ‘propagated views and organized activities directed against the party’s political line’. The ‘Gniazdo’ case was closed, to be replaced by the ‘Gracze’ [Gamblers] operation, concerning KOR’s activities.

In 1968, Adam Michnik and Henryk Szlajfer were taken to court, accused of spying after meeting a French journalist (what’s more, a bad choice, as he was a witness in the indictment). In 1976 Jacek Kuron organized press conferences in his copiously bugged flat. Thus, within a few years, the limits designed to isolate a small group were breached to the point where they created a sizeable expanse of freedom, protected by its openness and complete information about the offences committed by the authorities. For communism can only function successfully in ignorance, silence, and fear. KOR proved that freedom is infectious, that it is worthwhile to abandon fear, and that loyalty is important, and one should stand up for everyone. But such knowledge does not come from the files, which can embellish it with

some details but which reveal a completely different reality. They do not contain

unknown truths about the opposition, about the successful manipulation by agents, and about the power of the state authorities. There one can find the truth about the Security Service and about its world view, its contempt for society, and its conviction about the limitations of human needs and motives. Also about its ineffectuality, the routine, and the pathetic work standard, as everywhere else in People’s Poland. Its successes included a number of broken lives, character assassinations, humiliations, and slander. It did not hinder the course of events as it was not even able to anticipate it. For what could it and the PZPR know about the desire for freedom? Translated from the Polish by Theresa Prout

PART II

New Views

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The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki KALMAN WEISER THOUGH FEW STUDENTS of Jewish culture and politics recall Noah Prylucki (1882—1941) today, his was virtually a household name among Jews in Warsaw in the early years of Polish independence.' Prylucki’s career of intensive cultural and

_ political activism spanned more than three decades in the Russian empire and Second Polish Republic. During this time he distinguished himself among colleagues active in the Yiddish secular movement with important, indeed often pioneering, contributions in the fields of philology, folklore and folk music, and theatre criticism. News of his bold and controversial speeches defending the Yiddish language and demanding Jewish civil and national rights in the Warsaw City Council and Polish parliament appeared regularly on the pages of the Yiddish press between 1916 and 1926, the years when his Diaspora nationalist Folksparty was most active.

Given the importance of Prylucki’s contributions to Yiddish culture and Jewish politics, a comprehensive treatment of his life and thought is long overdue.? An examination of Prylucki’s career in the context of inter-war Poland helps towards filling a substantial lacuna in the still largely unwritten history of the Yiddishist movement. By focusing on Prylucki’s ideology and the activity of his Folksparty, especially on behalf of the Yiddish secular school, this essay seeks to broaden our understanding of the ideational development of Yiddishism and the construction of institutions of modern mass culture in Yiddish. It highlights divisions concerning the very importance of language for Jewish life and identity within a single ' Michael Weichert, with whom he shared a profound interest in Yiddish theatre, recalled after the First World War that Prylucki was ‘without exaggeration the most popular Jew in Poland in the last two years of the occupation and the first three of the Republic’. M. Weichert, Zikhroynes (‘Tel Aviv, 1961), 50.

2 Little has been written since the Holocaust about his cultural and scholarly contributions. The New York-based linguist Yudel Mark, a Folkist while still living in Lithuania, surveyed Prylucki’s

accomplishments in a commemorative article, ‘Noyekh prilutski—der kemfer un der forsher’, Tsukunft (Feb. 1945), 100-3. More recently, the linguist Christopher Hutton has contributed ‘Noyekh Prylucki: Philosopher of Language’, in Dov-Ber Kerler (ed.), History of Yiddish Studies (Chur, 1991), 15—24. Itzik Gottesman discusses Prylucki’s contributions to Yiddish folklore in his book Defining the Yiddish Nation: The Ffewish Folklorists of Poland (Detroit, 2003).

364 Kalman Weiser party, as well as in the movement on behalf of secular Yiddish culture as a whole. Finally, it sheds light on Yiddishist responses to inter-war Polish Jewry’s changing cultural profile and concerns for the very future of Yiddish.

WHAT IS YIDDISHISM? Since the Holocaust virtual oblivion has engulfed Yiddishism, the movement to make Yiddish language and culture the centre of secularized Jewish life. Scholars today remember its diverse achievements almost exclusively in the realms of education, scholarship, and the arts. Yiddishism and the concomitant political ideology of Diaspora Nationalism, once movements commanding a mass following in eastern Europe and elsewhere, have effectively been eclipsed in popular memory by the ulti-

mate success of their chief pre-war rivals in the secular sphere, Hebraism and Zionism. And while Yiddish-speaking ultra-Orthodox communities, the inheritors of pre-war religious opposition to Jewish secularism, thrive in a number of democratic lands, there exists no clear inheritor of the traditions of secular Yiddishism outside of academia and the dwindling circles of the organized Jewish Left. | To the extent that an awareness of Yiddishism exists today, it is associated in the popular mind almost entirely with the radically secular programme of the socialist, anti-Zionist Bund in Poland. Alternatively, it is mistakenly identified with the illfated efforts of the Yevsektsya. These militant communists and their collaborators laboured to create a Yiddish-language proletarian culture denuded of traditional Hebrew and Judaic content before party ideology and Stalinist purges effectively silenced Yiddish culture by the 1950s, if not a decade or more sooner, in the Soviet Union.° Yet Yiddishism, like Zionism or Jewish socialism for that matter, was hardly

a monolith. It constituted a variegated cultural movement in inter-war Poland supported by a number of often mutually antagonistic political orientations with differing attitudes towards Jewish traditions. And even within these parties there existed much discord over the very meaning of Yiddishism as an ideology. With over 3 million Jews making up roughly ro per cent of its population, independent Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in all of Europe and the central arena for Jewish democratic politics and cultural activity.* Chief among Yiddishist parties (and hence receiving the bulk of scholarly attention) were the Bund and left-wing Zionists (Poale Zion-Left).° 3 For more on this misperception, see David Fishman’s refutation of remarks made by Philologus, the language columnist of the English-language Forward: D. E. Fishman, ‘Vos iz yidishizm?’, Afn shvel, 304 (Oct.—Dec. 1996), 1-4.

4 For an overview of this period, see E. Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington, Ind., 1983), 3-84. © On the Bund, see, most recently, G. Pickhan, Gegen den Strom: Der allgemeine jiidische Arbeiterbund

‘Bund’ in Polen 1915-1939 (Stuttgart, 2001). On Poale Zion, see B. Garncarska-Kadary, Di linke poyeley-tsien in poyln biz der tsveyter velt-milkhome (Tel Aviv, 1995).

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 365 Less well known is the staunchly anti-socialist, Diaspora-nationalist Folksparty (Folkspartey) founded and headed by Noah Prylucki. Both historians and scholars of Yiddish culture have paid scant attention to the Folksparty despite the prominence of its founders as intellectuals and cultural leaders in inter-war Poland. A small party whose meteoric rise during the First World War and almost equally meteoric fall thereafter was intimately linked to the personality of its leader, it left

no political heirs to record its history and none of its leaders survived the Holocaust to commemorate it.®

PRYLUCKI AS A LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIST Like many prominent Jewish figures born in late nineteenth-century east central Europe, Prylucki first turned to Yiddish after initial activity in what were commonly perceived as more prestigious non-Jewish languages and in Hebrew.’ It is typical of a generation of politically active middle-class Jews that Prylucki’s initial use of Yiddish in the public sphere stemmed from reasons more practical than ideological: as a left-leaning Zionist orator travelling through the Pale of Settlement at the turn of the twentieth century, he sought to communicate his message to Jewish masses who knew no other language well. Over time, however, he came to venerate Yiddish at the expense of Hebrew and even viewed the very survival of the Jewish people in an age of rapid secularization and acculturation as dependent on its preservation and expanded use in new social and economic circumstances. A lawyer by profession, Prylucki had by 1910 already made a name for himself in Warsaw Jewish intellectual circles as a journalist, pioneering theatre critic, literary patron, and scholar—all in Yiddish, a language commonly perceived as inadequate or inappropriate for the expression of modern cultural functions in Jewish life. Born in 1882 in Berdichev, in his youth Prylucki shared the familiar maskilic distaste for the language he later championed as the national language of eastern European Jewry.® He enjoyed a thorough grounding in the Russian language and literature in state schools in the Haskalah centre of Kremenets (Krzemieniec) in the Ukraine, where he was raised. He also received a modernized Hebrew 6 The party’s activity receives frequent, albeit passing, mention in the partisan histories of contemporary Jewish parties and in larger scholarly works treating specifically Jewish or general Polish politics during the turbulent and fascinating inter-war period. Only one brief article about the Yiddishist autonomist ideology of the Folksparty has been published to date: M. W. Kiel, ‘The Ideology of the Folks-Partey’, Soviet fewish Affairs, 2 (1975), 75-89.

” 'To cite only a few prominent examples: the Zionist turned Diaspora-Nationalist turned UltraOrthodox publicist Nathan Birnbaum (raised in Vienna by Galician parents), the Poale Zion theoretician and Yiddish linguist Ber Borochow, the Bundist leader Vladimir Medem, and the founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky (all three native Russian-speakers). 8 For details on Noah Prylucki’s life, see B. Khilinovitsh, ‘Noyekh prilutski’, in N. Prilutski, Jn poyln: kimat a publitsist toghukh, 1905-1911 (Warsaw, 1921), pp. i-iv, and M. Fuks, ‘Prylucki Noe’, in Polski stownthk hiograficzny (Warsaw, 1982—4), xxviii. 629-30.

366 Kalman Weiser education thanks to his father Zevi, who was active in the early Russian-Jewish and Hebrew presses, as well as the movement to revive Hebrew as a spoken language.? Consequently, Noah Prylucki considered Russian and Hebrew, the languages of

the secularized Jewish intelligentsia in late nineteenth-century Russia, to be his ‘true’ mother tongues. While still a secondary school student, he contributed articles on a variety of literary and political topics to the Jewish press in Russian and Hebrew and made his debut in Yiddish with popular science articles in Leo Rabinovitsh’s short-lived journal Bleter fun a togbukh in 1900.'° His Yiddish, he later claimed in retrospect, was raw and uncultivated until he gained practice as a political orator for Poale Zion, which actively supported the use of Yiddish in both the Diaspora and Palestine.1’ Without great difficulty, probably because he knew Yiddish as his literal mother tongue but had little cultivated it as a literary idiom, he quickly made the transition to writing and lecturing in the language with great aplomb and was recommended to serve as language editor for the party’s Yiddishlanguage paper in 1906./* Encouraged by his father, who in 1905 founded Der veg, the very first Yiddish daily to appear in Warsaw, he found a mass readership in the

profitable Yiddish press that burgeoned after the first Russian Revolution. Increasingly fascinated by the Yiddish language and its culture, he gradually grew

estranged from political Zionism and came to embrace the cause of Diaspora Nationalism.1° Prylucki was sufficiently supportive of Yiddish as the language of both the eastern European Jewish present and future to attend the First Yiddish Language Conference in Czernowitz (Chernivtsi) in 1908, where he served on the

‘Committee of Seven’ responsible for formulating a resolution on behalf of Yiddish as a national language of the Jewish people. '“

After marrying and graduating from the law faculty of the University of St Petersburg, in 1909 Prylucki settled in Warsaw, home to the largest Jewish population in the Russian empire and the site of a vibrant Yiddish literary and cultural scene presided over by the writer Y. L. Peretz. An avid visitor to theatres and galleries since his student days, Prylucki honed his aesthetic sense through regular ° For details on Zevi Prylucki’s life, see ‘Tsvi prilutski’, in Z. Reisen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologye (Vilna, 1930), ii. 967; H. Hoykhgelernter, ‘Kurtse geshikhte fun kremenits’, in Kremenits, vizshgorodek un potshayev yizker-bukh (Buenos Aires, 1965), 84—8; M. Fuks, ‘Pritucki Cwr’,

in Polski slownik biograficzny, xxviii. 628-9; ‘Prilutski, tsvi hirsh’, in S. L. Tsitron, Lekstkon tstom

(Warsaw, 1924), 543-7. 10 “Noyekh Prilutski’, Literarishe bleter, 18 (1931), 330. 11_N. Prilutski, ‘“Der veg” a bintl zikhroynes’, Der moment, 176 (15 Aug. 1930).

‘2 A. Grafman, ‘Di gevylte yidish ratmener: Shmuel hirshhorn’, Der moment, 167 (20 July 1916). Khilinovitsh, ‘Noyekh prilutski’, p. viii. N. Prilutski, ‘Koshere asimilatorn’, Unzer lebn, 1-6 (14-20 Jan. 1910), 170. M. Mintz, Ber borochov: hama’agal harishon, 1rg00—1906 (Tel Aviv, 1976), 271; M. Mintz and T: Balshan, /gerot ber borokhov, 1897-1917 (‘Tel Aviv, 1989), 155.

13 “Un mayne oygn hobn derzen’, Der moment, 176 (13 Aug. 1911); repr. in N. Prilutski, Barg-aroyf

(Warsaw, 1917), 33-5. |

14 On the Czernowitz conference, see E. Goldsmith, Modern Yiddish Culture: The Story of the

Arbor, 1987).

Yiddish Language Movement (New York, 1997), and J. Fishman, Jdeology, Society, and Language (Ann

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 367. reading of art and theatre criticism in the Russian press. ‘Transporting his passion for the stage to Warsaw, he pioneered criticism of the recently legalized Yiddish theatre on the pages of Der veg (1905-7), to which he also contributed political commentary. After a fiasco surrounding the publication of his erotic verse (Farn mizbeyakh) in 1908, which critics panned as too devoid of literary value even to be considered pornography,’ Prylucki virtually abandoned writing belles-lettres in Yiddish, as he already had in Russian and Hebrew. Instead, he encouraged the literary talents of others and devoted his own prodigious abilities to political and scholarly endeavours. He dedicated his seemingly boundless energies together with a part of his personal income to promoting modern literary productions and the ‘salvaging’ of elements of traditional Jewish life that were rapidly disappearing with the advance of industrialization and secular, cosmopolitan culture among the Jews. In his mid-twenties he sponsored amateur folklore and literary circles in his

Warsaw home and offered honoraria for contributions to his publications. Together with the religious philosopher Hillel Zeitlin, in 1910 he helped to found Der moment, one of Warsaw’s leading Yiddish dailies until the Second World War. On its pages he wrote regularly about Jewish politics and culture, frequently popularizing his own research for the benefit of the ordinary reader. In contrast with Zionists, who prized the Jews’ ancient Near Eastern past over their exilic present and found evidence in it of their capacity for national regeneration in Palestine, as a Yiddishist and Diaspora nationalist Prylucki mined the cultural legacy of Ashkenazic Jewry to demonstrate its ‘normalcy’ and its rootedness

as an autochthonous people in Europe. To counter widespread perceptions of Yiddish as an ugly and hapless jargon, an emblem of Jewish backwardness and isolation from humanistic universalism and modern European civilization, Prylucki

wrote numerous articles and studies throughout his career defending the legitimacy of Yiddish as an independent language and argued for the recognition of a venerable, thousand-year tradition of secular creativity in Yiddish. He undertook projects to standardize Yiddish spelling and grammar, and to regulate lexicon in order to win it the respect accorded the leading European languages. He also rummaged through Old Yiddish literature in pursuit of non-religious themes and personally collected, analysed, and published at his own expense anthologies of contemporary folk songs, proverbs, and folk tales.

EMERGENCE OF THE FOLKSPARTY Eagerly anticipated by both Jews and Poles as marking an end to more than a cen-

tury of oppressive foreign rule, elections were called for the Warsaw City Council | in the summer of 1916 during the German occupation of Poland in the First 19 A. Lazar, ‘Kinstler un verk: v. noyekh prilutski’, Roman-tsaytung, 2/33 (Aug—Sept. 1908). S. Niger, ‘Shpinvebs’, Der fraynd, 45 (24 (9) Mar. 1909).

368 Kalman Weiser World War. ‘The Council was viewed as constituting the embryonic parliament of a future sovereign Polish state—a hope that was finally realized in 1918. Hastily organized in the weeks preceding the elections, the Folksparty achieved an unexpected victory, winning four seats in the sixth curia. This curia represented the general electorate and was the only one in which the United Jewish Electoral Committee (UJEC, an alliance of Zionist, Orthodox, and Assimilationist candidates) did not form a bloc with Polish parties. The Folksparty was formed upon the initiative of a group of artisans, pedagogues, public intellectuals, and writers

under Prylucki’s leadership—many of them former Zionists—active in the Yiddish school movement and the Yiddish press. Folkists condemned the tactical

decision of the Zionist-led UJEC to refrain from demanding Jewish national rights, especially the free use of Yiddish in public institutions (including schools) and proportional representation in elected bodies. They saw it as the cowardly failure to seize a historic opportunity to champion the Jews’ collective rights for fear of offending the Poles, who sought to demonstrate a unified political front to the Germans at the climax of their own struggle for independence and sovereignty. The Zionists, the Folkists argued, focused exclusively on Palestine and neglected the very real needs of Jews in the Diaspora, where the majority of Jews were likely

to remain indefinitely. They thus sacrificed vital Jewish national interests in order to seal an illusory peace with Polish nationalists and chauvinists, including

the notoriously Jew-baiting Endecja (Narodowa Demokracja; the National Democrats).'®

The Folkist platform, inspired by the Diaspora nationalist ideas of Simon Dubnow and his defunct pre-First World War party of the same name,'” called both for complete civil rights and national cultural autonomy for the Jews within a multi-ethnic Poland on the basis of the Yiddish language and state-supported Jewish cultural institutions. According to this scheme, Jews were to pay taxes to the Polish state, serve in its military, and fulfil all other duties of citizens but enjoy rights to publicly funded schools and cultural institutions, government services,

and the like in Yiddish. The kehilah was to be secularized, and its activity expanded beyond religious and philanthropic functions, such as maintaining ritual baths and caring for the indigent. Its managing board was to be chosen 1n universal, democratic elections and it would serve as the local unit in the administration of national cultural autonomy subordinate to a super-regional Jewish parliament (national council).1® 16 Kiel, “The Ideology of the Folks-Partey’, 77-8. A. Guterman, Kehilat varsha bein shtei milhamot ha’olam (Tel Aviv, 1997), 114-16.

17 For the programme of Dubnow’s Volkspartei and an evaluation of its activity, see Z. Gitelman, Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics (Princeton, 1972), 49-52; R. M. Seltzer, ‘Jewish Liberalism in Late Tsarist Russia’, Contemporary Jewry, 9 (1987-8), 47-66; S. Rabinovitch, “The Dawn of a New Diaspora: Simon Dubnow’s Autonomism, from St. Petersburg to Berlin’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 50 (2005), 267-88. 18 On the Folkist platform, see Kiel, ‘The Ideology of the Folks-Partey’, 86.

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 369 In a period when language was deemed the hallmark of modern nationhood in Europe, the Folkists argued that without recognition of Yiddish as the living, national language of the Jews, no recognition for the Jews as a national minority with accompanying rights—a goal of Zionists, Bundists, and Folkists alike— would be possible in a future sovereign Polish state. Conversely, for the Folkists the obtainment of national rights was the best guarantee for the preservation and

expansion of Yiddish culture. In keeping with the romantic currents then in vogue, the party’s leader Prylucki perceived Yiddish itself to be the expression of a Jewish ‘folk soul’ and located in its dialectal diversity evidence of the underlying ethnic and cultural unity of a people scattered across political boundaries.!?

As a consequence of their hostility towards demands for the recognition of Jewish national rights and distaste, if not disdain, for the Yiddish language as a barrier to socio-cultural integration into Polish society, the Assimilationists among the Jews of Poland were a source of special contempt for Folkists. By 1863, the year of the failed Polish Insurrection against Russia, a small number of Progressives or Assimilationists (as they were popularly known by both their supporters and their ideological opponents) stepped forward onto the political scene as Polish patriots and champions of the cultural integration of the Jews into Polish society.2° Most concentrated in Warsaw, the Assimilationists were generally intellectuals or mem-

bers of the Jewish high bourgeoisie—financial, commercial, and industrial—a group composing no more than 5—6 per cent of the total Jewish population.*! They considered themselves Jews by descent or religion (hence the terms ‘Poles of Mosaic Confession’ or ‘Poles of Mosaic Descent’, by which they also frequently referred to themselves in print) but Poles by virtue of culture and nationality (even if some spoke Polish with a pronounced Yiddish accent). Grouped around the newspaper /[zraelta prior to the First World War, they called for the religious reform (but not conversion) of the Jews and their gradual adoption of the Polish language and culture as steps towards full integration into Polish society. More aptly described as integrationists, Assimilationists did not seek—despite the accusations of Jewish nationalists, who often indiscriminately hurled the term as a slur at opponents—the complete disappearance of Jewish identity and of the Jews as a collective.”* Indeed, they remained active in Jewish affairs. Rather, they desired to follow the Western model of recasting Judaism in mostly religious terms. They did 19 See e.g. N. Prilutski, Yidishe folkshider: gezamlt, derklert un aroysgegebn fun noyekh prilutskt, 1: Religyezishe un yontevdtke (Warsaw, 1911), pp. X—X1l.

20 S. Blejwas, ‘The Failure of Assimilation 1864-1895’, review of A. Cala, Asymilacja Zydéw w Krélestwie Polskim (1864-1897 ) (Warsaw, 1989), in Polin, 8 (1994), 336.

21 G. Bacon, ‘La Société juive dans le royaume de la Pologne du Congrés (1860—1914)’, in S. Trigano (ed.), Société juive a travers V’histotre (Paris, 1992), 1. 623—4, 659.

22 Ezra Mendelsohn introduced the term ‘integrationist’ to describe this school of thought in the Polish Jewish context to indicate that ‘What its adherents really wanted the Jews to do was to integrate

into the majority society without being entirely swallowed up by it’: E. Mendelsohn, On Modern Jewish Politics (New York and Oxford, 1993), 16.

370 Kalman Weiser not constitute a specific political party and urged Jews not to vote along ethnic lines. They nonetheless ran their own candidates in both kehilah and city- and state-wide elections, at times championing Jewish civil and political rights together with avowedly Jewish parties in the face of antisemitic discrimination. The Assimilationists’ vehement opposition to applying a secular national definition to the Jews was shared by the Agudas Yisroel party, which championed above all the religious interests of Orthodox Jews. The Agudah insisted upon belief in

God and, in contrast with Assimilationists, strict adherence to Jewish law as the sine gua non of Jewish collective existence.?? It also differed from the Assimilationists in its distaste for acculturation to non-Jewish norms. Proficiency in gentile languages prior to the inter-war period was considered useful by most Orthodox Jews but was far from universal and certainly not meant to displace Hebrew and Yiddish in internal Jewish life.2* Orthodox leaders attached, at least ostensibly, little or no ideological significance to the use of Yiddish other than the maintenance of tradition or resistance to change and foreign ways. Orthodox Jews typically rejected Yiddishism, like Hebraism, outright as linguistic fetishism tantamount to idolatry. The call for monolingualism in Jewish life by Jewish nationalist movements was seen by them as but another sign of Jews’ contamination with European secularism since the Haskalah.?° The Folksparty distinguished itself from other Yiddishist parties, such as the Bund and Poale Zion, chiefly through its resolute rejection of socialism and cham-

pioning of the economic interests of the Jewish petite bourgeoisie. Further, as nationalists, the Folkists viewed the nation as a living organism, the desirability of whose preservation was unquestioned. They emphatically rejected the Bund’s theoretical neutrality to Jewish acculturation and assimilation as long as it was not coerced. Folkism attempted to appeal mainly to the same mass of voters as did its chief rivals, the General Zionists—the petty merchants, shopkeepers, brokers, and artisans who composed the largest part of Polish Jewry. As Diaspora nationalists and Yiddishists, the Folkists naturally distanced themselves from Zionism and Hebraism through their refusal to regard mass Jewish settlement in Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state there with Hebrew, a language spoken by a tiny

minority of Jews worldwide, as its official language as anything other than a utopian dream born of the frustrations of discrimination and unfulfilled national aspirations in the Diaspora.”° 23 On the Agudah, see G. Bacon, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland, 1916-1939 (Jerusalem, 1986). 24'S. D. Corrsin, Warsaw before the First World War: Poles and Jews in the Third City of the Russian Empire, 1880-1914 (Boulder, Colo., 1989), and Bacon, ‘La Société juive’. 25 On this subject, see my article, ‘The “Orthodox Orthography” of Solomon Birnbaum’, Studies in Contemporary fewry, 20 (2004), 275-95. 26 On Zionism in Poland, see E. Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland, the Formative Years, 1915-1926 (New Haven and London, 1981).

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 371 The Folkist victory demonstrated mass Jewish support for a Jewish nationalist alternative to Zionism.?’ It also made clear to Zionists the necessity of widely employing Yiddish in party activities in order to assume a leading role in Polish Jewish life. Many of the older Zionist cadres had feared that official recognition of the much-maligned Jewish ‘folk language’ would legitimize the Diaspora as more than a temporary dwelling place in the eyes of the Jewish rank and file.2° With the

return from Russia after the First World War of Yitshak Griinbaum to head the General Zionist party, however, many of these strategic errors were soon corrected.”9 Despite an auspicious start, even during its heyday, the years 1916—21, the Folksparty never enjoyed widespread support from voters outside Warsaw in elections to the Polish parliament and city councils. Prylucki’s tremendous popularity as a brash and unapologetic defender of Jewish interests in the political arena, especially against economic and cultural discrimination, as well as his intensive relief work on behalf of Jewish pogrom and war sufferers, won him the party’s only mandate in Sejm elections in both 1919 and 1922.°° A handful of leaders without a flock, the party exercised its greatest influence not in the political but in the cultural sphere. Founding members of the Folksparty such as H. D. Nomberg, Hillel Zeitlin,

| Samuel Hirshhorn, Lazar Kahan, and Saul Stupnicki were public figures active in shaping the very culture that stood at the foundation of its political programme.

The Yiddish secular school, the foundation of the Folkists’ vision of Jewish national autonomy in Poland, represents the party’s most conspicuous cause and, arguably, its most significant concrete achievement. A major vehicle for imparting political and cultural ideology during this period, the Yiddish school is also a prism through which to view fundamental ideological differences between Folkists concerning the very importance of Yiddish for Jewish identity and survival.

THE ORIGINS OF MASS YIDDISH SECULAR SCHOOLING Despite the tremendous economic exploitation and physical devastation it wrought, the German occupation of Poland and Lithuania in the First World War brought an unprecedented measure of political and cultural freedom to all peoples in the occupied zones.?! Throughout the war, institutions of mass secular Yid-

dish and Hebrew culture, such as schools, theatre, and the press, flourished. Yiddish, long refused recognition and persecuted in the public domain by the 27 FE. Golczewski, Polnisch-jiidische Beziehungen 1881-1922 (Wiesbaden, 1981), 160.

28 Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland, 67. 29 Tbid. 51-3. 3° On Prylucki’s parliamentary activity, see N. Prytucki, Momy (Warsaw, 1920), and, most recently, S. Rudnicki, Zydzi w parlamencie IT Rzeczypospolite; (Warsaw, 2004).

31 On this period, see Z. Szajkowski, ‘The Struggle for Yiddish during World War I’, Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 9 (1964), 131-58, and S. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East-European Jew in German and German-JFewish Consciousness (Madison, 1982).

372 Kalman Weiser tsarist administration, was granted official status by the occupiers as a language for

public declarations, along with Polish, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Belorussian. Not only were educational restrictions abrogated, such as the numerus clausus limiting Jewish admission to schools and universities, secular elementary education was made compulsory by the Germans in the mother tongue of children regardless of race, creed, or sex. The atmosphere of relative liberalization and the presence of

thousands of children in the city in need of schooling afforded nationalist and socialist educators the opportunity to create the first mass kindergartens and elementary schools with Hebrew or Yiddish as their language of instruction. ‘They thereby laid the foundations of the inter-war Hebraist Tarbut and Yiddishist Tsisho (Central Yiddish School Organization) school systems in Poland. The issue of the language of Jewish schools sparked a rancorous public debate

that pitted supporters of Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Polish against one another to determine the cultural orientation of a new generation of Polish Jews. A

torrent of articles appeared in the Polish, Jewish, and German presses between 1916 and 1918 along with a number of partisan books and treatises, including linguistic defences by Prylucki,*” proposing solutions to the school question in a time

of inflamed national tensions. Each participant in the debate claimed to speak

legitimately in the name of Polish Jewry or on behalf of its interests.°° , As journalists and literati grouped around the highly popular daily Der moment,

edited by Zevi Prylucki, the Folkists had ready access to an effective forum to agitate before a mass audience on behalf of the Yiddish school. Working together with the Bund, Poale Zion, and the socialist-territoralist Fareynikte, they played a leading role in establishing a legal, material, and organizational basis for an interwar network of schools—one of the few domains of co-operation between Jewish socialists and the ‘democratic intelligentsia’, or bourgeois parties. Noah Prylucki

himself served as the founding president of the Jewish School and Public Education Association (Yidishe shul un folksbildung-fareyn), an organization formed in 1915 to create a model Yiddish school.** The School Association counted on its executive committee a number of other Folkists, including the well-

known writer H. D. Nomberg and the political philosopher Saul Stupnick1. Zeitlin, Prylucki, and other Folkists also figured prominently among teacher trainers in the Yiddish schools and as organizers, members, and guest lecturers in a number of Yiddish cultural organizations, such as drama, music, literary, and publishing societies that mushroomed virtually overnight during the occupation.®? By the close of 1917 twelve Yiddish elementary schools and kindergartens were active 32 N. Prilutski, ‘Vos iz yidish?’, in Barg-aroyf-

33 K. Weiser, ‘The Struggle for the Yiddish Secular School in Congress Poland’, MA essay (Columbia University, 1996). 34 “Prytucki, Noé’, Polski sfownik biograficzny, xxviii. 630. Y. S. Hertz, Di geshikhte fun bund tn lodz (New York, 1958), 256. N. Prilutski, ‘Oyf der vakh’, Der moment, 293 (21 Dec. 1924). 35 E. Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im ersten Weltkrieg (Gottingen, 1969), 194, and K. S. Kazdan, Di geshikhte fun yidishn shulvezn in umophengikn poyln (Mexico City, 1947), 225.

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 373 in Warsaw: four schools run by various institutions under the supervision of the

Central Dinezon School Committee (the core of the inter-war Tsisho school system), five belonging to Prylucki and Nomberg’s Jewish School and Public Education Association and affiliated with the Dinezon schools, one Bundist kindergarten, and two additional schools with kindergartens established by the

Poale Zion.*° ,

With the expansion of the Jewish school system the idea arose of uniting independently functioning Yiddish schools of various political and cultural orientations. A number of pedagogical issues, such as the pressing need for grammatical and spelling standardization,?’ were discussed at a series of conferences between 1915 and 1920 but ideological divisions prevented a unified school front. Members of the Bund, Poale Zion, the Fareynikte, the Folksparty, and non-party Yiddishists agreed only on language and secularism. ‘They diverged on pedagogical methods,

educational goals and ideals, and their attitude towards traditional Jewish texts, | Hebrew, and Palestine. Party representatives and educators nonetheless cooperated on a number of practical matters. Nomberg, for example, and especially Prylucki, a dialectologist and foremost expert on Polish Yiddish, were active in commissions to develop terminologies for instruction in the sciences and mathematics and participated in committees to establish and implement a unified system of Yiddish spelling. In 1921 Tsisho, the Central Yiddish School Organization, was formed as an umbrella organization encompassing 130 Yiddish secular elementary schools and forty-seven kindergartens of all political orientations.°°

DIVERGING VIEWS AMONG FOLKISTS While all Folkists championed Yiddish as the primary language of Jewish schooling and everyday life, their motivations and attitudes towards other languages were often quite disparate. This divergence is best illustrated by contrasting the personalities and perspectives of Hillel Zeitlin and Noah Prylucki, the two party activists articulating the most radical positions on language and education. Both wrote regularly in support of the party’s platform on the pages of Der moment during the party’s early years. Zeitlin was an observant Jew who claimed a strong distaste for divisive party politics and ideological extremism in any form. A hasidic yeshiva scholar turned secular Zionist and then religious penitent, he enjoyed tremendous popularity for his fusion of intense religiosity and secular nationalism. He was beloved among readers of the Yiddish press for articles that popularized religious philosophy and

especially for his ‘Letters to Jewish Youth’, a series of ruminations on Jewish 36 Garncarska-Kadary, Di linke poyeley-tsien, 34. 37 S. Londinski, ‘Vegn a konferents fun yidish-lerer’, Lebnsfragn, 4 (25 Feb. 1916). 38 S. Frost, Schooling as a Socio-Political Expression (Jerusalem, 1998), 37—8.

374 Kalman Weiser history and identity advocating a non-coercive approach to Jewish religious obser-

vance.” Zeitlin therefore called for the reform, rather than the abandonment, of the heder and the necessity of retaining Torah and /oshn-koydesh (the Hebrew-Aramaic

of the Bible and Talmud) as the foundations of a Jewish education. While demanding greater respect and official recognition for Yiddish by Jews and nonJews alike, Zeitlin also deplored the condition of Hebrew literacy and writing ability in Poland in comparison with his native Lithuania (the north-east of the Pale of Settlement), renowned for its Jewish scholarly tradition. He supported

maintaining the linguistic status quo in Jewish society whereby Yiddish and Hebrew fulfilled complementary functions. For him Yiddish was hallowed by a thousand-year-old tradition but Hebrew was holier and more sublime. Or, to be more precise, he distinguished between the Modern Hebrew of the Zionists and loshn-koydesh, the language of sanctity—the multilayered language of Jewish liturgy and rabbinic writings comprising both Hebrew and Aramaic.*° At the heart of Zeitlin’s ideology lay his devotion to Judaism as the irreplaceable

foundation of Jewish national existence. He insisted that even a modernized Jewish education must focus around the language and values of the Torah. Misguided efforts to revive Hebrew as a spoken language, especially with a pronunciation (Sephardic) foreign to Polish Jews, were bound to fail and those who attempted this would merely make an artificial, debased jargon of loshn-koydesh.*} Secular Hebraist educators, Zeitlin warned, will succeed only in teaching Jewish

children to hate Yiddish and thus drive them closer to the camp of the antinationalist Assimilationists and from there to apostasy. Teaching children in any language other than Yiddish, he argued, was a sure way to alienate them from their home environment and to estrange them linguistically and culturally from the whole of the Jewish people, as had already occurred among the Polish-speaking Jewish upper bourgeoisie. Zeitlin saw a Jewish national school where loshn-koydesh

and, more importantly, Torah were taught in Yiddish in addition to general subjects as the only viable means to combat the decline in morals and religious textual literacy among Jewish children and, ultimately, to guard against the disappearance of Jewish identity as he understood it.*” Zeitlin was thus deeply opposed to the replacement of Yiddish with Polish in Jewish schools, even if Judaic studies were preserved. Further, he cautioned that 39 M. Waldoks, ‘Hillel Zeitlin: The Early Years (1894—1919)’ (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1984), 78-9, 89, 92—-5. “Tseytlin, Hilel’, in S. Niger and Y. Shatski (eds.), Lekstkon fun der nayer yidisher literatur (New York, 1956—81), vii. 578.

40H. Tseytlin, ‘Di ershte yidishe kultur-konferents’, Der moment, 74, 75, 76, 77 (28-31 Mar. 1917). *1 Td., ‘An emes vegn hebreish un yidish’, Der haynt, 67, 70, 73, 76 (19, 23, 26 Feb. and 30 Mar. IQIO).

2 It. ‘Di kultur-baderfenishn fun der poylisher provints’, Der moment, 144, 150 (22 and 29 June IQ17).

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 375 a high-quality kheyder and yeshiva made Polish ‘in language and in spirit’ was ultimately an unrealizable goal: melamdim were ill-equipped to teach Jewish subjects in Polish due to lack of fluency and because Polish lacked the specialized vocabulary for Jewish study that Yiddish had forged over generations.**® At the same time, Zeitlin unflinchingly took to task the hasidic and lower middle-class readership of Der moment for sending its sons to poorly organized, reform-needy khadorim while wholly denying its daughters a Jewish education and providing them instead a secular Russian or Polish one. This strategy, he railed, served only to encourage the estrangement of girls from Jewish culture and to implant in them a disdain for the language of their parents and their community.** Nonetheless, while agreeing in principle with Yiddishists and defending them

from accusations that they were principled opponents of Polish, Hebrew, and khadorim, he made clear that he did not belong wholeheartedly to their camp: Iam not a Yiddishist and hate all ‘isms’ but do not want to see my brethren deprived of civil and national rights and their children estranged. Therefore, I support the ‘Folksgrupe’ [the initial name of the Folksparty—K W ] and side with the Yiddishists even though I disagree with them as to the quantity and purpose of teaching Joshn-koydesh.*°

In contrast, Prylucki held a very different view of the function of religion in Jewish life. He was strongly influenced by the political-historical theses of Simon Dubnow, the seminal historian of eastern European Jewry and the intellectual father of the cause of Jewish extra-territorial national-cultural autonomy. According to Prylucki’s understanding, the Jewish religion was protective armour that had preserved Jewish nationhood in the Diaspora for generations but would eventually yield to language and a secularized national culture as the organizing princi-

ple and unifying factor in Jewish life.4© Though strongly opposed to clerical participation in politics and hegemony in communal affairs, he was not hostile to religion as a matter of individual conscience.*’ He shared the conviction of such writers and Yiddish cultural activists as Y. L. Peretz and S. An-ski that religion informed Jewish folk culture and provided a vast repository of themes, values, and images for use in shaping a secularized national culture.*® Like all other Folkists,

he supported instruction in both Hebrew and Polish as separate subjects in Yiddish schools and valued the Jews’ cultural heritage in all their historic lan43 Td., ‘Yidish in religyez-natsionaln bavustzayn fun folk’, Der moment, 300 (29 Dec. 1916). 44 See M. Mozes, ‘Der moment’, in Yidishe prese in varshe, ii: Fun noentn over (New York, 1956), 250-2. 45 'Tseytlin, ‘Yidish in religyez-natsionaln bavustzayn fun folk’. 46 N. Prilutski, ‘Moyshe hes’, Der moment, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, 54, (9, 16, 23 Feb. 1912; 1, 8, 15 Mar. 1912), reprinted in his Barg-aroyf, 3-25. 47, N. Prilutski, ‘Oyf der vakh’, Dos folk, 36 (31 Dec. 1917). 48 On Peretz, see R. R. Wisse, [. L. Peretz and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Seattle, 1991)

and M. W. Kiel, ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei: The Centrality of Peretz in Jewish Folkloristics’, Polin, 7 (1992), 88—120. On An-ski, see D. Roskies, ‘S. Anski and the Paradigm of Return’, in J. Wertheimer (ed.), The Uses of Tradition (New York, 1992), 243-60.

376 Kalman Weiser guages. He contended, though, that the Yiddish language and a modern European culture expressed in it were sufficient to safeguard the existence of the Jews as a people in the Diaspora. Moreover, focusing energies in campaigning for official recognition of Hebrew in the Diaspora, as did Zionists, weakened the Jewish nationalist cause by presenting evidence of a linguistically divided nation and hence no nation at all. Prylucki accepted the proposal, outlined by Stupnicki, that only those who registered Yiddish as their language in a national registry should be eligible to participate in elections to a council envisioned to administer national cultural autonomy. Those claiming other languages would thus be effectively excluded, at least politically, from the Jewish nation in Poland.*? Pryluck1’s colleague, the journalist and translator Samuel Hirshhorn, advocated a more flexible position on the school-language issue. He himself had received a Polish-language education in a commercial school and did not begin his literary activity in Yiddish until 1916, after having written for several years in both the Polish progressive and Polish Jewish presses.°° Accustomed to writing and lecturing in Polish, he was unwilling to exclude polonized Jews from the Jewish nation for their linguistic peccadillo and instead urged their gradual ‘nationalization’: It is wrong to separate Jews into ‘Assimilationists’ and nationalist Jews in practical life. Few

are the Jews with one foot in the church, waiting for a ‘fanatical’ rich grandmother to bequeath money. Most ‘Assimilationists’ disagree with nationalists in points or are simply poorly informed about the essence of Jewish nationalism. Most ‘Assimilationists’ may

oppose Hebrew or Yiddish as the language of instruction or find too much Hebrew or Judaic Studies in the curriculum but usually want the child to know Jewish history, have some education in Hebrew language, and to be raised in a religious spirit, although without excess fanaticism. Nationalization of the half-assimilated cannot be accomplished at once or they will not return and we will lose them entirely.°*

Hirshhorn understood, although he did not sympathize with, the concern that motivated the Polish-speaking Jewish intelligentsia to send its children to privately

funded Polish schools devoid of Jewish content rather than to Jewish schools. They believed that their children would learn more there and be safeguarded from the danger of learning Polish inadequately or of preserving a socially stigmatizing

Yiddish accent. He cast the lion’s share of responsibility for this situation on Jewish mothers, to whom Hirshhorn attributed the greatest authority in educational decisions and whom he, like Zeitlin, bitterly blamed for valuing fads and foreign ways over Jewish culture. The popularity of Polish schools among Jewish parents, he argued, must be combated by popularizing Jewish schools financed by the kehilah in ever broader circles of parents. The future kehilah, once national 49S. Stupnitski, Oyfn veg tsum folk (Warsaw, 1920), 140-2.

°° “Tsu der hayntiker derefnung fun seym’, Der moment, 34 (9 Feb. 1919); Grafman, ‘Di geveylte yidish ratmener’. ‘Hirshhorn, Shmuel’, in Z. Reyzin, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filolo-

gye (Vilna, 1930), 1. 847-8. , 1S. Hirshhorn, ‘Mitlshuln far yidn’, Shul un dertsiung, 8 (1 June 1917), 5—12.

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Pryluckt 377 cultural autonomy was achieved, would need to operate three types of schools: Polish-language schools for the children of ‘half-assimilated’ classes, Hebrew- or Yiddish-language schools for the children of the ‘fully national’ (in the form of currently existing institutions), and secondary schools with either Hebrew or Yiddish as the language of instruction.®” Thus, although a proponent of Yiddish, he was not hostile to Hebrew. Though himself not a strictly observant Jew, Hirshhorn viewed the Jewish religion as thoroughly ‘national’ and sufficient in itself to earn the Jews recognition as a people since it pervaded all areas of life; indeed, religion was the only element of

the manifold criteria (language, land, culture, etc.) defining a nation that was shared by all Jews. While a Jew can theoretically exist as a Jew without religion, the other national traits are not sufficiently strong to preserve his Jewish identity in the long run. Conversion or a declaration of Konfessionslosigkett (as in western Europe) in actuality leads to the severing of bonds with Jewish life. By the same token, he argued, it is impossible to be religious and not a nationalist.°°

In opposition to his colleagues Zeitlin and Hirshhorn, who emphasized educational content and attributed to language a secondary, albeit essential, role, Prylucki made all other concerns subordinate to the language question. For him, the dreaded disappearance of Yiddish in an increasingly non-religious age was liable to spell the demise of the Jews as a people. In his most extreme pronouncements he hyperbolically distinguished between two distinct nations with conflicting interests, yidishe yidn—Yiddish-speaking Jews—and acculturated, Polish-speaking Jews.°* He vehemently opposed the existence of Jewish national schools in any language other than Yiddish and claimed that the language was so permeated with Jewish culture as to render almost superfluous instruction in national values. In

this way, he neatly begged the question of what precisely constituted Jewish national values apart from devotion to Yiddish. At the same time, he warned that education in what he called ‘national spirit’ but in a ‘foreign tongue’ would yield the undesirable product of a generation of national chauvinists.°°? Without the creation of a national school of uniform curriculum in Yiddish, the Jewish elite would follow the example of the Ukrainians, whose most creative talents, he claimed, adopted a hegemonic language of the region—Russian, German, or Polish.°® According to Prylucki, ideological attachment to the language and an appreciation of its cultivation needed to be fostered among ordinary Jews indifferent to

questions of language and lacking pride in their mother tongue. Only in this way could the ‘contamination’ of Yiddish by immoderate foreign influences be stemmed as Jews became familiar with non-Jewish languages in increasing 52 Tbid. 53 §. Hirshhorn, ‘Dos natsionale un religyeze yidntum’, Dos folk, 25 (3 Aug. 1917). o4 N. Prilutski, ‘Farzhaverte shverd’, Unzer lebn (18 Mar. 1910), repr. in his In poyln: Kimat a publitsist togbukh, 1905-1911 (Warsaw, 1921), 173-8. 55 Td., ‘Oyf der vakh’, Der moment, 116 (18 May 1917). °6 Id., ‘Oyf der vakh’, Dos folk, 33 (28 Aug. 1918).

378 Kalman Weiser numbers.°” As an autodidact linguist, Prylucki understood well how elements of Middle High German, Hebrew-Aramaic, and Slavonic and Romance languages had fused over time to form the integral whole known as Yiddish. He therefore attempted to distinguish between useful borrowings and the wholesale import of elements from German and co-territorial languages, especially Polish and Russian,

which, when undigested and unassimilated by the internal processes of the language, threatened its uniqueness.°® Wherever Yiddish disappears from Jewish life, he argued, assimilation is sure to

creep quietly, almost unnoticed, into its place; on the contrary, the spread of the Yiddish printed word, the work of agitators on behalf of Yiddish, and the popularity of Yiddish lectures and of even shund (popular Yiddish) theatre are all factors which contribute to the strengthening of Jewish national feeling and to reversing the tide of assimilation. It is therefore essential that Jews exclusively employ

Yiddish with one another in all situations and for all purposes. The anxietyinducing expectation must be shattered among the Jewish masses that one must address a Jewish professional, a member of the linguistically assimilated bourgeoisie, in clumsy Polish or Russian rather than comfortable mame-loshn.°? Thus, Jewish nationalist newspapers must be printed in Yiddish and no other language, the minutes and reports of Jewish societies must be kept in Yiddish,°! merchants and doctors must hang only Yiddish signs, business cards must be printed in Yiddish, wedding announcements must appear in correct Yiddish (and not with a cosmetic admixture of daytshmerish, e.g. ferlobte for fiancée), and even household , utensils bearing initials, such as salt and pepper shakers, must bear Yiddish and not Latin or Cyrillic letters: ‘And again, don’t say that these are trifles. From such “trifles” (kleyntkeytn) begins assimilation. At first, Kopel becomes Filaret, Zangvel—Zenzwi, Efraym—Franciszek, and Sore—Solomea. After the Jewish names, the Jewish books, the Jewish heart, the Jewish soul are driven out of the house.’® 57 N. Prilutski, ‘Kleynikeytn’, in Barg-aroyf, 216—19. °8 Td., ‘A shmues vegn gringe zakhn, vos vern kinstlekh farplontert’, Der moment, 147 (26 June

1931); id., ‘Zhargonizirung fun yidish’, Yidish far ale, 1 (Mar. 1938), 3-8. See C. Hutton, ‘Normativism and the Notion of Authenticity in Yiddish Linguistics’, in D. Goldberg (ed.), The Field of Yiddish, Fifth Collection (Evanston, Ill., 1993), 14-28. °9 Prylucki tells of a visitor to his law office, a man quite familiar with his articles in the Yiddish

press and therefore his stance as a Yiddishist, who nonetheless feels obliged to address a lawyer in Polish. ‘He sweats, is embarrassed, and asks fearfully, “Czy mozna mémté po Zargonu?” And I hear the same question ten times a day, which upsets me greatly. “Certainly! You’ve come, it would seem, to a Jew!” “But for a lawyer to speak Yiddish??” “What’s the surprise? Haven’t I written that a Jew should

never be ashamed of his mother tongue?” “There’s no telling what they’!l write [in newspapers]!”’ (N. Prilutski, ‘Male vos m’shraybt!’, in Der zhurnalist: a zamlung aroysgegebn lekoved dem zhurnalistnbal dem tsveytn tog peysakh 5672 (Warsaw, 1912), 34-5). 60 _N. Prilutski, ‘Ver darf dos? (di rusish-yidishe prese)’, Unzer lebn, 13 (28 Jan. 1910), repr. in Barg-

aroyf, 212-15. 61 Td., ‘Mekoyekh a barikht’, Der moment, 98 (12 May 1911), repr. in Barg-aroyf, 220-3; id., ‘Der

eltster yidisher muzikfareyn’, in Barg-aroyf, 224-5. 62 Td., ‘Kleynikeytn’, in Barg-aroyf, 216-19.

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 379 For Prylucki, the ‘defection’ of Jews to other, allegedly more prestigious or useful languages in pursuit of social and economic advancement had to be halted at all costs. Through the provisions of cultural autonomy, new opportunities in the form of jobs and cultural institutions, such as theatres, schools, and universities, needed to be created in Yiddish, protected by law, and funded with public moneys. Only

then could Yiddish remain competitive with Polish, the chief language of non-

Jewish society and the language of the Second Polish Republic. In short, a Yiddish-speaking sub-economy needed to be not only maintained within the larger, Polish-speaking economy; it also had to be expanded to include areas of endeavour, such as intellectual and white-collar professions, in which Jews were previously not active or in whose pursuit they did not formerly speak Yiddish.

, Further, if Yiddish were not only to survive but to thrive truly, the fo/k that had unconsciously created it could no longer remain its exclusive guardians. Instead, the cultivation and regulation of the language had to be entrusted to scholars like him who possessed the necessary sensitivity to the specificity of the language vis-avis closely related German and, in particular, the Slavonic languages, whose proximity caused them to pose the greatest threat to the integrity of Yiddish. This new variety of Yiddish supervised by a Yiddish language academy, the kulturshprakh, would stand above all dialects and be transmitted largely through the vehicle of the Yiddish secular elementary school. Its use would serve as a marker of education and social refinement, distinguishing a new secular nationalist elite that would replace

both the traditional religious elite and the more recent, linguistically assimilated elite that together dominated Jewish communal life. On the model of German, whose standard pronunciation was shaped by stage speech, Prylucki proposed Volhynian Yiddish—the basis of theatre dialect outside the Soviet Union and, perhaps not coincidentally, his native dialect—as the basis for a Yiddish orthoepy.°°

LANGUAGE CHANGE AND SCHOOLING While Hebrew literacy and interest in Diaspora Hebrew culture were on the whole on the wane in Poland—so much so that after repeated attempts Zionists gave up on trying to publish a general Hebrew daily in the late 1920s—Hebraists could at least point to the burgeoning of a new Hebrew culture in the developing Jewish

proto-state in Mandate Palestine. Those interested in literature and a press in Modern Hebrew were more likely to turn to imports from Palestine than local publications.®* Polish Yiddishists, on the other hand, viewed themselves as a camp

increasingly besieged from both within and without by the changing nature of Jewish society and the worsening political and economic reality. 63 Td., ‘Di yidishe bineshprakh’, Yidish teater, Book 2 (Apr.—June 1927), 129-44.

64 S. Werses, “The Hebrew Press and its Readership in Interwar Poland’, in Y. Gutman, E. Mendelsohn, J. Reinharz, and C. Shmeruk (eds.), The Jews of Poland between Two World Wars (Hanover, NH and London, 1989), 312-33.

380 Kalman Weiser With Poland finally independent after the First World War, adoption of the language of tsars and Bolsheviks alike naturally ceased to be an attractive option for economically and socially aspiring Jews. Despite significant gains for Yiddish during the war, the polonization of Jewish youth remained with good reason an acute

fear among committed Yiddishists throughout the inter-war period. Of the 21,176,717 individuals registered in the 1921 Polish census, more than a third were not ethnically Polish. Ukrainians formed the largest minority group, followed by

Jews, Belorussians, and Germans. In contrast with the Slavonic and German minorities, the community of nearly three million Jews (as determined by religion) making up 10.5 per cent of the 1921 population lacked an ethnic homeland outside Poland to protect its interests.°° Jewish nationalists therefore looked to negotia-

tions with the representatives of the new state at the Paris Peace Conference of I91IQ aS an opportunity to secure guarantees for the protection of the Jews in Poland as a national minority with concomitant cultural rights. According to the terms of the National Minorities Treaty signed on 28 June 1919 between representatives of the Five Powers—the USA, Britain, France, Italy,

Japan—and Poland, the Jews were entitled to state-supported Jewish schools under the supervision of their own authorities and the right to use Yiddish in public institutions. The National Minorities ‘Treaty was welcomed by most Jewish

Sejm deputies as the juridical basis for their expanded political and cultural activity while a constitution guaranteeing their rights was pending. Sensitive to a tremendous public outcry against the treaty despite efforts in the Seym to portray it as beneficial to Poland, the government refrained from publishing the Minorities

Treaty in its official organ until December 1920.°° For Yiddishists, state funding for the Yiddish secular school, while falling short of the full goal of national cultural autonomy, represented a tremendous achievement and fount of hope for the future. The very recognition of Yiddish by German officials during the First World War was in their eyes tantamount to national recognition of the Jews. Further, the Yiddish language had made tremendous concrete gains, becoming a language of mass, super-regional culture via the press, schools, theatre, and political parties. Thus, the Yiddishist movement seemed to its adher~ ents to be on the ascendant: Yiddishists had long struggled for official recognition for Yiddish as a legitimate language; now, they saw this recognition implicitly extended into the international sphere through a treaty guaranteeing government support for Yiddish-language schools 1n a sovereign Polish state. Initially, at least, the Polish state’s reluctance to implement the treaty in full did not deter the Folkists. Prylucki was confident that the wars fought in the early 6° Mendelsohn, Zionism in Poland, 14-15, 23. R. F. Leslie (ed.), The History of Poland since 1863

(Cambridge, 1980), 126-7. .

66 S. Netzer, Ma’avak yehudei polin al zekhuyoteihem ha’ezrahiyot vehale’umiyot, 1918-1922 (Tel Aviv, 1980), 146—60. Mendelsohn, Zionism, 35. O. I. Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights (1595-1919) (New York, 1933), 340-69. Frost, Schooling as a Socto-Political Expression, 19-22.

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 381 years of the Polish state over border areas with mixed populations, such as the western Ukraine, would convince world leaders of the rectitude of the doctrine of national autonomy as the only adequate solution to national conflicts. Of the Jewish parties in Poland, only the Folksparty and the Bund, he proudly pointed out, included the rights of Yiddish in their platforms. He also did not demur in attributing to himself no small share of the credit for popularizing the doctrine among the Jewish masses of Poland and for familiarizing the Polish non-Jewish population with it through his tireless efforts in the Warsaw City Council and his

articles in the Yiddish press.°’ . In compliance with the treaty, hundreds of public elementary schools were opened with Ukrainian, German, and other languages as the languages of instruction. To be sure, the opening of these schools was dependent on numerous formal-

ities, such as population requirements and teacher qualifications, which were manipulated by the state to reduce their number and encourage the polonization of

Slavonic minorities through the medium of an increasing number of bilingual schools.°° Similarly, state policy, including educational policy, aimed at pressuring the German minority to emigrate or polonize by denying the use of its language in numerous spheres.°? Not a single Hebrew or Yiddish public school, however, needed to be shut down

by the state since none had been established. In contravention of the Minorities Treaty, financially strapped Yiddish and Hebrew secular schools received almost no state support and necessarily remained in private hands.’° Of Jewish schools, the state looked favourably only on religious ones organized by the Agudah, whose political and social conservatism was welcomed by the government. Hebrew- and,

above all, Yiddish-language schools, on the contrary, were subject to frequent official harassment. The government objected to the schools, especially those of Tsisho, as an expression of Jewish nationalism and because of their secular, leftist orientations. Various pretexts were employed, including the charge that Yiddish was a Jewish jargon, not a proper language, or that the buildings were unsafe, to arrest or remove teachers and to deny the renewal of school concessions over the protests of Jewish nationalist deputies in the Sejm. Between 1920 and 1922 more than twenty private Jewish schools were closed in this manner, especially in the eastern borderlands (kresy), where both the Hebrew and Yiddish school 67 “Fun groysn yidishn miting in kaminskis teater: di rede fun noyekh prilutski’, Der moment, 144 (25 June 1919).

68 On Ukrainian schools in Poland, see G. Y. Shevelov, The Ukrainian Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century (1900-1941 ) (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 178-81. 69 A.S. Kotowski, Polens Politik gegeniiber seiner deutschen Minderheit 1919-1939 (Wiesbaden, 1998), 1OI-—4.

70 During the Second Polish Republic only one grant was made by the Ministry of Education to Jewish schools, a one-time allocation of 45,000 zlotys in 1927. Communal allocations were made more

often, although irregularly, and, on the whole, grudgingly (Frost, Schooling as a Socto-Pohtical Expression, 26).

382 Kalman Weiser movements were at their strongest. Moreover, supervisory state authorities gradually cancelled or reduced appropriations given by a considerable number of municipalities to Tsisho schools.’* This trend, while never resulting in the outlawing of private Jewish schools, continued throughout the inter-war period. Opposition to the Yiddish secular school movement did not come exclusively, however, from the side of the Polish government. The Yiddishist Tsisho schools, to whose organization Folkists were leading contributors, were also decidedly unpopular among many impoverished Jewish parents once the emergency conditions of the First World War, when schools provided for the basic material needs of children of refugees, had ended. ‘They were typically associated with the antireligious, anti-Hebrew radicalism preached by Jewish socialists and recognized as offering limited socio-economic horizons. A secular Yiddish education, even if including thorough instruction in both Polish and Hebrew and on a high pedagogical level, offered no competitive advantage in gaining places in the Polishlanguage state secondary schools and universities coveted by aspiring middle-class Jews. On the contrary, it was a hindrance. Diplomas from Yiddish schools were frequently not recognized by the state (obliging pupils to prepare for state exams in addition to the ones administered by Jewish schools in order to gain admission toa state high school) and parents feared that their children would master Polish with

a Jewish accent. Attending secondary school or university abroad, where the diplomas of Jewish secondary schools were sometimes recognized, was an option available only to the wealthy. Financially strapped Yiddish and Hebrew secular schools necessarily charged for tuition, albeit modestly, and relied heavily on party funding and contributions

, from Jewish communities abroad, especially in the USA. The Yiddish secular school, the cornerstone of the Folkist vision of national cultural autonomy for the

Jews in the Diaspora, was thus unable to draw more than a fraction of Polish Jewish youth. Despite the tremendous dedication of parents and educators 71 J, Zyndul, Panstwo w parstwie2: Autonomia narodowo-kulturalna w Europie Srodkowowschodnies w

XX wieku (Warsaw, 2000), 123-6. N. Eck, “The Educational Institutions of Polish Jewry (1921-1939), fewish Social Studies, 9/1 (Jan. 1947), 11, 15. Eck notes that during this same period, ‘government reports bewailed the fact that, due to lack of funds, hundreds of rural public schools were housed in dilapidated huts’ (p. 11). 7 C. Shmeruk, ‘A Trilingual Jewish Culture’, in Gutman, Mendelsohn, Reinharz, and Shmeruk (eds.), The fews of Poland between Two World Wars, 292—6. According to JDC statistics, in 1936, ‘of the

one-half million Jewish children of school age, 64 percent studied or were supposed to study tn public schools in Polish, some of which were intended exclusively for Jewish children’ (ibid. 292). Official Polish government figures for the same year show some 80% of Jewish school-age children registered

in state public schools (G. Bacon, ‘National Revival, Ongoing Acculturation: Jewish Education in Interwar Poland’, Simon Dubnow Institut Jahrbuch, 1 (2002), 84). Gershon Bacon approvingly cites Shimon Frost’s assessment that ‘all statistical data on the Jewish educational networks in inter-war Poland are flawed with inaccuracies and overlapping figures. This is particularly true of the orthodox sector which included a great number of small hadarim, many of which in the words of Tartakower, “did not deserve to be called schools” ’ (ibid. 74).

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 383 involved in the Tsisho schools, the Yiddish schools showed the weakest enrolments

among the Jewish elementary schools. They drew only 9.5 per cent of the total number of children who attended Jewish schools during the school year 1934—5 in

comparison with roughly 25 per cent for the Tarbut schools and 55 per cent for religious schools (run mostly by Agudas Yisroel within the framework of the Khoyrev network). The Hebrew-language Tarbut schools fared somewhat better since they suffered less harassment from the state and because of the popularity of the Zionist pioneering ethos they imparted. Both types of secular Jewish schools were most popular in the multi-ethnic kresy, where Poles constituted a minority, thus diluting assimilatory pressures. Despite at times open displays of antisemitism by teachers and students, for simple pecuniary reasons the vast majority of Jewish children attended the free Polish-language elementary schools opened by the state. The private secular schools in either Jewish language, as well as the network of Orthodox day schools created by the Agudas Yisroel party, all charged tuition, however modest. ’*

ACCULTURATION WITHOUT INTEGRATION A climate of increasing poverty and discrimination alongside easy access to Polish primary (although not secondary) education contributed to a growing rate of lin-

guistic assimilation without commensurate societal integration among Jewish youth in the inter-war period.” Statistics measuring the reading habits of the patrons of Jewish libraries demonstrate a marked and increasing preference over time for books in Polish rather than other languages, especially among women and

children and even in the Tsisho schools. This inclination became more pronounced among students with age (and hence more years of exposure to Polish in school) and middle-class status. Not only were middle-class families more likely to speak Polish at home with their children than working-class ones but they were also much more likely to send their children to secondary schools, where the pace of polonization typically accelerated. Facing obstacles to admission to state insti-

tutions, in 1936—7 almost 75 per cent of Jewish secondary school students attended private schools that paralleled the curriculum of state institutions. Frequently offering little in the way of Judaic content, these private schools were often more Jewish in the make-up of their student bodies than in their curriculum. The vast majority of these schools taught exclusively in Polish or restricted the use of Hebrew to religious instruction, while leaving Yiddish out of the curriculum. ”° 73 N. Cohen, “The Jews of Independent Poland: Linguistic and Cultural Changes’, in E. Krausz and G. Tulea (eds.), Starting the Twenty-First Century (New Brunswick, NJ, 2002), 164. 74 Bacon, ‘National Revival, Ongoing Acculturation’, 71-92. % C. Heller, On the Edge of Destruction (New York, 1977), and Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central

Europe between the World Wars. 76 Cohen, ‘The Jews of Independent Poland’, 166-8.

384 Kalman Weiser Thus, the bourgeoisie, the socio-economic class which most venerated high culture—the type of culture which Prylucki and his colleagues laboured so assiduously to fashion in Yiddish—was also the class most inclined to embrace cultural life in Polish. The Yiddish dimension of the Polish-Hebrew—Yiddish cultural polysystem in inter-war Poland relied mainly on poorer and religiously conservative Jews. These sectors of Jewish society were less able financially or less ideologically inclined to support secular Yiddish culture. During a period when self-improvement through education was a cherished goal, poverty impeded the working class, the main consumers of Yiddish publications, in sustaining and helping to expand the Yiddish book market.’” Moreover, these groups were themselves hardly immune to polonization. This was especially true of girls since, in comparison with their brothers who studied in khadorim and yeshivas (often in addition to Polish-language public

schools) where Yiddish was the language of instruction, they typically received no | Jewish education outside the home. ’®

While never publicly retracting their support for Yiddish, a number of prominent Folkists and former Folkists seamlessly adapted to the changing cultural profile of Polish Jewry in the 1920s and 1930s. They advocated the creation of a Jewish

press and schools in Polish to accommodate the growing number of Jews most comfortable in Polish and who desired to take part in both the Polish and Jewish worlds but were offended by the antisemitism of the Polish public sphere.” Prior to the inter-war period, the weekly /zraelita (1866-1913) was the only long-standing Jewish newspaper in the Polish language. Since its message of integration into Polish culture and society found little resonance with the mass of traditional, Yiddish-speaking Jews at this time, its readership was limited to small but wealthy Assimilationist circles. Jewish nationalist papers in Polish appeared mainly around election time and were short-lived.®° By the outbreak of the Second World War, however, at least four Jewish dailies (Nomy Dziennik in Krakow, Chwila in ™ Cohen, “The Jews of Independent Poland’, 172. E. Kellman, ‘Dos yidishe bukh alarmirt’, Polin, 16 (2003), 226.

78 On the inroads of the Polish language among strictly religious girls, a phenomenon noted before the inter-war period in predominantly hasidic Galicia and Congress Poland, see G. Bacon, ‘La Société juive dans le royaume de la Pologne du Congrés (1860—1914)’, 647, 656; M. Prager, ‘Dos yidishe togblat’, in Yidishe prese in varshe, ii. 488-9. 79 “W mlynie opinji: Czy potrzebne jest pismo polsko-zydowskie?’, Nasz Przeglad, 14 ( June 1928).

80S. D. Corrsin, ‘Language Use in Cultural and Political Change in pre-1914 Warsaw: Poles, Jews, and Russification’, Slavonic and East European Review, 68/1 (1990), 81. S. Hirszhorn, ‘Poczatki zydowskiego ruchu narodowego w Polsce’, Nasz Przeglad, 18 (Sept. 1938). Hirshhorn recalls anecdotally that /zrachta’s readers typically subscribed more out of a sense of ideological duty to the assimilationist cause than out of genuine interest in reading the paper (which they seldom did). Some were even ashamed that their Polish servants might think them backward for receiving a newspaper whose very existence was a mark of Jewish separatism. In any event, the ‘non-reading’ editorial board failed to notice that the editor Nahum Sokolow, although not yet a confirmed Zionist, had been inserting Jewish nationalist content in the paper for two years.

The Yiddishtst Ideology of Noah Pryluckt 385 Lviv, Nasz Przeglad and sta rano in Warsaw) appeared in the Polish language. Apart from familiarizing readers with issues of particular concern to Jews, the Jewish press in Polish exposed many readers to Yiddish and Hebrew culture in translation who might otherwise have been unable or disinclined to read a book or attend a theatre performance in a Jewish language. Of decidedly Zionist bent, it was also the vehicle for the emergence of a Jewish literature of distinction in the Polish language.®! Polish Jewish newspapers were thus far from being the agents of

national assimilation predicted by Yiddishists and Hebraists. Nonetheless, as a forum for an emerging Jewish identity and culture expressing itself via the Polish language, they necessarily threatened the economic well-being of the more established Yiddish press. Among their readers were many who knew Yiddish but who were chiefly educated or simply preferred to read in Polish.*” Not a few Folkists, above all Stupnicki and Hirshhorn, became regular contributors to the growing Jewish press in Polish during the 1920s without ever publicly recanting their allegiance to Yiddish as the singular authentic medium for the creation of a modern Jewish culture. In 1923 the Folkists Hirshhorn, Sh. Vagman and Sh. Volkovitsh joined Jakub Appenszlak and the Haynt writer N. Shvalbe to found

Nasz Przeglad, the major Jewish nationalist paper in Polish in the inter-war period.®? Indeed, Hirshhorn wrote in the 1930s specifically in favour of developing

Jewish national identity via the Polish language in the face of the juggernaut of linguistic assimilation.®* Similarly, Bernard Singer, one-time secretary of the Folksparty’s central committee, abandoned politics after failing to be elected to the Sejm from 6dz in 1919 and made a career for himself as a leading writer for the Polish Jewish press under the pseudonym Regnis.®°

The possibility of a primarily Polish-speaking Jewish population—a menace against which Prylucki and his colleagues had long struggled—understandably terrified and demoralized those who had invested their energies, finances, and

hopes in not only the survival but also the modernization and expansion of Yiddish culture. To be sure, Yiddish remained the native language of most Jews in

Poland until the outbreak of the Second World War and the medium of an extremely variegated literature, press, theatre, and a wide array of cultural, political, and sporting organizations during the 1920s and 1930s. Eleven Yiddish dailies, two of them afternoon papers, appeared in Warsaw alone in 1936—7.°° Nonetheless, the trend towards linguistic assimilation was undeniable. “To judge by the number of Yiddish signs’, the Yiddish writer Nakhman Meisel warned in 1926, ‘Warsaw is free of Jews’ in comparison with much smaller, more 81 On this subject, see E. Prokop-Janiec, Polish-Jewish Literature in the Interwar Years (Syracuse, NY, 2003) (translation by A. Shenitzer of Miedzywojenna literatura polsko-zydowska jako zjawisko kul-

turowe 1 artystyczne (Krakow, 1992)). 82 Cohen, “The Jews of Independent Poland’, 170. 83 M.C. Steinlauf, “The Polish Jewish Daily Press’, Polin, 2 (1987), 219-45. 84 Prokop-Janiec, Polish-fewish Literature, 36. 85 J. K. Rogozik, ‘Bernard Singer, the Forgotten “Most Popular Jewish Reporter of the Inter-War

Years in Poland” ’, Polin, 12 (1999), 188. 86 Shmeruk, ‘A Trilingual Jewish Culture’, 305.

386 Kalman Weiser demonstratively pro-Yiddish Vilna. How many intellectuals, even those who claim

to support ‘Jewish national institutions’ (press, theatre, social-philanthropic institutions), he questioned, are consistent in their claims and create a Jewish environment at home by actually speaking Yiddish with their wives and children?®’ The Folkist dream of a diversified economy and school system functioning entirely in Yiddish was closest to realization in the kresy during the First World War and its aftermath. The bulk of the Yiddish schools were (like those of the Hebraist Tarbut system) concentrated in Vilna, Bialystok, and Brzes¢ (‘T'sisho was

, virtually non-existent in Galicia) and showed far less factionalism than in former Congress Poland.®® There also existed (at least in Congress Poland) a wellorganized Orthodox opposition to Jewish secular schools.®° The Jewish school movement was especially strong in Vilna, a city renowned for

its Hebrew scholarly tradition and celebrated by Yiddishists for the widespread use of the language among bourgeois and intellectuals, as well as the lower classes.°° There the Jewish upper classes switched from Russian, the prestigious and economically advantageous imperial language, to Yiddish after the tsarist retreat during the First World War, largely in order to avoid risking the animosity of other peoples by siding overtly with any one party (Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, | or German) in a multi-national conflict. In the former Congress Poland and especially Galicia, where the pace of polonization was most advanced even before the First World War (due to the favoured status given the language since the 1860s by the Habsburg empire), assimilative forces were at their strongest. Polish was not only the language of the state in these regions of Polish ethnic concentration; it was also the dominant language of non-Jewish society as a whole, including its upper classes whose conduct provided a model for the Jewish intelligentsia.**

~PRYLUCKI IN AMERICA Prylucki’s aggressive championing of Jewish national rights in the Seym and his zealous challenging of those speakers in whose words he suspected even the slightest hint of anti-Jewish animus did little to endear him to his fellow, especially 87 N. Mayzil, ‘Yidishe shildn’, Literarishe bleter, 132 (1926), 747-8. 88 Mendelsohn, Zionism, 204. On the whole, despite government harassment and financial difficul-

ties, the number of Tsisho schools actually grew between 1921 and 1925. In 1921, Tsisho possessed sixty-nine elementary schools and thirty-five kindergartens—a total of 381 classes with 13,457 children in forty-four cities. Four years later, it had ninety-one elementary schools with 455 classes and 16,364 pupils in addition to three secondary schools with 780 pupils (K. S. Kazdan, ‘Education’, Encylopaedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1971), Vi. 435). 89 Mendelsohn, Zionism, 193. M. Eisenstein, Jewish Schools in Poland 1919-39 (New York, 1950), 35. 80 On the topic of Yiddish cultural work in Vilna at this time, see S. D. Kassow, ‘Zalmen reyzen un

zayn gezelshaftlekh-politishe arbet, 1915-1922’, Yivo-bleter, 2 (1994), 67-97. , 91 Mendelsohn, Jews of East Central Europe. L. Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time (New York, 1989).

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 387 Polish, deputies.?? Irritated by a regular barrage of remarks that they vociferously denounced as provocative and inimical to the Polish state, Prylucki’s adversaries in parliament succeeded in manipulating election laws to bring a premature end to his term of office. On 24 May 19109, scarcely three months after the Seym had gone into session, Prylucki was stripped of his mandate on the grounds that he had been

born outside Poland (Berdichev) and was replaced by his Folkist colleagues Nomberg and, later, the artisan leader Chaim Rasner. Prylucki was thus required to apply for Polish citizenship through the same bureaucratic process as any other foreign national while ethnic Poles also born ‘abroad’ were deemed citizens.?° Prylucki’s exclusion from the Sejm permitted him greater freedom to travel for extended periods in the pursuit of relief work. Accompanied by his wife, he left Warsaw in September 1921 to undertake a tour of the United States and Canada.

He travelled in the name of the Central Relief Committee for War-Suffering Emigrants and Re-emigrants of Ukraine and Russia, a Folkist-dominated organization founded the previous year to assist in the resettlement of the thousands of Jewish victims of pogroms and expulsions in the Ukraine and Belorussia.** Apart

from his official goal of raising funds for rehabilitation work and imploring American officials to ease immigration restrictions, Prylucki viewed his visit as an opportunity to become acquainted with American Jewry, which he considered a colony of eastern European Jewry. With more than 1.5 million Jews, New York City possessed the largest concentration of Jews in the world and was home to four

Yiddish dailies in addition to a myriad other Yiddish publications and cultural activities.2° By meeting with immigrant societies and conducting interviews with the local Yiddish press, he sought to familiarize American Jews with the struggle of their Polish brethren for civil equality and national cultural autonomy in fulfilment of the National Minorities Treaty. He also hoped to establish cultural, organizational, and perhaps even political contacts in the atmosphere of greater closeness

engendered by the First World War. , At the end of four months, Prylucki’s trip to North America on the whole failed to yield the financial, political, and cultural results for which he had hoped. A , meeting with President Harding and the State Department to loosen severe immigration restrictions brought no concrete results.2° Neither was the Joint Distribution Committee, which was wary of Prylucki’s controversial personality 92 Prylucki was actually assaulted in the Sejm by two Endek deputies, leaving him with a bandaged head (‘Nokhn brutaln onfal oyfn dep’ prilutski’, Der moment, 161 (11 July 1924)). A photo of him recuperating in his office graces the cover of [/ustrirte vokh (17 July 1924), a journal edited by the Folkist A. Grafman. 93 Netzer, Ma’avak yehudei polin, 169-75. 1. Lewin, A History of Polish Jewry during the Revival of Poland (New York, 1990), 139. ‘Prytucki, Noe’, in Polski slownik biograficzny, 629-30.

94 “Noyekh prilutski ongekumen in nyu-york tsu helfn di heymloze ukrayner korbones’, Morgnzhurnal, 19 Sept. 1921. 95 A. Goren, ‘New York City’, Encyclopaedia Fudaica (Jerusalem, 1971), xii. 1078. 96 PD. Druk, ‘Noyekh prilutski baym president (a briv fun amerike)’, Der moment, 19 (22 Jan. 1922).

388 Kalman Weiser and feuding with the Zionists, willing to provide funding for refugee rehabilitation

programmes specifically to his organization, as he had requested, rather than to Polish Jewry as a whole.?’

While expressing no overt bitterness, Prylucki, the consummate European as well as Jewish nationalist, described America in his travelogues and special reports in Der moment with an air of condescension. He conceived of it as a young and naive land, a plutocracy where equality was chiefly to be found in the purposefulness and industry with which work was pursued by all regardless of social station and economic class. ‘The Americans were technologically advanced, but socially unsophisticated, as reflected in their two-party political system and their lack of gallantry towards women. Despite their flouting of European conventions of dress and manners, their tremendous degree of conformity was evident in their rigid

adherence to a fixed work schedule and the visible surprise with which they greeted deviance from accepted social and sartorial norms.9® In summary, Prylucki’s cursory tour of the USA impressed upon him that in American democracy lurked a negative side—the levelling of cultural and political distinctions. Prylucki recognized that Jewish political life as it was known in eastern Europe could not exist in a land where all citizens theoretically possessed equal rights as individuals but not the collective right to preserve their national distinctiveness. In his estimation, a man like Louis Marshall, for whom he expressed a deep respect, was more an old-style intercessor (shtadlan) on behalf of Jewish interests before influential non-Jews than a popular leader (folksfirer). His use of connections in

the financial and political spheres along with his personal qualities in order to intervene on behalf of European Jewry smacked precisely of the sort of custodianship by unelected elites from which Prylucki wished to free Polish Jewry.°? The postulates of national cultural autonomy were completely without context in a land where Jews were recent immigrants and rapidly integrating into general society in a way impossible in Poland, where social and ethnic barriers were centuries

old. Perhaps out of pessimism for the prospects of developing an independent Jewish cultural life in Yiddish in America or, like his colleague Nomberg and other Yiddishists,‘°° out of disappointment with the level of Yiddish culture which he %7 In May 1922 James Rosenberg, chairman of the European Executive Council of the JDC, expressed concern that Prylucki had been denied a clear answer after months of waiting and felt slighted since the Ukrainian Committee had received no money even after Prylucki had agreed to halt his fund-raising drive in the USA in return for what he deemed friendly assurances of assistance from

the JDC. Rosenberg asked for guidance on the matter since he believed that Prylucki ‘is the sort of man... where if we do not actually help his organization we are going to have him as a foe’ (letter from James N. Rosenberg to Dr Bernard Kahn, Archives of the Joint Distribution Committee, AR2132, file

405, 20 May 1922). 8 N. Prilutski, ‘Untervegs: nyu-york’, Der moment, 180 (8 Aug. 1922). 99 Td., ‘Lui marshal’, Der moment, 221 (20 Sept. 1929).

109 Nomberg, for example, felt that the Jewish immigrants to Argentina were on a higher cultural level than those in the USA (S. Rozhanski (ed.), H. d. nomberg: oysgeklibene shriftn (Buenos Aires, 1958)). Nina Warnke notes of Sholem Aleichem, ‘Whereas he acknowledges the benefits of political freedom and economic opportunity for Jews in America, he continuously mocked in his writings the

The Yiddtshist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 389 found there, he refrained from commenting on the state of the Yiddish language, literature, and cultural institutions. Quite uncharacteristic of one so attuned to language—or perhaps out of discomfort with it—he passed over in silence the remoulding of the American Yiddish lexicon and idiom by the local vernacular, a phenomenon deplored by other Yiddishists as reaching a far greater extent than in eastern Europe.!°!

DECLINE OF THE FOLKSPARTY Prylucki returned to Poland in January 1922 in time to campaign for re-election to the Sejm. While he was successful in gaining a parliamentary seat thanks to his personal popularity, the party as a whole fared less well. Insufficient support was to be found for the party’s militantly pro-Yiddish, anti-Zionist, and anti-socialist stance. This, coupled with its lack of decisive success in winning national minority rights and strengthening Jewish economic positions, translated into disappointing returns in the 1922 elections.'°? Several defections also arose within party ranks, as intellectuals who despaired of factionalism, such as Zeitlin and Nomberg, rued the party’s opposition to other Jewish political currents, its principled opposition to mass emigration, and the misnomer of a self-proclaimed people’s party without the backing of the people it claimed to support. While no political party was able to achieve national cultural autonomy and each was at best able to defend Jewish civil rights, the socialist message of the Bund and the prospect of a Jewish state held much greater appeal than the secular Yiddish schools and libraries that were the primary concrete offering of the Folkists. The prospect of secular Yiddish culture was insufficient to draw the allegiance of all but the most dogged Yiddishists.

The Folkists had only modest success in organizing artisans and merchants despite the gratitude expressed by many for Prylucki’s intercessory work on their behalf before the government and the party’s efforts to rebuild petty commerce and manual industry through schools, co-operatives, and credit facilities.1°? The party, which struggled to dominate artisan associations and make them exclusively

Yiddish-speaking, alienated many artisans with its position on Hebrew and Palestine and was unable to gain a foothold in the staunchly Zionist Lodz Artisans Association. Warsaw artisans divided into separate Folkist and Zionist organizations in 1919 and reunited only in 1925./°* Zionism, however, was also unsuited for low level of the immigrants’ culture and the shallowness of their values’ (N. Warnke, ‘Of Plays and Politics’, YIVO Annual, 20 (1991), 251). Similarly, Chone Shmeruk notes the degradation of east European Jewish ‘aristocrats’ in the USA (C. Shmeruk, ‘Sholem Aleichem and America’, ibid. 227). 101 Y. Mark, ‘Yidishe anglitsizmen’, Yorbukh fun amopteyl, 1 (1938), 296-321, and Y. Yofe, ‘Yidish

in amerike’, Yivo-bleter, 10 (1936), 127-45. 102 Netzer, Ma’avak yehudei polin, 309-13. 103 A. Levinson, Toldot yehude varsha (Tel Aviv, 1953), 271. R. Feldshuh, Yidisher gezelshaftlekher leksikon: Poyln 1. Varshe (Warsaw, 1939), 218. N. Prilutski, ‘Oyf der vakh’, Der moment, 67 (19 Mar. 1920).

104 E. Rak, Zikhroynes fun a yidishn hantverker-tuer (Buenos Aires, 1958), 65—6, 110. N. Prilutski, ‘Oyf der vakh’, Der moment, 29 (3 Feb. 1920).

390 Kalman Weiser the hundreds of thousands of pauperized Jewish craftsmen and petty traders unable to qualify for certificates of immigration to Palestine.!°°? The Bund, with its

emphasis on daily economic struggle, had the greatest influence on the Jewish trade union movement.!°° A one-man parliamentary faction from 1922 on, Prylucki found his party isolated in both the political and the cultural realms. He refused to join the Zionist-

dominated circle of Jewish delegates led by his arch-rival Griinbaum in the parliament, and the Folkists saw their influence in the schools of the Shul- un folksbildung fareyn greatly reduced in the 1920s until they were essentially excluded from Tsisho (except in Vilna) by the doctrinal narrowness of the Bund, which refused to co-operate with a bourgeois party.'°’ Even in Vilna, however,

support for Prylucki’s leadership was lacking among Folkists. A sister party, the People’s Democratic Party (Folks-demokratishe partey), was formed under the

| leadership of the popular medical doctor Tsemakh Shabad, with closer organizational ties to Folkists in Kaunas, Lithuania than in Warsaw. It became a separate organization in August 1923, with its central council in Vilna.*°° Using the original charter of the Shul- un folksbildung fareyn dating from the

First World War, Prylucki applied to and received permission from the state to begin a new educational organization, the Folksbildung-lige (Public Education League).!°° The Lige was officially authorized in July 1924 to open new Yiddish elementary and intermediate schools along with evening courses for adults. Its stated aim was to create a broad network of Yiddish schools for the petite bourgeoisie since no schools yet existed specifically for its children and because the Tsisho schools taught anti-religious proletarian culture and emphasized the proletariat as the backbone of the school movement. The Folkist Lige opened no new schools under its own aegis, however (although it did maintain a handful of existing schools and purchased a villa in the resort area of Otwock outside Warsaw for use as an orphanage with American relief moneys), and was therefore excluded according to the Tsisho constitution from the organization’s governing circle.'!°

Despite the support of some Folkist intellectuals for the Hebrew-Yiddish Shul-Kult schools opened by Poale Zion, Prylucki was unwilling to join this

| association.'+4

105 E, Mendelsohn, ‘Reflections on East European Jewish Politics in the Twentieth Century’, Y/VO

Annual, 20 (1991), 29. 106 Mendelsohn, The Jews of East Central Europe, 61. 107 N. Mayzil, ‘Noyekh prilutski’, Yidishe kultur (Jan. 1945), 27. 108 S. Biber, ‘Folks-partey’, in A. Mab (ed.), Politish-ekonomish verterbukh (Warsaw, 1936), 296.

109 “Veen inyen prilutski-trop’, Shul un lebn, 8 (15) (1922); Kazdan, Geshikhte, 160, 342; Garncarska-Kadary, Di linke poyeley-tsien, 285. 110 ‘Funem gezelshaftlekhn lebn: di grindings-farzamlung fun der folksbildungs-lige’, Der moment, 185 (8 Aug. 1924); ‘Fayerlekher oysflug in otvotsker dertstungs-hoyz fun der folksbildungs-lige’, Der moment, 163 (14 July 1924); Kazdan, Geshikhte, 352.

111 H. Tseytlin, ‘Un vos hert zikh epes mekoyekh der folkspartey’, Der moment, 135 (12 June 1931).

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Pryluckt 391 TURN FROM ACTIVE POLITICS TO SCHOLARSHIP Frustrated by the futility of political agitation on behalf of national cultural autonomy, Prylucki largely withdrew from active political life in the later half of the 1920s following a party split in 1926 after Marshal Pilsudski’s coup d’état. Folkists

dissatisfied with the isolationist course of the party and what they considered Prylucki’s authoritarian control dissolved its Warsaw executive committee and fused with Tsemakh Shabad’s Jewish Democratic Party in Vilna, the Warsaw

Folksparty’s sister party. They formed a new independent party, the Vilna Democratic Folksparty, while Prylucki was abroad addressing the National Minorities Conference in Geneva in Yiddish in the name of Polish Jewry. The party shared Prylucki’s party’s support of Jewish national autonomy based on secular Yiddish culture, as well as its championing of the economic interests of the middle class, but also gave greater attention to social problems and possessed a more positive attitude towards settlement in Palestine and the Hebrew language.*'” From these years until the outbreak of the Second World War, Jewish parties in Poland pursued a more conciliatory policy towards the government, from which

they hoped for protection in an atmosphere of rising popular antisemitism, and largely forwent national demands. Prylucki ran unsuccessfully for the Sejm in 1928 in a technical alliance with the Agudah and Assimilationists in the progovernment bloc instead of joining the Zionist-organized national minorities’ bloc.1!? Although the Folksparty did not wholly cease to exist and an (unsuccessful) attempt was made to reunite Folkist factions in Poland in 1929,*'* the party never regained its former stature. Prylucki, whose name was virtually synonymous

with the party, largely retired into the world of his journalistic and, above all, private scholarly pursuits, from which he derived tremendous satisfaction.''? Like many other Jewish scholars (such as the linguist Nokhem Shtif ),*’° he channelled his frustrated energies from politics into his beloved scholarly research. Nonetheless, Prylucki persisted—perhaps naively, perhaps out of stubborn commitment to what he felt was a just, although as yet unobtainable, cause—in publicly reaffirming his dedication to the postulates of national cultural autonomy. After Poland had formally repudiated the National Minorities Treaty in 1934, he encouraged 112 §. Biber, Der krizis funem yidish politishn gedank: a vendung tsu der yidisher demokratsye (Warsaw, 1927), 22. ‘Di demokratish-folkistishe konferents’, Frayer gedank, 1 (29 Oct. 1926). 113 'Y. Shatski, ‘Yidishe politik in poyln tsvishn di tsvey velt-milkhomes’, in Algemeyne entstklopedye.

Yidn, iv (New York, 1950), 229-33. 114 B. Yeushzon, ‘Folkizm’, Der haynt, 259 (1929). 115 *To tell the truth, I have mainly worked for myself alone. The interest in philology in the broadest sense of the concept is an inborn quality. The social instinct that determines the relationship of the

individual to the milieu directed this interest towards the Yiddish camp’ (‘Draysik yor literarishe tetikayt fun noyekh prilutski’, Literarishe bleter, 8/18 (May 1931), 332).

116 On Shtif’s career, see C. Kuznitz, ‘The Origins of Jewish Scholarship and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research’ (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2000).

392 Kalman Weiser voters to support Folkist candidates in the 1936 Warsaw kehilah elections, despite the fact that the party had all but ceased to exist apart from at election time.'*” , In 1931 the Association of Jewish Writers and Journalists feted Prylucki for over thirty years of literary, cultural, and political activity on behalf of Yiddish. A number of speakers, including his wife and the Yiddish philologist Zalmen Reisen, expressed the hope that he would one day occupy a chair of Yiddish philology at a future Yiddish university in Vilnius. There he would be able to continue with an appropriate budget and prestige the vital scholarly research that he had undertaken until then without any external support.17° While most of the speakers congratulated Prylucki on his cultural activity, a few voices called for his return to active political life in order to reassume leadership of

the Folksparty. In response to these urgings Prylucki remarked that ‘However important political work may be, it does not compare to scholarly work. . . . The current condition of Jewish political and organizational life convinces me even more of the national political meaning of Yiddish philological work.’ Pointing to a

decline in the fate of independent Jewish politics since 1927, he continued: ‘Precisely because the political struggle for national rights is so weakened among us, It is an urgent necessity to reinforce work and propaganda for the Yiddish language in order to straighten out and dignify our character and to destroy slavish mimicry tendencies.’*!”

YIVO, the pioneering research institute for Yiddish language and culture founded 1n 1925, was in Prylucki’s conception to become the Yavne of a new generation./2° Like the ancient rabbinic academy that preserved Jewish learning and, thus, identity in a time of despair, it would provide inspiration and guidance for new generations. A secular institution, however, it would study and regulate the growth of the Yiddish language and culture. Apart from contributing a regular column (misleadingly) titled ‘Notices without

Politics’ to Der moment in the latter half of the 1930s, Prylucki was active as a member of the philological section and the central committee (farvaltung) of YIVO. In 1937 he founded and edited the language journal Yidish far ale, intended for an audience of interested laymen as well as specialists, in collaboration with the

noted Yiddish linguists and cultural specialists Max Weinreich and Zalmen Reisen. He was also an active participant in lively debates about language standardization, contributing his own phonetically precise and interdialectal spelling system, which he used mainly in his linguistic publications. Indeed, despite extensive criticism of his idiosyncratic scholarly methodology during his own lifetime,'** his "NW See N. Prilutski, Bay di kehile-valn (Warsaw, 1936).

118M. K-ski (Magnus Krinski), ‘Di yoyvl-fayerung fun noyekh prilutski’, Der moment, 106 (8 May 1931); ‘Banket lekoved noyekh prilutski’, Der moment, 107 (10 May 1931). 119 K-nski (Magnus Krinski), ‘Banket lekoved noyekh prilutski’. 120 Tbid., and ‘Di yoyvi-fayerung fun noyekh prilutski’. #21 'Y. Mark, ‘Noyekh prilutski—der kemfer un der forsher’, Tsukunft (Feb. 1945), 100—3. In a personal letter to Mark, who resided in the USA from the 1920s, the philologist and YIVO stalwart Zelig

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 393 scholarly contributions and unsurpassed knowledge of Yiddish dialectology remain invaluable to this day. It is to the largely unanalysed data that he collected that post-Holocaust researchers will necessarily turn to reconstruct many features of Polish and Ukrainian Yiddish.

THE 1930S: DARKNESS AND HOPE By the mid-1930s, Prylucki’s dismay over politics extended beyond Poland to the world at large. Writing from Paris, where he resided for extended periods beginning in the late 1920s, he lamented bitterly the empowerment of dictatorial strongmen in the place of social democratic governments in a number of lands. He also noted frightening similarities between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. In both lands socialism had mutated into tyranny and ‘racism’. In the former, chauvinistic fascism and radical antisemitism aimed at the elimination of those of the wrong ‘blood’; in the latter, communist ideological intolerance victimized those born into the wrong ‘class’. In both societies, a notion of ‘chosenness’ _legitimized the persecution of the dominant ‘people’s’ alleged enemies.!7? Moreover, in the USSR, where Jews were actually recognized as a national minority with Yiddish as their language, hypocritical Jewish communists claimed to support Yiddish culture while ‘spitting in its face’. Their oppressive ideological controls and ‘Jesuit chicanery’ terrorized the world of Soviet Yiddish arts and let-

ters, leading its members to denounce their former colleagues in Poland as ‘Yiddish nationalists’ in order to avoid persecution for heretical ‘deviations’ from

| the party line. In order to demonstrate their unshakeable loyalty to the regime scholars such as Max Erik and Nokhem Shtif publicly confessed the Yiddishist sins of their youth and denounced their colleagues in the West. Thus, the very same scholars from whom Soviet Yiddish researchers had until recently solicited submissions for their publications, invited to conferences, and upon whose work they still relied (or, in the case of Shtif, plagiarized, according to Prylucki) were now supposedly enemies of the Jewish proletariat.'*° Further, the Soviet answer to Zionism—the Jewish autonomous region in Birobidzhan—disappointed Prylucki as a rejection of the ideal of extra-territorial cultural autonomy in the regions of the Jews’ historic residence. Kalmanowicz complained that the YIVO journal Yidish far ale had fallen into the hands of Prylucki, who ‘destroys Yiddish in his own way’. ‘Poor mame-loshn’, he wrote, ‘has the misfortune that such a scholarly graphomaniac has latched on to it and occupies its top position, driving away every expert and letting in the defect [ felenish] of sickly egotism.’ He states that Max Weinreich and Zalmen Reisen concur with him in this assessment and in the need to deprive Prylucki of the editorship of the journal. (Letter from Kalmanowicz to Mark, 8 Dec. 1938, YIVO RG 1.1 Call no. 540, Box 9, Folder 161.) 122 N. Prilutski, ‘Notitsn on politik’, Der moment, 122, 123 (27, 29 May 1932). 123 Td., ‘Notitsn on politik’, Der moment, 240 (1931); ‘Oy, doles, doles! . . .’, Der moment, 197 (25 Aug. 1933).

304 Kalman Weiser Meanwhile, Prylucki’s opinion of America had not improved since his visit a decade earlier. Once a beacon of hope for the persecuted, it continued to enforce a draconian immigration policy. Emerging from the First World War power-drunk and filthy rich, it was ripe for social upheaval on the scale of the Bolshevik revolution once its poor reached awareness of their oppression by arrogant plutocrats and the professional clique of ‘politicians’ whom they blindly elected.’** The working and middle classes, most of whose members remained non-unionized, lacked a sense of the government’s responsibility to provide them with social protection. In a land where ‘politics’ was deemed a necessary evil with which no respectable man wished to sully his hands, workers continued to elect the same corrupt representatives who forcefully suppressed their strikes for the benefit of wealthy capitalists and industrialists.‘*° Ultimately, Prylucki prophesied, the very strength of the American republic, its federal system permitting each state a high degree of autonomy, would be its undoing, as states would clamour for secession to manage individually the economic crises of the era.‘”°

Shortly after the German invasion of Poland, on 5 September 1939 Noah Prylucki boarded the ‘journalists’ train’ hastily organized by the Polish government to evacuate prominent Warsaw newspapermen. He was one of sixteen Jewish writers who accepted, along with forty-five or so non-Jewish journalists, official invitations to flee in secrecy with only a few hours’ notice. After travelling a circuitous route through eastern Poland, during which passengers joined and left the group, the train ultimately deposited twenty-nine members of the Warsaw Jewish Writers and Journalists’ Association in Lithuania on 10 October. ‘?’ Prylucki and his colleagues were part of a stream of refugees, chiefly members of the political, cultural, and religious elites of Polish Jewry, who found refuge in the Vilnius area between 1939 and 1941 and infused Lithuanian Jewish culture with their energies. Caught between the German ‘hammer’ and the Bolshevik ‘sickle’, neutral Lithuania represented virtually the only escape route from Poland to the free world by late 1939. The city was severed from Poland, to which it had belonged in the inter-war period, in the German—Soviet partition of that country in September 1939 and awarded by Moscow after a brief occupation to independent Lithuania the following month. In all, more than 14,000 Polish Jews, most intending to continue on to Japan and the western hemisphere, gathered in Vilnius between the outbreak of war and June 1940. That month the country was reoccupied and subsequently annexed by the Soviet Union. Even then, however, departure from Lithuania via the , Soviet Union remained possible for those with the requisite wherewithal, connec124 N. Prilutski, ‘Notitsn on politik’. ‘Ay, dobl yu, dobl yu-organizatsye. (Fun der serye “amerike un amerikaner”)’, Der moment, 66 (17 Mar. 1933). '25 Id., ‘Notitsn on politik’, Der moment, 104 (6 May 1932); ‘Amerike un amerikaner vi ikh hob zey gezen’, Der moment, 61 (12 Mar. 1933). 126 Td., ‘Der psikhos fun diktatur in di fareynikte shtatn’, Der moment, 88 (14 Apr. 1933).

127 N. Cohen, Sefer, sofer, ve’iton: merkaz hatarbut hayehudit bevarsha, 1918-1942 (Jerusalem, 2003), 297-9.

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 395 tions, and luck.!“° But while others applied in desperation for visas or crossed borders illegally, Prylucki insulated himself from the conflagration engulfing the world with ‘dialectical calm’, convinced that the war between Nazis and Soviets was an ineluctable process in the Hegelian scheme of history.!”°

Though Prylucki reportedly considered Das Kapital to be the ‘best work of shund’ he had ever read,!°° the available evidence suggests that when the Soviets took control of Vilnius he was not above paying cynical lip service to their cause in return for benefits for himself and Yiddish culture beyond the crucial protection of life and limb. ‘In no other land in the world will I have such opportunities for my

scholarly work as in the Soviet Union’, he explained to his Folkist colleague M. Balberyszki, who urged that he join him in fleeing Lithuania. In contrast to Bundists and Zionists, Prylucki maintained, Folkists had no reason to fear political

repressions from the Soviets. Theirs was the only bourgeois party to join ‘the popular front together with the communists’ against fascism.!*!

When questioned about the fate of two colleagues who had previously expressed pro-Soviet sympathies, Zalmen Reisen and the celebrated lawyer Joseph Tshernikhov (a Folkist who had defended communists in trials in Poland), he suggested that they had been arrested because they constituted a political danger to the Soviets: the former for statements allegedly critical of the Soviets that he had made as editor of the Vilnius daily Der tog and the latter for his memoirs as a lawyer

defending individuals standing before Bolshevik revolutionary tribunals in Kharkhov in 1919.1°” In trying to assess why Prylucki, given his own anti-Soviet pronouncements in the preceding years, remained so calm in the situation, it is difficult to determine whether he was an eternal optimist making the best of a horrendous situation or in wilful collusion with the Soviets. Perhaps it is best not to

judge him, especially without having examined the contents of the Soviet and Lithuanian archives recently opened to Western scholars. Quite likely, the Soviets wished to make a favourable impression on the annexed Jewish population, as well as the West, by supporting Jewish culture, at least its secular Yiddish dimension. Prylucki, arguably the most qualified Yiddish scholar remaining in Vilnius after 128 D. Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils (Philadelphia and Jerusalem, 1995), 198—217; Dawidowicz, From That Place and Time, 215. Mordkhe Tsanin, himself a refugee in Vilnius at this time, depicts

frantic attempts to secure visas and permission to exit Soviet Lithuania in his wartime memoirs,

Grenetsn biz tsum himl (Tel Aviv, 1969). 129 Tsanin, Grenetsn biz tsum himl, 13. 180 According to Tsanin, Prylucki described Das Kapital as ‘the best shundroman that I have ever read’. Interview with Mordkhe Tsanin, Tel Aviv, 4 July 1999. 131 Balberyszki attributes the following statement to Prylucki: ‘The Bolsheviks are applying repressions against the Bolsheviks because Lenin and Stalin were already combating the Bund as a counterrevolutionary, Menshevik movement. The Bund was dangerous for them for decades because it agitates

among workers and speaks in the name of socialism. They combat Zionism, on the other hand, as a reactionary, pro-English movement’. M. Balberyszki, Shtarker fun ayzn (Tel Aviv, 1967), 105. 182 Tbid. 105—6. S. Kaczerginski, Tsvishn hamer un serp: tsu der geshikhte fun der likvidatsye fun der ytdisher kultur in sovetn-rusland (Paris, 1949), 19-20; J. Tshernikhov, Jn revtribunal: zikhroynes fun a fartaydtker (Vilna, 1932); M. Astour, ‘Yosef tshernikov-danieli’, Hulyot (2005), 318.

396 Kalman Weiser the disappearance of Zalmen Reisen and in the absence of Max Weinreich (who was in Copenhagen when the war erupted and later made his way to New York), was willing to co-operate in return for the fulfilment of his ideal of state-supported Yiddish culture (albeit under Soviet aegis with all its ideological strictures) and the opportunity to continue his own scholarly work.

The immediate imposition of Soviet nationalities policy on the tiny Baltic republic held out the promise of state-supported Yiddish culture that democratic Poland had demonstratively refused to provide and whose institutions it had even

actively undermined during the preceding twenty years. In contrast with the Jews of Poland, the largest part of Jewish pupils in independent Lithuania was already enrolled in Jewish schools before the outbreak of the war. Now, virtually overnight, secular Hebrew and religious schools were transformed into state-run Yiddish schools. In contrast with elsewhere in the USSR, where Jewish educational facilities were being systematically restricted to the point of disappearance, in Soviet Lithuania ‘Jewish education seemed to be holding its own; there were almost no indications of real infringements, at least on the surface’. Despite the realistic anxieties of Jewish educators, in the short term at least, plans to eliminate Jewish education were not evident here.'*° For Prylucki, who despaired of the future of Yiddish in Poland and probably even more so in America, the prospect of mandatory Yiddish schools and statesponsored cultural life was surely very attractive. Moreover, he was granted by Soviet authorities the recognition as a scholar which he was denied by many of his colleagues. In August 1940 he was appointed chief lector for Yiddish language and culture at state teachers’ courses initiated through the Bureau for Minorities of the Communist Party in Lithuania, a clear endorsement of his acceptability to Soviet

authorities. The following month he was provided the means to publish these lectures under the title Yidishe fonetik. Elementar kurs far lerer un aleynlerner, as

well as his research about Yiddish theatre (Farvos iz dos yidishe teater azoy shpet oyfgekumen?, to which he added a Marxist introduction in keeping with the reigning ideology). His research was recognized by the Senate of the Soviet Lithuanian

University in Vilnius. Though lacking formal training as a philologist, he was routinely referred to 1n official Soviet documents as ‘Professor’ even to prior to his

appointment as docent of the newly founded Chair for Yiddish Language and Culture in October 1940.1°* While Prylucki’s academic star rose, much of the staff

of YIVO, including Prylucki’s chief opponent Zelig Kalmanowicz,'*° was dis- _183 Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils, 111. , 134 'Y, Lemperer, ‘Der goyrl fun yivo in historishn iberbrokh (1939-1941)’, Yivo-bleter, NS 3 (1997), 21. See also, by the same author, IJ. Lempertas, ‘UzmurSta jidiS puoselétoja: Nojaus Priluckio katedra Vilniaus universitete’, in L. Lempertiené (ed.), Vilniaus Zydy intelektualinis gyvenimas (Vilna, 2004), 184-19.

1385 Tn addition to being anti-communist, Kalmanowicz had a son and other personal connections in Palestine but chose to remain in Vilnius in order to continue his work in YIVO (YIVO RG 1.1, Box 3.1, folder 631, ‘Protokol fun der zitsung fun der tsaytvayliker farvaltung fun yivo, vilne, dem rotn marts 1940’).

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 397 missed from their posts as ideologically objectionable. In order to emphasize the academic level of YIVO and to co-ordinate scholarly activity with the Chair, Prylucki was also appointed the manager ( farvalter) of YIVO, whose operations he worked feverishly to maintain with a diminished staff. The Sovietized YIVO, now exclusively a research institution, was soon integrated into the Scholarly Academy of the Soviet Lithuanian Republic under the title ‘Institute for Jewish Culture’.'°° Prylucki was well aware of the oppressive nature of the Soviet regime and, according to Mordkhe Tsanin, bore no illusion that Yiddish schools would continue there beyond the duration of the war.’?’ Nonetheless, convinced that the Soviets would defeat the Nazis,!°° he preferred to take his chances as a professor among the Soviets than attempt escape to America. ‘I’ve seen Jewish life in America’, he explained to Balberyszki, ‘and it’s no place for me. Should I live from Cahan’s hand-outs?’’°? The Cahan of whom he spoke was, of course, Abraham Cahan, the powerful editor

of the New York daily Forward and Yiddish cultural tsar who advocated the Americanization of his readers and the gradual disappearance of Yiddish in America. Being a 60-year-old refugee in America meant being reduced to dependence, economic and otherwise, on his integrationist American Jewish brethren, especially the

autocratic Cahan, who had little interest in encouraging Yiddish scholarship and ‘serious’ literature without a socialist message.1*° For Prylucki, a self-styled Jewish aristocrat who had devoted his life to the cause of Yiddish and cultural autonomy, the challenge of immigrant adjustment and the loss of personal prestige, influence, and perhaps even purpose in life were very likely too much to contemplate. Debilitated by a lung infection at the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, Prylucki saw little sense in accepting an invitation to join young writers attempting

to escape the approaching German onslaught on foot.'*' Dismissed from his university position, he was arrested by the Gestapo a month later. His expertise in the field of Old Yiddish literature and book publishing was yoked into service by the notorious Rosenberg Stab, which forced him to compile lists of mcunabula in Vilnius’s famed Strashun Library in preparation for their shipment to Germany. On 18 August 1941, the 60-year-old Prylucki was ‘liquidated’ by his captors.'** His wife Paula (Paulina, née Edelstein), a Polish poet turned Yiddish dramaturge under 136 T). Levin, ‘Tsvishn hamer un serp: di geshikhte fun yidishn visnshaftlekhn institut in vilne unter der sovetisher memshole’, Yivo-bleter, 46 (1980), 88-91. Lemperer, ‘Der goyrl fun yivo’, 9—42.

137 Tsanin, Grenetsn biz tsum himl, 13-14. ‘The Soviet authority will not allow a Jewish school system in Vilna. It will want to have the Jewish children in Russian schools. So, who asks the former Hebrew teachers to give declarations for me, Noah Prylucki, that in teaching Hebrew to Jewish children they were ideationally misled by Zionist capitalism .. .’.

138 A. Sutzkever, Fun vilner geto (Moscow, 1946), 3. 139 Balberyszki, Shtarker fun ayzn, 105. 140 On Cahan and his policies in the Forward, see I. Howe, World of our Fathers (New York, 1989). E. D. Kellman, ‘The Newspaper Novel in the Jewish Daily Forward: Fiction as Entertainment and Serious Literature’ (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2000).

141 Balberyszki, Shtarker fun ayzn, 119.

142 T. Beder and M. Yelin, ‘Di letste yorn fun noyekh prilutskin’, in Sovetish heymland, Mar. 1965, pp. 146-8.

398 Kalman Weiser his tutelage, was confined to the Vilnius ghetto and murdered a year later at the notorious killing fields at Ponar.'*°

CONCLUSION Although exceptional for the sheer diversity and longevity of his cultural and political activity, Noah Prylucki illustrates a broader phenomenon common among the secularized nationalist leadership of early twentieth-century eastern European Jewry. An acculturated, cosmopolitan intellectual, he ‘discovered’ Yiddish under the influence of the general European movements of Romanticism and Populism.

In it he located the ‘authentic’ creative expression of an idealized Jewish folk dwelling in eastern Europe. He turned his back on both Hebrew and Russian, the languages in which he was formally educated, and worked to refashion the /fo/k’s own language into an instrument for the attainment of both political and cultural

goals on its behalf. Paradoxically, he endeavoured to create a version of the language whose growth and cultivation was to be removed from the hands of the Jewish folk and ultimately entrusted to linguists necessarily at a social remove from it. The graduates of the Yiddish secular school, the cornerstone of the Folkist programme, were to master the standardized version of the language and to form a new elite—one that shared his values and would replace the traditional clerical and linguistically assimilated bourgeois elites in Jewish society.

In many ways, Prylucki’s career both reflects and informs the fate of Yiddishism, which saw its genesis, summit, nadir, and, ultimately, destruction in Europe all within the space of his lifetime. Thanks to his father, a Hovev Tsion, he was raised in the bosom of an inchoate Jewish nationalist movement which made use of Yiddish to advance its goals and encouraged a general cultural ‘renaissance’

| among eastern European Jews. While not part of the founding generation of Yiddishists, such as Peretz or Chaim Zhitlowsky, who first articulated and agitated on behalf of the ideology, Prylucki began contributing to the creation of a modern culture in Yiddish in his adolescence and was already its principled champion by the time of the Czernowitz Yiddish language conference in 1908. For nearly three decades, Prylucki used Der moment, the daily which he helped

to found, as a means to popularize his vision of a secularized Jewish national community and to demand official recognition for Yiddish as its language and the creation of the Yiddish secular school to shape future generations. By obtaining rights for Yiddish and state support for its culture, Prylucki hoped to create the means for a self-sustaining Yiddish-speaking, reading, and writing intelligentsia as well as Yiddish professional and working classes. ‘The newspaper itself offered not only a forum for the exchange of ideas and a tribune to champion Prylucki’s cause;

like the Yiddish press in general, it also contributed towards the realization of Yiddishist aims by providing an important source of income for writers and schol143 Balberyszki, Shtarker fun ayzn, 146.

The Yiddishist Ideology of Noah Prylucki 399 ars in addition to the merchants and brokers who advertised their wares and services in it.

The political constellation engendered by the First World War emboldened Prylucki and his colleagues in the Folksparty with hope to accomplish their goals. On the eve of an independent Poland, the possibilities for Yiddish culture, now removed from tsarist fetters and protected by international treaties, appeared limitless. The inter-war period ultimately proved, however, to be one of great disappointment, if not despair, to ideologically committed Yiddishists. As the sociolinguist Joshua Fishman observes in another context, Yiddish-speakers ‘were either too powerless or too mobile’ for Yiddishism to succeed in the absence of an ‘econo-political reality’’** such as the official recognition given to Hebrew in

Mandate Palestine or to Yiddish during the brief existence of independent Ukraine after the First World War. The Folksparty, like other Yiddishist parties, was unable to win the necessary recognition for extra-territorial cultural autonomy to make Yiddishism economically viable. Neither a state apparatus nor minority protections were 1n place to allow the expansion of the Jewish sub-economy and to protect the language in new societal functions. Further, the Folkists did not enjoy adequate success in impressing upon the upper bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, those classes Prylucki decried as ‘half-assimilated’, the crucial link between the use of Yiddish in seemingly trivial, mundane situations and the economic and material welfare of the Jews in Poland. The bourgeoisie, even if nationalist, tended towards Polish, the language of upward mobility. The petite bourgeoisie, the segment of the electorate most courted by the Folkists, lacked the financial means to support Yiddish culture as envisioned by Prylucki even if it shared a Yiddishist commitment to it. Moreover, without mass attendance of Yiddish secular schools, the entirety of a generation could not be raised to understand, appreciate, and, in turn, produce ‘high culture’, including serious literary and academic texts, in Yiddish. Unlike colleagues who either succumbed to despair or opted to adapt to a new reality—the emergence of a Polish-speaking yet nationally identifying Jewish community—Prylucki remained aloof, if not hostile, to these developments. Both his political fortune and social prominence declined by the 1930s, and he increas-

ingly pursued his private scholarly pursuits both in Poland and for extended periods abroad. Intransigent in his political and cultural views, he never wavered in his conviction that Yiddish was the single authentic medium for the expression of contemporary Jewish identity. He understood well that Yiddish and Yiddishism

faced great peril in an integrationist society such as the United States and took refuge for both himself and his ideology in Vilnius, the ‘most Yiddish’ city in the

former Pale of Settlement. Though a convinced democrat, with few options remaining at the outbreak of war, he took advantage of the coercive policies of the Soviet Union to advance his own career as well as to realize goals for Yiddish

that were impossible elsewhere. In Vilnius he was granted unprecedented 144 Fishman, /deology, Society, and Language, 62.

400 Kalman Weiser opportunities for his research and the academic recognition he craved, even if he harboured private doubts about the future of Yiddish culture under Soviet rule. His co-operation with the Soviets ultimately failed to save his life but it did spare him the pain of witnessing first-hand the accelerated atrophying of Yiddish culture in post-war America and the challenge of either abandoning Yiddishism or investing it with new meaning after the Holocaust—a challenge that faced Max Weinreich and other YIVO stalwarts who rebuilt the institutions in post-war New

, York. While other refugees desperately sought out visas, Prylucki immersed himself in the scholarly pursuits that gave his life meaning. In terms of teaching, research, and publications, his two years in Vilnius proved to be among his most productive. In the end, however, he shared the fate of millions of Yiddish-speakers in eastern Europe.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky A Reassessment JULIAN J. BUSSGANG INTRODUCTION METROPOLITAN ANDREY SHEPTYTSKY," archbishop of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic (Uniate) Church in south-eastern Poland from 1900 to 1944, was head-

quartered in the city of Lviv (Lwéw).? During the German occupation of the eastern half of Poland (June 1941—July 1944), Sheptytsky exercised his authority as regional head of the church to shelter and save Jews in the monasteries and convents under his supervision. As a direct result of his instructions, members of the clergy reporting to him hid and protected between 150 and 200 Jews, mostly children. An elderly, erudite, religiously devoted man, Metropolitan Sheptytsky, crippled

with arthritis and confined to a wheelchair, directed his younger brother, Klymenty, head of the Studite Order, to make many of these arrangements. For his role in saving lives, Klymenty has been recognized by Yad Vashem in Israel as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ and was beatified by John Paul I during his papal visit to Ukraine in June 2001. To the distress of many of those whom he saved, and in spite of their repeated

requests, Metropolitan Sheptytsky himself has not yet been designated by Yad Vashem as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’. The purpose of this article is to compile and summarize the facts about him from the extensive literature in order to make very clear why Yad Vashem should recognize, without further delay, I should like to thank Kurt and Nathan Lewin, sons of the late chief rabbi of Lwow, Dr Jecheskiel Lewin, who were among the youngsters saved by Sheptytsky, for their assistance. It was Kurt Lewin who first encouraged and inspired me to prepare this essay and provided me with much vital information. Kurt, who interacted personally with the metropolitan while being sheltered by him, reviewed the archives relating to Sheptytsky in Lwow, Paris, and Rome and has shared his findings with me. 1 ‘Sheptytsky’ is the most widely accepted English transliteration of the Ukrainian spelling of his surname. Other spellings, found in various publications, are used in this article only for a direct reference or quotation. When referring to his earlier years or the Polish branch of the family, the Polish spelling ‘Szeptyckr 1s used. 2 Lwow is the Polish name of the city in use prior to the partitions of Poland and from 1918 to 1945.

Under Austria-Hungary, the name in German was Lemberg; when it was part of the Soviet Union, it was Lvov. Currently, it is part of western Ukraine and spelled Lviv.

war. | 402 Julhan 7. Bussgang

his humanitarian and courageous acts in saving so many Jewish lives during the

THE BACKGROUND OF ANDREY SHEPTYTSKY (1865-1944)

The Szeptycki family was a prominent aristocratic Polish family with Ruthenian (Ukrainian) roots.* The future metropolitan was born on 25 July 1865 in Przytbice (Jaworow district), near Lviv, as Roman Maria Aleksander Szeptycki, son of Count Jan Kanty and Zofia Szeptycki. He was the grandson of Count Aleksander Fredro, his mother’s father. Fredro, who may also have had Ruthenian roots, was a well-known Polish playwright, poet, and active political leader. A street was named after him in Lviv and a statue of him erected in an important square of the city.* Roman Szeptycki was brought up as a Roman Catholic, but at a young age he decided to adopt the Greek Catholic, or Uniate, faith and become a priest.® The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the largest Eastern, or Byzantine, rite of the Roman Catholic Church. Like other Eastern rites, for example the Maronites in Lebanon, it has its own leader, an archbishop responsible for his flock, who reports directly to the pope. Some Greek Catholic priests marry, but bishops and monks do not. After a brief period of military service from which he was discharged because of illness, Roman Szeptycki first studied law at universities in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) and then Krakow, where he earned his doctorate.’ After completing his

studies, in May 1888 he entered the Greek Catholic Order of the Basilians (OSBM),° adopting the name Andrey. During his first few years as a Basilian he earned a doctoral degree in theology at the Jesuit seminary in Krakéw.? He continued his studies in philosophy in Munich and Vienna (1888—g0).'° One of Sheptytsky’s brothers, Count Stanislaw M. Szeptycki (1867-1950), served in the Austrian army, and, after the First World War, in the Polish army, where he reached the rank of general. He later became minister of military affairs. 3 A. Zieba, ‘W sprawie genezy decyzji Romana Szeptyckiego 0 zmianie obrzadku’, in id. (ed.), Metropolita Andrzej Szeptycki: Studia 1 materialy (Krakow, 1994), 43-64; I. Muzyczka, ‘Sheptyts’kyi in the Russian Empire’, in P. R. Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality: The Life and Times of Andrei

Sheptyts'kyt (Edmonton, Alberta, 1989), 314. Both refer to Andrey Sheptytsky’s ancestors Metropolitans Atanasy Sheptytsky (1715-46) and Lev Sheptytsky (1748-76). * After the Second World War, the bronze figure of Fredro, completed in 1879 by L. Marconi, was moved from Lwow to Wroclaw. ° More recently referred to as Ukrainian Catholic—not to be confused with the Russian Orthodox Church.

© C. Korolevsky, Metropolitan Andrew: 1865-1944 (Lviv, 1993), 71. ” Tbid. 73. 8 A religious community of monks dedicated to monastic life and fraternal charity founded by St Basil the Great. ° P.R. Magocsi, ‘Chronology’, in id. (ed.), Morality and Reality, p. xx. 10M. Szeptycka and Father M. Skérka, Metropolita Andrzej Szeptycki: Pisma wybrane (Krakow, 2000), 16.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 403 Thus Andrey Sheptytsky, though the religious leader of Ukrainians, had deep Polish ties. Deeply religious and dedicated to God, Andrey Sheptytsky had a great desire to serve as a monk. However, his special talents and intelligence were soon recognized

by his superiors, and in 1899 Father Andrey was selected by Pope Leo XIII to become the Uniate bishop of Stanistawow in south-eastern Poland (now IvanoFrankivsk, Ukraine). Ukrainians made up a large proportion of the population in eastern Galicia, constituting 73 per cent of the population in the Stanislawow province (ojewodztwo) and 42 per cent of the population in the Lviv province. Shortly after Sheptytsky was named bishop, on 17 December 1go00, Pope Leo XIII promoted him to the post of metropolitan of Halicz'! and archbishop of Lviv. Thus, at the age of only 35, he became the spiritual leader of Ukrainian Catholics in eastern Galicia. This region, which became known as south-eastern Poland after the First World War, was where the Ukrainian population of Poland was centred. When he became a bishop, and later metropolitan, Sheptytsky moved

from being an unknown monk to an important and highly visible leader of the community, and thus assumed a position of great responsibility. The pre-war Polish leadership initially welcomed him, assuming his Polish roots would prevail over Ukrainian nationalism, but they later came to regard him ‘with the special hatred reserved for renegades’. !” In 1904 Metropolitan Sheptytsky established the Studite order,!? which by the beginning of the Second World War included almost 200 monks.'* The Studites lived in monasteries, mostly in the countryside, and concentrated on educational activities for children and on agriculture. They led a very strict life: erght hours of prayer, eight hours of work, and eight hours of rest.’° One Studite monastery was established near the metropolitan’s residence in Lviv. Sheptytsky began studying Hebrew at the age of 20 and soon mastered the lan-

guage. He made two pilgrimages to the Holy Land—in August 1905 and in September 1906. During the latter trip, he travelled with a group of some 500 Ukrainians.'° Sheptytsky’s leadership took on an international dimension when in September 1910 he travelled to attend the twenty-first Eucharistic Congress in Montreal. On this trip he also met Ukrainian Greek Catholic immigrants in Canada and the United States. Based on his assessment of the situation, he initiated the effort to ‘1 Halicz (Galicz) was the original capital of Galicia, from which the province of Galicia took its

name. 12 J.-P. Himka, “The Polish—Ukrainian—Jewish Relationship’, Polin, 12 (1999), 42. 13 A. Zieba, ‘Chronologia zycia Metropolity Andrzeja Szeptyckiego’, in id. (ed.), Metropolita Andrzej, 255. 14 (accessed 15 Aug. 2005). 1 Kurt Lewin, A Journey through Illusions (Santa Barbara, Calif., 1994), 54.

16 S. Redlich, ‘Metropolitan Sheptyts’kyi and Ukrainian—Jewish Relations’, in Z. Gitelman (ed.), Bitter Legacy: Confronting the Holocaust in the USSR (Bloomington, Ind., 1997), 63.

404 Julian 7. Bussgang appoint a Ukrainian Uniate bishop for Canada. In 1921 and in 1922 he again travelled to the United States. At the start of the First World War, when Russian troops forced the Austrian army out and occupied Lviv in September 1914, Metropolitan Sheptytsky was

arrested by the tsarist authorities; he moved first to Kiev, and then Nizhny Novgorod and Kursk. In September 1916 he was confined in a Greek Orthodox monastery in Suzdal near Vladimir, east of Moscow. He was finally liberated in March 1917 after the revolution against the tsarist regime erupted.’ As the years went by, Metropolitan Sheptytsky’s health deteriorated, and in 1932, disabled by severe arthritis, he became confined to a wheelchair. In his youth, , in 1884, he had contracted scarlet fever which affected his hands to the point that, by 1926, he was unable to write. Nonetheless, he addressed himself to his duties with great dedication. Surrounded by devoted associates, including his brother Klymenty, he was able to lead his church and communicate internationally. He was

regarded by all around him as an inspirational spiritual figure, a legendary Ukrainian Moses.'® He longed for the Ukrainians to be united, but his emphasis was on the Greek Catholic religion and not on politics. Indeed, as early as 1934 he issued a letter to his clergy asking that they give no sermons that could be used towards political ends.!* Sheptytsky served as the Greek Catholic bishop of south-eastern Poland, with

headquarters in Lviv, for forty-four years. During the Second World War he responded to pressure and guided his church first through the Soviet occupation (1939-41), and then through the German occupation (1941-4). His health began to deteriorate markedly in 1942. The Soviet troops re-entered Lviv in July 1944. Metropolitan Sheptytsky died in his residence a few weeks later, on 1 November 1944, at the age of 79.

SHEPTYTSKY’S RELATIONS WITH JEWS BEFORE THE WAR In his memoir, A Journey through Illusions, Kurt I. Lewin, the son of Rabbi Dr Jecheskiel Lewin, describes the friendship his father developed with Sheptytsky.”° Rabbi Lewin joined the ageing Rabbi Lewi Freund in 1928 to share the position of chief rabbi of Lviv as well as the pulpit of the Progressive Great Synagogue of Lviv.?1

An important encounter between Rabbi Lewin and Sheptytsky took place in 1935, when the metropolitan celebrated his seventieth birthday. Lewin, accompa17 Magocsi, ‘Chronology’, p. xxi. , 7° As acknowledged even by a writer with a strongly anti-Ukrainian bias: E. Prus, Wladyka Swietojurski: Rzecz o Arcybiskupie Andrzeju Szeptyckim (Warsaw, 1985), 266.

19 S. Stepien, ‘Stanowisko Metropolity Szeptyckiego wobec zjawiska terroru politycznego’, in Zieba

(ed.), Metropolita Andrzej, 115-16. 20 Lewin, A Journey through Illusions, 20-1. 21 M. Balaban, Historia Lwowskiej synagogi postepowe; (Lw6w, 1937); also J. Bussgang, ‘The Progressive Synagogue in Lwow’, Polin, 11 (1998), 127-53.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 405 nied by other Jewish leaders, called on the metropolitan to congratulate him on behalf of the Jewish community. The cordial relationship that developed continued from then on, with Lewin often visiting the metropolitan in his residence, which was across the street from the Greek Catholic Cathedral of St George ( Yur). The two religious leaders had the common interest of wishing to secure fair

treatment for their co-religionists from the primarily Roman Catholic Polish authorities.

The metropolitan was also friendly with several other rabbis. Rabbi David Kahane, among those saved by Sheptytsky, writes in his memoir that another rabbi, Rabbi Lilienfeld of Podhajce (now Pidhaitsi), was an old friend of the Sheptytsky family.2? Rabbi Dr Izhak Bartfeld knew the metropolitan well enough to take his nephew, Oded Amarant, to the palace of the metropolitan in autumn 1942 and entrust Oded to his personal care.° Kurt Lewin describes how warmly Sheptytsky was received by Jewish community leaders in the various villages during the pre-war years, when he was still able

to visit his parishes. It was not uncommon for the elders of the local Jewish community to come out to welcome him to their town, carrying Torah scrolls to honour him and show him their respect.** Professor Shimon Redlich writes in his memoir that his great-grandfather was one of the rabbis who greeted Sheptytsky on his canonical visit to Brzezany (Berezhany) before the First World War.?° Sheptytsky was fluent in many languages and is said to have written a letter in Hebrew to a group of Jews petitioning for aid.2° The metropolitan interacted extensively with Jews. Every year he made donations to the poor to buy flour for matzot for Passover. His Hebrew teacher was the antiquarian book dealer Siegel.’ The Jewish industrialist and philanthropist Solomon Hammer from Lviv was listed as his economic adviser.”®

Metropolitan Sheptytsky, active in a number of spheres, was a lover and promoter of art.2° He helped found the Ukrainian National Museum in Lviv, with its

large archive and the important library attached to it.°? He engaged Baruch Dornhelm and his brothers, the well-known Jewish goldsmith and silversmith artists in Lviv, to create both evangelical and historical art.24 He was a founder of 22 1). Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary (Amherst, 1990), 7 (originally published in Hebrew in Israel by Yad Vashem, 1987). After the war Kahane served as chief rabbi of the Polish army. He later emigrated to Israel and became chief rabbi of the Israeli air force.

23 Sworn deposition of Oded Amarant, 2 May 1996, USHMM Archives, Metropolitan Graf

Szeptycki Collection. 24 Redlich, ‘Metropolitan Sheptyts’kyi’, 63. 25S. Redlich, Together and Apart in Brzezany: Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, 1919-1945 (Bloomington, Ind., 2002), 7. 26 P. Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers (New York, 1978; first published in 1957), 133.

27 Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 142. 28 H. Stachel, A/manach zydowski (Lw6w, 1937), 627. 22M. M. Mudrak, ‘Sheptyts’kyi as Patron of the Arts’, in Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality,

289-300. 8° Korolevsky, Metropolitan Andrew, 118-20. , 31 J. Maurin-Biatostocka et al. (eds.), Stownik artystéw polskich 1 obcych w Polsce dziatajacych: Malarze, rzezbiarze, graficy, 1i (Wroclaw, 1975), 89-90.

406 Julian Ff. Bussgang the Ukrainian Religious Scholarly Society, and, in 1928, of the Greek Catholic Theological Academy in Lviv. In 1936 Bishop Ivan Buchko,*? the auxiliary bishop in Lviv, published an exhor-

tation against antisemitism and a condemnation of Hitler’s neo-paganism and book-burning.*° In an interview with the Jewish daily Chmila ((Moment’), Buchko,

condemning brutal antisemitism, said: “The struggle with anti-Semitism 1s a struggle for Christianity, and anti-Semitism is anti-Christianism.’°* Buchko could

not have made such a strong comment within the church’s hierarchy without Sheptytsky’s tacit approval. He was a close associate of the metropolitan and an enthusiastic supporter of Sheptytsky’s ‘Hebrew encounters’ with Jews.°° Tatjana M. Sztankowa, in reviewing the surviving archival documents about Sheptytsky’s attitude towards Jews, quotes from a 10 January 1922 memorandum that Sheptytsky wrote during his visit in America, addressed to the US Secretary

of State Charles Hughes: ‘Jews of Eastern Galicia are in full accord with the Ukrainians.’ She also cites a letter from the Jewish Committee for Assistance to the Victims of Pogroms in Lviv of 12 December 1918, thanking Sheptytsky for his donation of 500 crowns.®© The archival collection also contains the 15 May 1930 letter from the Jewish Agency in Berlin advising Sheptytsky of a new translation of

the Babylonian Talmud by Lazarus Goldschmidt—which illustrates that the Jewish Agency was aware of Sheptytsky’s interest in the Jewish world.?’ In brief, Metropolitan Sheptytsky had continuous close and friendly ties to the Jewish community of the Lviv region before the Second World War began, and it

was thus natural for Jewish people to turn to him for help and support after the Nazi regime took over the city.

KLYMENTY SHEPTYTSKY’S ASSISTANCE TO THE METROPOLITAN Kazimierz (Casimir) Szeptycki (1869-1951), later Klymenty (Clement) Sheptytsky,?® was a younger brother of the metropolitan. Like his brother Andrey, he first studied law and earned a doctoral degree at the University of Krakow. He then studied abroad in Munich and Paris. In 1911, at the age of 42, Kazimierz followed in the footsteps of his older brother. He entered the Studite monastery in Bosnia and changed his name from 82 The Polish spelling is Buczko.

33S. Redlich, ‘Jewish—Ukrainian Relations in Inter-War Poland as Reflected in Some Ukrainian Publications’, Polin, 11 (1998), 244. 34 V. Melamed, L’viv Jewish Community in Interwar Period (1918-1939) (Lviv, 1996), 141 n. 131,

quoting Chwila, 17 Sept. 1936, p. 5; T. M. Sztankowa, ‘Dokumenty archiwum historycznego we Lwowie odnoszace sie do kontaktow Metropolity Szeptyckiego z Zydami’, in Zieba (ed.), Metropolhta Andrzej, 233-.

35 Redlich, ‘Metropolitan Sheptyts’kyi’, 66. 36 Sztankowa, ‘Dokumenty’, 232.

37 Tbid. 231. 38 Kazimierz Szeptycki is the Polish spelling.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 407 Kazimierz to Klymenty. He received his theological education in Innsbruck and was ordained a priest in August 1915. He was then named ihumen (abbot),°? head of the Studite monasteries, with headquarters in Uniow (Univ), a small village south-east of Lviv, ten kilometres north-east of Przemyslany (Peremyshlyany). Klymenty was close to his brother and often travelled from Uniow to Lviv to assist the metropolitan. After the Germans pushed back the Soviets and occupied the territories around Lviv, Klymenty moved to the metropolitan’s residential

palace opposite the Cathedral of St George. He continued to help his ailing brother, who was already 74 years old when the war broke out, to administer the diocese.

One cannot discuss Metropolitan Andrey’s initiative to save and provide refuge for Jews without recognizing the role of Ihumen Klymenty, who, at his brother’s request, led the effort to hide Jews in various Studite monasteries. After the metropolitan died in 1944, [humen Klymenty was named archimandrite.*° Two years after the Soviets recaptured Lviv, he was sent to Moscow by

Andrey Sheptytsky’s successor, Metropolitan Josyf Slipyj, with a delegation charged with the task of establishing better relations with the Soviet authorities. This attempt failed. Klymenty Sheptytsky was arrested in Moscow on 5 June 1947, imprisoned, and submitted to two trials. He died in prison on 1 May 1951.**

LVIV UNDER SOVIET OCCUPATION Germany attacked Poland on 1 September 1939. The Red Army crossed the border into Poland on 17 September 1939 under the secret German—Soviet pact called the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact. This agreement, signed less than a month earlier, provided for the partition of Poland between Germany and the USSR. Thus the area around Lviv fell under Soviet control. Life under the Soviets was difficult and dangerous. In February 1940 mass deportations began from the

Soviet-occupied territories of Poland into the depths of the Soviet Union. Initially, deportations concentrated on government officials, prosperous individuals, military personnel, and police, but they were soon broadened. It is estimated that, in total, over half a million Polish citizens, many of them Jews, were deported

to gulags and work camps in Siberia and other Asian parts of the USSR. The Soviet occupation was quite brutal both for Poles and Ukrainians. In April 1943 it was discovered that a secret massacre had taken place in March 1940 in the forests of Katyn: Stalin had ordered some 12,000 Polish officers shot to death and secretly buried in mass graves. °° Hegumen or ihumen is the title of the head of a monastery of the Eastern Orthodox Church— based on the Greek term hegumeni, which means ‘the individual in charge’ or ‘the leader’. 4° Korolevsky, Metropolitan Andrew, 466. Archimandrite, which comes from the Greek word archo, ‘I command’, and mandra, ‘sheepfold’, is the highest monastic title in the Greek Catholic rite for a superior abbot, one who has the supervision of a large monastery or of several abbots and monasteries. 4! (accessed 24 Apr. 2007).

408 Julian Ff. Bussgang Leon Szeptycki (1877-1939), another brother of the metropolitan, was executed by Soviet troops along with his wife, Jadwiga (nee Szembek), on 27 September 1939 in Przytbice, the metropolitan’s home town.*” Many Ukrainian nationalists fled west to the German-occupied part of Poland, where, in 1940, the Germans had allowed them to form two battalions totalling 600 men—‘Nachtigall’ and ‘Roland’.*? The Ukrainians expected these units to be the

nucleus of a future Ukrainian army, but instead, the Germans were preparing them to help with their secretly planned attack on the Soviet Union.** By the spring of 1941 Soviet deportations from Poland’s eastern territories into

the depth of the Soviet Union started to include Ukrainian nationalists. The Soviets began to oppress the Greek Catholic Church, closing convents and monasteries. The soldiers of the occupying army were by and large Russian Orthodox or

atheists and were hostile towards the Greek Catholic Church. Prohibitive taxes were imposed on religious institutions.*° Priests, monks, and nuns were arrested. Metropolitan Sheptytsky and Rabbi Lewin consulted with each other as to how to protect their religious communities from Soviet hostility and anti-religious acts. Their consultations were carried out through emissaries, because it was too dangerous for these two leaders to meet in person.*° In general, despite all the difficulties during the Soviet occupation, close relations between the Jewish community and Metropolitan Sheptytsky were maintained. Before retreating in June 1941, the NK VD*’ killed many Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian political prisoners in Lviv and the surrounding areas. Eleven or twelve

Greek Catholic priests were murdered or went missing. Some 200,000 laymen were deported.*®

What the metropolitan had faced under the Soviets were the murder of his brother Leon; harassment of his church; mass deportations of Poles, his fellow countrymen; suppression and deportations of Ukrainians, who were his flock; and deportations of Jews, with whom he had excellent relations. He also could not have forgotten the harshness of his own earlier imprisonment by the Russians.*? In the light of all these experiences, it should not be surprising that the metropolitan welcomed with relief the end of the Soviet occupation, believing that the Germans would allow Ukrainian independence. ** E. Weyman (née Szeptycka), “Leon i Jadwiga Szeptyccy wobec osoby i dziela Metropolity Andrzeja Szeptyckiego’, in Zieba (ed.), Metropolita Andrzej, 33; Prus, Wladyka Swietojurski, 271.

43 Representing the two main Ukrainian factions of Bandera and Melnyk respectively. 44 Prus, Wladyka Swietojurski, 205; (accessed 15 Aug. 2005).

45 B. R. Bociurkiw, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the Greek Catholic Church under the Soviet Occupation of 1939-1941’, in Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality, 112.

46 Lewin, A Journey through Illusions, 33. 4” The Soviet secret police, later renamed KGB. 48 Bociurkiw, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the Greek Catholic Church’, 115-16.

49 As noted above, Metropolitan Szeptycki had been arrested by the Russians in 1914 and was imprisoned in Nizhny Novgorod and Kursk. He was freed only in March 1917.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 409 LVIV UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION On 22 June 1941 the Germans unexpectedly attacked their former ally, the USSR. Soviet troops were forced to retreat, and on 29 June 1941 the Germans entered Lviv, pushing the Soviet troops east. By the first of July the German forces had full control of the city, which had, at the time, some 150,000—160,000 Jews, many of them refugees from western Poland, already occupied by the Germans.”° Because of their experiences under the Soviet occupation, many Ukrainians

(and even Poles), distressed by the ruthless seizure of properties, arrests, and deportations, welcomed with cheers and enthusiasm the retreat of the Soviets. To the Ukrainians, the German arrival meant hope for the establishment of an independent Ukrainian state. Viewing the departure of the Soviet army as their liberation, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, OUN-B,°! under the leadership of Stepan Bandera, proclaimed on 30 June 1941 an independent Ukrainian state in Lviv and formed a government headed by Yaroslav Stetsko. Unfortunately, some of the Ukrainian nationalists immediately allied themselves with the Germans and turned against the Jews. German units were joined by the Ukrainian militia and an unruly mob from the local population, and, some maintain, by the soldiers of the Ukrainian Nachtigall batallion.°* Survivors estimate that during the following few days (30 June to 10 July), between 4,000 and 10,000 Jews were massacred in Lviv.°®

On the morning of 1 July 1941, shortly after the arrival of the German troops, Rabbi Jecheskiel Lewin visited the metropolitan with two other Jewish community leaders to report to him what was happening on the streets of Lviv and asked him to appeal to the Ukrainians to stop the atrocities. The metropolitan offered shelter to Rabbi Lewin, but Lewin refused, feeling that he should return to his people. Tragically, Rabbi Lewin was captured by the Germans on the street right after his visit with the metropolitan, taken to prison, and executed later that day.°* That very afternoon, shortly after Lewin’s visit?’ (more than three weeks before the so-called Petlyura Days, 25—7 July 1941),°° the metropolitan issued a pastoral letter (or proclamation) expressing gratitude to the Divine for the beginning of a °° P. Friedman, Roads to Extinction (New York and Philadelphia, 1980), 244.

5! OUN: Orhanizatsiya ukrayins’kykh natsionalistiv (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). 2S. Littman, Pure Soldiers or Sinister Legion (Montreal, 2003), 26—30. °3 §. Szende, The Promise Hitler Kept (New York, 1945), 48-9, estimates 10,000 Jews were killed between 1 and 10 July; Friedman, Roads to Extinction, 246-8, quotes 4,000 on p. 320 n. 4; E. Jones, Lydzi Lwowa w okresie okupacji, 1939-1945 (.6dZ, 1999), 48, estimates 7,000 Jews were killed between

30 June and 3 July. °4 Lewin, A Journey through Illusions, 35-7. °° Ibid. 35-6. °6 Symon Petlyura (or Simon Petlura), a Ukrainian nationalist, was shot in Paris in May 1926 by a Polish Jew, Szlomo Szwarcbard, as revenge for Petlyura’s having killed tens of thousands of Jews dur-

ing the civil war (1918-20). (The French court found Szwarcbard innocent.). On 25 July 1941 Ukrainian Nationalists began a three-day pogrom against Jews, purportedly to avenge belatedly the assassination of Petlyura. Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 10-13; Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 186; J. Gerstenfeld-Maltiel, My Private War (London, 1993), 60.

410 Julian F. Bussgang new era of an independent Ukraine and asked his flock for subordination to the laws of fairness. He urged the Ukrainians to demonstrate that they were ready for sovereignty as an independent European nation. Only in the eighth paragraph did he greet the incoming German army as ‘liberators from evil’.°’ He immediately followed this greeting with an appeal to the newly established authorities to provide ‘wise and just leadership and administration . . . for all citizens inhabiting Our Country, irrespective of which religion, nationality, or social stratum they belong to’.

His reference to ‘all citizens irrespective of religion .. .’ clearly implied that Sheptytsky was against any maltreatment of Jews. While the text of the proclamation indicated satisfaction that the evil Soviet regime had ended, it welcomed the Germans in a rather perfunctory manner. It should be noted that Sheptytsky had also given a similar welcome to the Soviets when they entered the city, in the hopes of establishing reasonable working relations with the new rulers.*® One of the Jews saved by Sheptytsky, Rabbi Kahane, asserts that the metropolitan

promised Rabbi Lewin ‘to write a pastoral letter in which he would warn the Ukrainians against committing murder and looting’.°? Rabbi Lewin’s son Kurt believes that the inclusion of the appeal to treat fairly all citizens regardless of their religion or ethnicity was a direct result of his father’s visit earlier in the day.°° Kahane states that the pro-Jewish passage in the metropolitan’s proclamation ‘required a great deal of courage and an unshakable commitment to moral principle . . . and entailed grave risk for its proponent’. Indeed, because of these statements, Himmler wanted the Gestapo to arrest the metropolitan. However, because the metropolitan was so popular with the Ukrainians, ‘Himmler backed down on the arrest but ordered that the metropolitan be closely watched and all his movements followed’.°** Barely a week or so after Sheptytsky’s proclamation, the Germans dissolved the

newly established Stetsko Ukrainian government, on direct orders from Hitler, and arrested Bandera and the other Ukrainian nationalist leaders.°” The situation deteriorated rapidly. A few days after the German occupation of the city, mobs of young men, both Ukrainians and Poles, incited by Nazi propaganda that ‘Jewish Bolsheviks’ had committed atrocities during the Soviet occupation, attacked Jews in the streets of Lviv, seeking revenge.®? While the Germans did not participate themselves, they did not intervene. Particularly terrible are the reports of the ‘Petlyura Days’ (25—7 July), mentioned above. °7 See the Appendix for the full text of the proclamation. 58 A. Kravchuk, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the Ethics of Christian Social Action’, in Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality, 260.

59 Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 9. 60 Personal communication from Kurt Lewin to the author. 61 Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 124. 62 H. Stehle, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the German Regime’, in Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality, 128. 63 Szende, The Promise Hitler Kept, 42. 64 L. S. Dawidowicz, The War against the Jews: 1933-1945 (New York, 1986), 279; see also S. Redlich, ‘Sheptytsky and the Jews during World War IT’, in Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Realty, 153.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 4Il The satisfaction of having the Soviets depart was short-lived. It took only days to realize that the new rulers brought with them even more serious problems, particularly in their murderous behaviour towards Jews. Metropolitan Sheptytsky soon realized that the German occupiers were worse than the Soviets. Confronted with the unrestrained, violent situation, Sheptytsky addressed both the Germans and his people in a series of declarations that had a very different tone from his original statement of 1 July 1941 or his 25 July 1941 radio address, in which he struck a pro-Ukrainian, anti-Soviet tone and appealed, albeit in a routine fashion, for peaceful co-operation with the new authorities.®° Sheptytsky must have known by then that his brother Aleksander had been killed by the Germans in Zamos¢ before entering Lviv. On 14 January 1942 Sheptytsky joined with other Ukrainian leaders in signing a letter to Adolf Hitler, objecting to several aspects of German policy in Galicia, especially that Ukrainian units were not being used in fighting the Soviets, as had been promised.® In February he wrote a letter of protest to Heinrich Himmler.®’ Although a copy of this letter has not survived, at least three persons have testified that they saw the letter.°? Rabbi Kahane states clearly in his memoir that he saw the full text of Sheptytsky’s letter to Himmler, calling on Himmler ‘to remove Ukrainian policemen from all extermination operations carried out against Jews’. Further evidence of the existence of this letter is the fact that it is referred to in the

metropolitan’s report to Pope Pius XII in which he informed the Pope: ‘I also wrote to Himmler and tried to warn our young not to enlist in the militia where that might lead them to depravation.’®’ Sheptytsky protested to Himmler that the Ukrainian police were being forced to murder Jews and requested that the practice be stopped. He also tried to influence young Ukrainians not to join the militia. ’° Sheptytsky’s letter to Pope Pius XII of 29-31 August 1942 has survived. In it the metropolitan first explained that he had not written at first for fear that the letter might fall into the wrong hands. He then wrote: Following our liberation from the Soviet yoke by the German army, we felt some relief because of it. However, this did not last any longer than one or two months. Gradually, the authorities introduced an unimaginable regime of terror and corruption, which is becoming more and more burdensome and unbearable. ‘Today our whole country is in accord that 65 Jones, Zydzi Lwowa w okresie okupacji, 53, 560. 43. 66 Zieba, ‘Chronologia’, 258; also Stehle, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the German Regime’, 132. 6” Redlich, ‘Metropolitan Sheptyts’kyi’, 69, 75 n. 28.

68 §. Redlich, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the Jews during World War II’, in Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality, 161 n. 47; Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 139, 141.

69 R. S. Wistrich, ‘The Vatican Documents and the Holocaust’, Polin, 15 (2002), 424-6; B. Budurowycz, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the Ukrainian National Movement after 1914’, in Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality, 73 n. 89. 70 J. A. Armstrong, Ukrainian Nationalism, 1939-1945 (New York, 1963), 172. Actes et documents du Saint-Siége relatifs a la seconde guerre mondiale, 111/2 (Vatican City, 1967), doc. 406, pp. 625—9.

412 Julian Ff. Bussgang the German regime is evil, almost diabolic, to a degree even higher than the Bolshevik regime.”

He cited the murder of Jews on the streets as an example and bluntly condemned the Nazis: Such a system of lies, fraud, injustice, and robbery is a caricature of all notions of civilization and good order. This system of egoism, adopted to absurdity, of completely insane national chauvinism and hatred for everything honest and beautiful, is totally out of line, so that perhaps the first reaction experienced when seeing such a monster leads to stupefaction. 7

These letters show very clearly that the metropolitan’s assessment of the German occupiers had drastically changed in a relatively short time. He had initially been optimistic. At the beginning, he felt that getting rid of the Soviets might make possible the creation of an independent Ukraine. He was encouraged by the fact that the Germans, unlike the Soviets, were not opposed to religion, and he thus expected them to give the Greek Catholic Church complete freedom. ’° At the same time, he consistently took an unequivocal position about crimes against the Jews. ‘This is evident in his pastoral letters, two of which are entitled ‘About the Love for our Brothers’ (summer 1942)" and “Thou Shalt not Kill’ (21 November 1942).’° Jews are not mentioned directly in these letters, but love of neighbour and an appeal not to kill one’s own countrymen clearly included them. The November 1942 letter was read in all 4,500 churches, chapels, monasteries, and schools under his jurisdiction.

In 1943 the metropolitan protested directly to Hitler against the abuses of the Gestapo in Galicia. ’®

INITIATIVES TO SAVE JEWS Historians of the Holocaust estimate that 150 or more Jewish lives were saved through Sheptytsky’s influence.’” Israel Bartal and Antony Polonsky cite Sheptytsky’s actions as being ‘a demonstration of humanity that stood out against the background of hostility and the desperate predicament of the Jews in the face of systematic extermination’. “®

Iwan Hirnyj, Sheptytsky’s personal chauffeur from 1941 to 1944 (who came to the United States after the war), gave notarized testimony that he transported Jews to safety on many occasions. He secretly drove Jewish men, women, and children “1 Quoted in Szeptycka and Skérka, Metropolita Andrzej Szeptycki, 399 (unofficial translation by

author). 7 Thid. 403. 73 Korolevsky, Metropolitan Andrew, 456. 74 A. Zieba, ‘Ewangelia, Ukraina’, Gazeta Wyborcza, 4—5 Nov. 2000, p. 23. 7 Szeptycka and Skorka, Metropolita Andrzej Szeptycki, 405-17.

76 Korolevsky, Metropolitan Andrew, 462. ™ Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 134. 7 JT. Bartal and A. Polonsky, ‘Introduction’, Polin, 12 (1999), 23, 24.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 413 to convents, monasteries, and other places of shelter at Father Klymenty’s directions—with full knowledge of the metropolitan—either in a Ford lorry that had a special permit to carry church materials or in the metropolitan’s private Packard.”

The rescued Jews were often supplied with false papers, and once inside the monasteries, sometimes donned church habits to avoid detection. The authority of

the metropolitan protected these transports from German searches, which had intensified in 1943.

The metropolitan himself sheltered many Jews.°° He did so although the Germans executed on the spot anyone found helping Jews. Therefore, these activities were always clandestine. The constant flow of visitors to the palace residence made it extremely dangerous to hide anyone on the premises. Father Korolevsky quotes from Sheptytsky’s letter of 28 December 1942: “The terror is growing. In the past two months more than 70,000 Jews have been executed in L’viv without trial. We have searches in the cathedral, in my house, in the chapter-house, in the Studite monastery around the corner.’®* Rabbi David Kahane was first hidden in the attic of the Studite monastery on Piotra Skargi (Petra Skarhy) Street in Lviv and was eventually moved to the metropolitan’s library attached to the Studite monastery. He recalled that during the winter of 1943-4 the Germans searched the library on at least six occasions.®?

Rabbi Lewin’s oldest son, Kurt, lived in a variety of Studite monasteries and, for a while, in the Studite monastery adjoining the metropolitan’s residence (buildings sometimes visited by the Germans), working in the library. Kurt Lewin, who later served in the Israeli army, wrote his memoirs primarily to document the extraordinary courage and spiritual leadership to save Jews displayed by ‘the towering figure of the Metropolitan Andrew Graf (Count) Sheptytsky, whose impact was widely felt in his church and beyond’.®°

On many occasions Sheptytsky met and sheltered Jews at great risk to himself and to the clergy carrying out his instructions. Edward Harvitt describes how Sheptytsky gave an audience to Harvitt’s mother, whom Sheptytsky had never met before, and how the metropolitan saved his and his mother’s life by offering her either asylum in a monastery or false papers.*4 Among those Sheptytsky offered to hide and protect were at least three rabbis: David Kahane and Jecheskiel Lewin of Lviv and Kalman Chameides of Katowice. Kahane quotes the metropolitan saying to him in 1943: We are opposed to the atrocities of the Nazis, and we shall do our utmost to denounce them as inhuman and sacrilegious. ... As human beings we are obliged to voice our opposition to 7 J. Hirnyj, ‘Moje swiadectwo’, in Zieba (ed.), Metropolita Andrzej, 207-10. 80 PE. Lapide, Three Popes and the Jews (New York, 1967), 185-7.

81 Korolevsky, Metropolitan Andrew, 459. 82 Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 146. 83 Lewin, A Journey through Illusions, 8.

84 Sworn deposition of Edward Harvitt, 9 May 1996, USHMM Archives, Metropolitan Graf Szeptycki Collection.

AI4 Julian Ff. Bussgang this [brutal and cruel treatment of the Jews] and condemn in the strongest terms the persecution of Jews and all forms of racial discrimination.®°

POST-WAR POSITION OF THE VATICAN The process of honouring Sheptytsky by the Vatican has been slow. After the metropolitan died, Archbishop Ivan Buchko, his auxiliary bishop from 1929 to 1939, submitted a petition to the Holy See for his beatification. Although this peti~ tion has been approved,*® it is still being processed. In 1999 the Vatican and the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC)®’ jointly formed the International Catholic_Jewish Historical Commission (ICJHC), composed of three Jewish and three Catholic scholars. In October 2000 these scholars issued a report entitled “The Vatican and the Holocaust’. The report singles out Metropolitan Sheptytsky as the one Catholic Church leader known to have had the courage to condemn the Nazi campaign against Jews. The commission concluded: At the end of 1942 the Greek Catholic Metropolitan of Lviv, Andrzeyj Szeptyckyj [sic], wrote to the Pope and described with stark clarity the atrocities and mass murders being carried out against the Jews and the local population. No other high-ranking Catholic churchman, to the best of our knowledge, provided such direct eyewitness testimony and expressed concern for Jews qua Jews (and as primary targets of German bestiality) in the same way. . . . He publicly denounced the massacres of Jews in circumstances in which some Ukrainian Catholics themselves were collaborating with the Germans in these murders.®®

Robert S. Wistrich, a Jewish member of the ICJHC, stated: ‘In sharp contrast to Sheptytsky, no other Polish archbishop or bishop, in their communications with Rome as recorded in the two parts of volume 111, showed any interest in the fate of the Jews or mentioned the atrocities against them.’°” The head of the Polish episcopate, Primate Hlond, issued a statement in support of the metropolitan, but Hlond’s successor, Cardinal Wyszynski, is said to have twice opposed the beatification of Sheptytsky,?° perhaps because Sheptytsky 85 Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 141. 86 Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 136. 87 ‘Report of the Vatican Documents on the Second World War’, Polin, 15 (2002), 411-12. The IJCHC, which represents World Jewry in its relations with the Vatican, includes representatives of the

World Jewish Congress, American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, B’nai B’rith International, and Israel Council on Inter-Religious Relations, as well as of the three major Jewish denominations: Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox.

88 ; = (accessed 15 Aug. 2005), n. 24; . 89 “The Vatican Documents and the Holocaust’, 425-6, referring to vol. 3 of Actes et documents du Saint-Siége.

9° Zieba, ‘Sheptyts’kyi in Polish Public Opinion’, in Magocsi (ed.), Morality and Reality, 391; M. Hrynchyshyn (the Greek Catholic Exarch in France), ‘Western Historiography and Future Research’, ibid. 425.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 415 was a Roman Catholic who had converted to Greek Catholicism and a Polish aristocrat who identified with Ukrainians and supported efforts for Ukrainian inde-

pendence. Polish—Ukrainian relations were not the best during the war. For example, Leszek Dziegiel, a Polish survivor from Lviv, explains in his memoir that during the war Archbishop Sheptytsky was presented by the underground press as being ready to ‘devour’ Poles, as inciting Ukrainians to murder Poles and collaborate with the Germans. It was only dozens of years later that Dziegiel learned the truth about the metropolitan’s attitude objecting to the murder of Poles.*! During his visit to Ukraine on 24 June 2001, Pope John Paul II paid tribute to Metropolitan Sheptytsky, saying, ‘How can we fail to recall the far-sighted and

solid pastoral activity of the Servant of God Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky, whose cause of beatification is proceeding and whom we hope to see one day in the

glory of the saints??? On that same occasion, it was announced that Klymenty Sheptytsky, who served as the chief implementer of the wishes of his older brother, was among those beatified.

QUESTIONS RAISED BY YAD VASHEM Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, is the

Israeli institution dedicated to commemorating those who perished in the Holocaust and to honouring non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. In order to carry out its mission, Yad Vashem provides recognition to those who saved Jews

by designating them ‘Righteous Among the Nations’. The approval of nominations for the award is the responsibility of an independent commission, currently headed by an Israeli Supreme Court Justice. From 1963, when the programme began, to the beginning of 2005, there have been 20,757 people from various countries, largely from Europe, so recognized.

The nominations must include a description of the aid extended, a statement whether any financial compensation was involved, whether the rescuer faced serious risk, and a description of what might have been the rescuer’s motivation—e.g.

friendship, religious belief, humanitarian considerations, etc. In general, the rescued persons themselves have been the best proponents for those nominated, as they can submit direct testimony and evidence. Even though Klymenty Sheptytsky, in addition to having been beatified by the Church, has already been recognized by Yad Vashem, and justly so, there has been a surprisingly negative attitude in the case of Metropolitan Sheptytsky himself, in spite of overwhelming evidence of his exemplary behaviour and numerous testimonies by those he rescued. There are reports that the late Moshe Bejski, then head of the Yad Vashem Commission, refused to award Sheptytsky the title of 91 L. Dziegiel, Lwéw nie kazdemu zdréw (Wroclaw, 1991), 244.

92 (accessed 25 Apr. 2007).

416 Julian fF. Bussgang ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ no fewer than sixteen times, claiming that ‘in public he failed to utter a single word to condemn the Nazi persecution of the Jews taking place in his country in front of his very eyes’.?? Such an argument is in stark contradiction to the written record of communications issued by the metropolitan, which are quoted above.

Much of the negative opinion seems to come from the metropolitan’s initial proclamation of 1 July 1941 and his 25 July 1941 radio address, in which he welcomed the Germans to the city, albeit in a rather routine fashion. Yet it was only by accepting the German authorities when they entered the city that he was able to

maintain his position and engage in activities to help Jews. Tragically, as mentioned above, violence against Jews began almost immediately after the radio address. Once he became aware of these atrocities, his subsequent declarations and

letters had a very different tone. |

Many of the arguments used against Sheptytsky seem to derive from Soviet propaganda. The Soviets had little liking for a Polish count. ‘They opposed the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and after the war essentially disbanded it, replacing it with the Russian Orthodox Church. They preferred a church reporting to the patriarch in Moscow to one reporting to the Vatican in the West and which symbolized an independent Ukraine. Accordingly, the Soviet propaganda and educational programmes in western Ukraine portrayed the metropolitan in ‘an extremely negative image’.** In addition, the accusation that Sheptytsky ‘never condemned the murders’ is derived from the official, post-war, Soviet-influenced Polish propaganda, which accused him of having been ‘a leading representative of extreme Ukrainian chauvinism and of anti-Communist and anti-Polish nationalism’.?° Andrzej Zieba, professor of Political and International Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, 1s very critical of the conclusions drawn in the Polish biography of Sheptytsky by Edward Prus, written in 1985, during Soviet rule. Zigba claims that the book reveals hostility towards Sheptytsky from both the Right and the Left. He states:

On the whole, the interpretation was still deeply rooted in the libelous attacks of the National Democratic press, enriched by the ‘achievements’ of Soviet scholarship. . . . Polish public opinion was for the first time exposed to the Soviet technique of argumentation in this attempt to discredit the character and personal life of Sheptyts' kyi.%°

TESTIMONIES OF SAVED INDIVIDUALS Sworn testimonies by at least nine Jews who had survived as children in the monasteries, orphanages, and convent schools have been filed with Yad Vashem 93 (GARIWO: Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide) (accessed 15 Aug. 2005). 94 Redlich, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the Jews during World War II’, 146.

9° From Jerzy A. Salecki in Trybuna Ludu, 221 (1984), 4, cited by Zieba, ‘Sheptyts’kyi in Polish

Public Opinion’, 391—3, n. 113, 402. %6 Zieba, ‘Sheptyts’kyi in Polish Public Opinion’, 392.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 417 and with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM).*’ They include Oded

Amarant, the nephew of Rabbi Dr Izhak Bartfeld of Lviv; Zwi Barnea (born Herbert Chameides), the elder son of Rabbi Dr Kalman Chameides of Katowice; Dr Leon Chameides, the younger son of Rabbi Chameides; Edward Harvitt (born Adolf Horowitz), the son of Amalia and Joachim Horowitz of Stanislawow; Kurt

I. Lewin and Nathan Lewin, sons of Rabbi Jecheskiel Lewin of Lviv; Lilit Pohlmann (maiden name Stern), on behalf of herself and her mother, Cecilia Stern-Abraham; and Adam Daniel Rotfeld, son of Berta (née Chajes) and Dr Leon Rothfeld of Przemyslany, who in 2005 served as foreign minister of Poland.?®

In addition to the official testimonies, memoirs of survivors also provide important evidence. For example, a survivor, Thomas Hecht, writes that there was no

pogrom in his town of Busk because Metropolitan Sheptytsky ‘signalled to his parishioners not to conduct pogroms’.?? In 2005 the Israeli journalist Alex Doron wrote an article in the daily Ma’ariv’© questioning why Yad Vashem had delayed honouring the metropolitan for so long.

He cited the efforts by the late Professor Dr Ludwig Podoszyn, head of the Laryngology Department at the Ben Zion Medical Center in Haifa and one of those saved by Sheptytsky, to have Sheptytsky recognized. The testimonies are very vivid and unequivocal; these survivors owe their lives to the metropolitan and want to see him honoured.

Doron points out that among the persons who demanded that Sheptytsky receive recognition as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ is Professor Shimon Redlich of Ben-Gurion University in Beer Sheva, himself a Holocaust survivor. Another survivor born in Poland, the late Nathan Gross, an Israeli film director and writer, protested the one-sided approach of the Committee to Reward the Righteous for its failure to bestow the award. Gross is quoted as writing to Yad Vashem in 1997: “They have displayed an insulting attitude towards a great friend of the Jews and the greatest of the great spiritual leaders of modern Christianity, who during the tragic days when others turned away out of fear, remained friendly and proved it by his actions. He criticized Himmler, wrote to the Pope, and sheltered many Jews.’1°!

One of the best-known accounts attesting to the courageous deeds of Metropolitan Sheptytsky occurs in the personal memoir of the late Rabbi David Kahane of Lviv, based on notes he had written from September to December 1943.'°? Kahane was sheltered at the direction of the metropolitan even though he had very Semitic features and was readily recognizable as being Jewish. There has 97 USHMM Archives, Metropolitan Graf Szeptycki Collection. 98 A. Rotfeld, Polityka, 18 Feb. 2005, pp. 70-3. 9 TT. Hecht, Life Death Memories (Charlottesville, Va., 2002), g8—100. 100 A. Doron, ‘Holier than the Pope’ (HEB.), Ma’ariv, 5 May 2005.

101 Thid. 102 Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, p. ix.

418 Julian fF. Bussgang been some speculation that, when Kahane reached an advanced age, he wondered about the attitude of the Ukrainians and began to question why Sheptytsky had welcomed the Germans, and also whether Jews had been rescued in order to be converted./°? However, Kahane’s own diary and the testimonies of other survivors refute these reservations.'°* Indeed, in his interview with Ewa Kurek (7 November 1987), Kahane, while deploring the acts of many Ukrainians against Jews, called Sheptytsky ‘a person of high morals’ and attested that the metropolitan personally saved him and had given orders to his convents to save Jewish children.*°? He affirmed that Sheptytsky’s primary reason for saving children was humanitarian, to save lives.

Kahane expressed regret that after liberation some young Jewish children remained in the convents. Yet, when the war was over, most of the rescued Jewish children were not converted but were returned to the Jewish community in Poland

to resume their lives and education. Only the very youngest ones who were not claimed by anybody remained in convents or monasteries. The conversion theme may stem, at least in part, from the fact that many Jews, in order to help save their lives, applied for conversion so as to receive new papers. Anna Krochmal writes that the Greek Catholic parish clergy, with the consent of the metropolitan, used to baptize Jews who requested it and that in Przemyslany, in December 1942, baptism was administered to some 500 Jews.1°° The metropolitan took a great personal risk to save not only Kahane himself and his then pregnant wife but also 150 or more other Jews, many of whom were circumcised and thus could easily have been identified. If discovered, these individuals would have been in danger even if they had converted.

Of great significance are the very recent testimonies submitted by Rabbi Kahane’s two daughters.'°’ Based on numerous family discussions, they attest that

their family, along with many other Jews, was saved from certain death by Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky ‘at great risk to himself and his religious institu-

tions’. ,

Many priests and monks reporting to Sheptytsky risked their lives as well. Some of them are paid tribute in the various USHMM depositions, in Kahane’s memorr,

and by Kurt Lewin.4?? Among those mentioned are: Ihumen Klymenty Sheptytsky, Brother Anthony, Brother Barnabas (Varnava), Sebastian Ben, Brother Bojarski, Herman Budzinski, Monk Gervazyi, Father Ivantziw, Mother Superior Josefa (Helena Witter), Father Hrytzaj (secretary of the metropolitan), 103 Redlich, ‘Metropolitan Sheptyts’kyi’, 72. 104 Sworn depositions of survivors, USHMM Archives, Metropolitan Graf Szeptycki Collection. 105 FE. Kurek, Your Life Is Worth Mine (New York, 1997), 213-17. 106 J. J. Hartman and J. Krochmal, J Remember Every Day (Przemysl, 2002), appendix, 280.

107 Notarized statements by Ruth Kahana-Geyer (dated 10 Oct. 2005) and Yael Kahana (dated 12 Oct. 2006), found in the Lewin file at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. See also Yael Kahana’s letter of 19 Mar. 2006 to Chairman Avner Shalev at Yad Vashem. 108 Lewin, A Journey through Illusions, 62, 101.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 419 Father Kyprian, Father Ivan Kotiw, Brother Lazar, Martyniuk, Father Nikanor, Father Platon, Volodymyr Poborejko, Mother Superior Monika Polianska of the Basilian convent in Pidmichailiwtzi, Monk Tyt Prociuk, Brother Teodosij, and Father Marko Stek.'°? At least two of them, Klymenty Sheptytsky and Father Marko Stek, have also been recognized by Yad Vashem as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’.

According to Father Bohdan Lukie, CSsR,!!° Rabbi Kahane drew up a list of over 240 Ukrainian Catholic priests who saved Jews, noting that this list was not exhaustive.'’* Friedman estimates that 550 Studite monks and nuns knew the secret, but that none of the concealed Jews was betrayed to the Germans.'!” The large number of Ukrainian clerics involved clearly shows that they acted to protect

Jews on the orders of and with the approval of their supervisor, Metropolitan Sheptytsky.

DISCUSSION OF ALLEGATIONS The website of the Shoah Resource Center connected with Yad Vashem acknowledges that Sheptytsky was sympathetic towards Jews and ‘helped dozens of Jews find refuge in his monasteries and even in his own home’. However, it makes the following accusations:'?°

1. ‘Szeptytsky did not approve of the [Ukrainian] movement’s terrorist activities but did not denounce them either.’ There is no question that Metropolitan Sheptytsky favoured a free Ukrainian state and sympathized with the Ukrainian nationalist movement. However, not

only did he not approve of their terrorist activities, he expressed himself very clearly and strongly against them. As mentioned before, he took an unequivocal position about crimes against the Jews by Ukrainians, as is evident in his pastoral . letters ‘About the Love for our Brothers’ (summer 1942)" and “Thou Shalt not Kill? (21 November 1942).1? Sheptytsky cannot be blamed for the excesses of the Ukrainian groups whom he

could not control. During wars and natural disasters, when order breaks down, civilians sometimes commit crimes against each other, and young soldiers, even under military command, often misbehave towards civilians. 109 Deposition of Zwi Barnea, USHMM Archives, Metropolitan Graf Szeptycki Collection; Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 136. 110 CSsR: Congregatio Sanctissimi Redemptoris (Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer).

111 (accessed 15 Aug. 2005); Revd Lukie, a Redemptionist priest, served as a Greek Catholic pastor in Newark, NJ and Perth, Australia. 112 Friedman, Roads to Extinction, 192. 118 (accessed 15 Aug.

2005). 114 Zieba, ‘Ewangelia, Ukraina’, 23. 119 Translation of pastoral letter ‘Thou Shalt not Kill’, issued 21 Nov. 1942, USHMM Archives, Metropolitan Graf Szeptycki Collection.

420 Julian 7. Bussgang 2. ‘He supported the German army as the saviour of the Ukrainians from the Soviets .. .’. The Soviet occupation of eastern Poland was exceptionally brutal. The Soviets killed many Poles and Ukrainians, including the metropolitan’s own

brother, Leon, and deported hundreds of thousands of people from Galicia to remote parts of the Soviet Union. They also opposed religion, particularly the Greek Catholic Church. Metropolitan Sheptytsky had experienced such brutality first-hand when he was imprisoned by the Russians during the First World War. On the other hand, Sheptytsky had studied in Germany and had been exposed to its cultural and academic heritage. Initially, he did not see Germans as cruel barbarians. [t could be said that he should have known from the media that the Nazis were persecuting Jews. However, many others, including Jews, also failed to believe current reports because they thought of Germany as being a civilized country. It is not so surprising then that Sheptytsky welcomed the German army, based on his personal experiences and the belief that they would be more likely to respect the Church and endorse an independent Ukraine. By contrast, what he had come to expect from the Soviets is evident from his 30 August 1941 letter to Angelo Rotta, the papal nuncio in Budapest: ‘Under the Bolsheviks, for sure, everybody was as if sentenced to death.’!!® Stull, it is evident from the manner in which he greeted the Germans that he had some reservations about them. The expression of a welcome does not appear until the eighth paragraph of his proclamation, and it is immediately followed by ‘we expect wise and just leadership and administration that will take into account the needs of all the citizens inhabiting Our Country, irrespective of which religion, nationality, or social stratum they belong to’. One could easily conclude that his welcome was a mere formality that was expected of him and that he used the occasion to admonish the new authorities to behave in a civil manner.

When Sheptytsky came to realize the true nature of the Nazi Germans, he denounced them in no uncertain terms. His letter to Pope Pius XII of 29—31 August 1942, mentioned briefly above and quoted below, demonstrates the sequence of his thinking. While he had expected the arrival of the Germans to provide relief from the Soviets, he soon realized that the opposite had happened: Gradually, the authorities introduced an unimaginable regime of terror and corruption, which is becoming more and more burdensome and unbearable. Today our whole country is in accord that the German regime is evil, almost diabolic, to a degree even higher than the Bolshevik regime. . . . For at least one year there has been no day during which there would

not be committed reprehensible crimes, murders, thefts and robbery, confiscations and extortions. The first victims were the Jews. The number of murdered Jews in our small country must have surely already exceeded 200,000. As the army has been moving east, the number of victims has been growing. In Kiev, in just a few days, they murdered up to 130,000 men, women, and children. All the small villages in Ukraine have witnessed similar 116 Quoted in Father T. Sliwa, ‘Kontakty Metropolity Szeptyckiego ze Stolica Apostolska w okresie II wojny swiatowey’, in Zieba (ed.), Metropolita Andrzej, 199.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 421 massacres, and this has been going on already for a year. At the beginning, the [German] authorities were ashamed of these acts of inhuman injustice and tried to obtain for themselves documents that would attest to the fact that the perpetrators of these murders were members of the local population or the militia. With time, they started murdering Jews on the streets, in full view of the whole population, without any hint of shame.”

Although the Germans had introduced censorship and it was difficult to speak against their behaviour without retribution, the metropolitan made his opposition clear.

As was evident later, Sheptytsky’s fears about Soviet intentions towards the church proved justified. Beginning in July 1944, when the Soviets returned to Lviv, they dismantled the Greek Catholic Church in the belief that ‘religion had to be abolished as a left-over from the capitalist regime, the enemy of socialism’.1+®

Church properties were liquidated or turned over to the Orthodox Church controlled from Moscow. Many monks and priests were arrested and many deported deep into the USSR.'!" 3. ‘and endorsed the formation of a Ukrainian division within the SS’. The Ukrainian division, named SS Galizien, was officially formed within the Waffen SS at a ceremony on 28 April 1943. The metropolitan did not attend the ceremony himself and never issued a pastoral letter or proclamation supporting the SS Galizien division. One of the priests familiar with the metropolitan’s views at the time, Father Hrodzskyj, believed that the metropolitan did not like mixing God with the type of tasks assigned to the Ukrainian military unit.1*° When the SS Galizien was first formed, the understanding was that such a unit would organize young Ukrainian volunteers to fight against the USSR and thus draw them away from partisan units where some uncontrolled leaders could use them to murder neighbours of other nationalities.'7'

Dr Vsevolod Frédéric, a French expert on eastern Europe who worked for the German Foreign Office in Berlin, was sent by his superiors to interview Sheptytsky and subsequently prepared a confidential report to Berlin dated 19 September 1943. He wrote that the metropolitan was convinced that Germany’s defeat was inevitable and that he had favoured the formation of a Ukrainian SS division as guardian of public order until regular Soviet troops arrived.!2? During the same interview, Frédéric stated that the Metropolitan had frankly told him of his disapproval of the inhuman treatment of the Jews by the Nazis and blamed them for killing 100,000 Jews in Lviv and several millions in the Ukraine. Frédéric said that Sheptytsky remained adamant in his statement that the killing of Jews was an inadmissible act.1?° 117 Szeptycka and Skoérka, Metropolita Andrzej Szeptycki, 399-400 (unofficial translation by the author). 118 Korolevsky, Metropolitan Andrew, ch. 12, ‘The Destruction of the Greek-Catholic Church in

Galicia’, 468. 119 Tbid. 480-2. 120 Prus, Wladyka Swietojurski, 271. 121 Zieba, ‘Ewangelia, Ukraina’, 23. 122 Stehle, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the German Regime’, 137-8. 123 Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 212.

422 Fulhan 7. Bussgang 4. ‘One of Sheptytsky’s closest aides served as the division’s chief chaplain.’ In July 1943 the metropolitan decided to appoint chaplains to the SS Galizien being formed by the Germans. He appointed Father Dr Vasil Laba as the division’s chief chaplain and assigned other priests to serve as chaplains. It is true that the metropolitan was close to Father Laba, but having priests appointed as chaplains of a military unit did not constitute an endorsement of murderous behaviour. On the

contrary, chaplains were meant to provide moral leadership to the troops and occupy such a position in all armies. Even though he appointed chaplains, Sheptytsky did not approve of the unit participating in any activity other than fighting the Soviets.

In his own tribute to Sheptytsky, the Revd Dr Laba, the division’s chaplain, wrote: Three years of German domination of Ukraine did not differ much from Soviet domination... . The metropolitan was shocked by the unexpected highhandedness of the Nazis. In private conversations he warned high ranking German officers who visited him of the consequences of such actions. Notwithstanding, lawlessness abounded, and he sent written protests to German government leaders and officials. The best known of these was his protest on the genocide of the Jews which he titled: “Thou Shalt not Kall!!” Only his position of authority and his age saved him from being imprisoned in a Nazi jail and nearly being killed.174

5. ‘Despite his sympathy for the Jews, Sheptytsky did nothing to stop the Ukrainian nationalists from backing Germany.’ The Ukrainians who murdered Jews cannot be excused. However, in backing

Germany, the Ukrainian nationalist movement was originally motivated by the desire for an independent Ukraine. Like Poles who wanted a free Poland and like Jews who wanted their own state of Israel, the Ukrainians wanted their own country. They were greatly distressed by the brutal regime of the Soviet Union and turned to the Germans, who had pushed out the Soviets in 1941, as their potential

allies. Nonetheless, ‘the metropolitan’s attitude toward the nascent Ukrainian Army (UPA-Ukrainska povstanska armita) is said to have been definitely cool and reserved’. !2°

The German historian and journalist Hansjakob Stehle states: In a private letter of 3 September 1942 to Cardinal Tisserant in the Vatican, Sheptytsky complained that the Germans were exposing young Ukrainians to ‘terrible demoralization’ by recruiting them into police and militia units and persuading them that they were performing patriotic work, while instead, they were misused ‘for their own perverted purposes’.*2°

The noted Holocaust historian Philip Friedman discusses Sheptytsky’s attempts to influence the Ukrainian nationalists: 124 Revd Dr V. Laba, Metropolitan Szeptytsky, his Life and Accomplishments (Rome and Toronto,

1984), 71-2. 125 Budurowycz, ‘Sheptyts kyi and the Ukrainian Movement after 1914’, 64. 126 Stehle, ‘Sheptyts’kyi and the German Regime’, 136.

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 423 When in November 1942 the Germans were massacring Galician Jews with the aid of many

Ukrainians, Sheptytsky threatened with ‘divine punishment’ all individuals who ‘shed innocent blood and make themselves outcasts of human society by disregarding the sanctity of man’. He prohibited the rendering of religious services to individuals who embraced the Nazi gospel of murder. . . . Although the metropolitan’s interventions and pastoral letters failed to dampen the zeal of the Ukrainian collaborationists, they made an impact on a great

many peasants and workmen as well as on the clergy and intelligentsia. His became the ringing voice of protest.'7"

CONCLUSION A careful analysis of the chronology of events and an appreciation of how the Ukrainians (and Poles) viewed the Soviet occupation make it clear that the criticisms of Sheptytsky show a lack of understanding of the events as they evolved and the context in which they occurred. Despite the fact that Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky was 76 years old when the German troops entered Lviv, and was feeble, sickly, and an invalid who could not move without assistance, he had the incredible courage and spirit to undertake the saving of 150 to 200 Jews, many of them children. He was blunt in his commu-

nications with the Vatican, and he dared demand that the German leaders stop their cruel policies to exterminate and persecute Jews. He also tried to influence his flock and directed those under his supervision to help Jews. There is no evidence that a single Jew hidden by Sheptytsky and his clergy was

denounced and surrendered to the Nazis. To his flock, to the clerics who surrounded him, and to the Jews whom he saved, he was a hero and a holy figure who

should be honoured and recognized by Yad Vashem. And yet he has not been recognized, allegedly because he initially welcomed the Germans and tried to establish civil relations with the authorities.

Other heroes of the era recognized by Yad Vashem also had relations with German authorities, or they could not have performed their good deeds; e.g. Oskar

Schindler, who operated a factory to supply the German war effort, and the recently honoured Wehrmacht major Karl Plagge, who had been a member of the Nazi Party from 1931 to 1939 but took many Jews out of the Vilna ghetto and transferred them to a forced labour camp, thus enabling them to survive.!° It is interesting to note that Moshe Bejski, who was chairman of the Yad Vashem com-

mission that refused the award to Sheptytsky, supported the nomination of Schindler, who had been his rescuer. !*9 Sheptytsky, a man who rescued so many Jewish lives, can surely be forgiven for having expected better of the German occupation and for the fact that he could not 127 Friedman, Their Brothers’ Keepers, 133-4. 128 A. L. Cowan, ‘60 Years Later, Honoring the German Army Maj. Karl Plagge, an Unlikely Hero of the Holocaust’, New York Times, 28 Mar. 2005.

129 (accessed 1 Jan 2006).

424 Julian Ff. Bussgang completely control the brutal behaviour of some of his people. What is truly most remarkable is that he accomplished so much, given the circumstances. This is the man about whom it 1s said: “The towering humanity of Sheptytsky remains an inspiration today’,!°° who is called ‘a saintly man’ by a survivor,!*! about whom Kahane writes, ‘It was such extraordinary, thoroughly humane persons that our sages had in mind when they wrote: “The righteous of the nations of the world have a portion in the world to come.” ’!°” Time is running out, as those who survived and have been campaigning to have him honoured are ageing and dying. They want Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky to be honoured without any further delay. Over 2,000 Ukrainians have already been accorded recognition as Righteous Among the Nations. It is high time to recognize their most important religious leader, who was responsible for inspiring and encouraging many of the others to save Jewish lives. To delay honouring one who tenaciously persisted in doing so much when others did so little would be a great injustice. 130 H. Troper and M. Weinfeld, Old Wounds (Toronto, 1988), 17—18. 131M. Gilbert, The Righteous: Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust (New York, 2003), 41 n. 6, quoting Dr

Leon Chameides. 182 Kahane, Lvov Ghetto Diary, 143. APPENDIX Pastoral Letter of His Excellency Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky, issued 1 July 1941 Based on the documents at the USHMM. Translation by Anne Lewin, slightly edited by the author. Although tt ts called a pastoral letter, 1t 1s actually more like a proclamation.

To the Ukrainian People: By the Will of the Almighty and Most Merciful God, united in the Trinity, a New Era has begun in the life of United, Sovereign Ukraine. The National Assembly that took place yesterday affirmed and proclaimed this Historic Event.

Informing You People of Ukraine of such a realization of your appealing prayers, I call on you to manifest your gratitude to the Divine, loyalty to His Church, and obedience to the authority. The times of war will demand many a sacrifice, but that which has begun in the name of God and with God’s blessing will be successfully completed. The sacrifices that are certainly necessary to achieve our goals will primarily be in obedient subordination to the laws of fairness and not opposing the orders of the Authority. People of Ukraine, at this Historical Moment you must demonstrate that you have sufficient sense of authority, solidarity, and vital force to deserve such a posi-

Metropolitan Sheptytsky: A Reassessment 425 tion among the nations of Europe so as to develop the strength given to us by God. By your obedience, solidarity, and proper performance of your duties prove that you are mature to accept the Sovereign Life. We greet the victorious German Army as our liberators from evil. We shall give proper obedience to the established authority. We recognize Mr Yaroslav Stetsko as the Head of the Administration of the Region of Western Ukraine. From the government called to life by Him, we expect wise and just leadership and administration that will take into account the needs of all the citizens inhabiting Our Country, irrespective of which religion, nationality, or social stratum they belong to. And may all Your endeavours, Ukrainian People, be blessed, and may Divine Wisdom from Heaven descend on all our Leaders. In Lviv, at the Cathedral of St George, 1 July 1941.

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‘The Case of Moses Schorr Rabhi, Scholar, and Social Activist MICHAEL BEIZER and ISRAEL BARTAL FOUR PROMINENT Jewish historians were active in pre-war Poland: Moses Schorr (1874-1941), Majer Balaban (1877-1942), Ignacy Schiper (1884—1943), and Emanuel Ringelblum (1900-44). They were all emigrants from Galicia, and all four died during the Second World War. Balaban, Schiper, and Ringelblum fell at the hands of the Nazis, but Schorr died in exile in Uzbekistan after almost two years of detention in Soviet prisons. By a tragic irony of fate, all three of his col-

leagues who had remained in German-occupied territories survived for a time after Schorr’s death. The investigatory documents published here, which have been preserved in the Central Archive of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in Moscow, allow us to clarify the details of his confinement.

BACKGROUND

Moses (Moshe, Moisey, Mojzesz) Schorr was born in Przemysl (in Russian, Peremyshl), Galicia. He received his education at the Jewish Theological Institute (also known as the Rabbinical Seminary) in Vienna? (he was ordained in 1900), and The authors would like to thank Professor Szymon Rudnicki of Warsaw for his valuable critical com-

ments and for his elaboration of biographical details on a number of figures, and to Avraham Greenbaum of Jerusalem for his bibliographical advice. The article was originally published as ‘Delo Mozesa Shorra, ravvina, uchenogo, obshchestvennogo deyatelya’, Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta, 8 (26) (2003), 269-310.

‘ On Schorr, see ‘Schorr, Moses’, Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem, 1966), xiv. 997—8; ‘Schorr,

Mojzesz’, Polski stomnik biograficzny (Warsaw and Krakow, 1994), xxxv. 603-4; articles by | M. Balaban and M. David, Ksiega jubileuszowa ku cect Prof. Dr. Mojzesza Schorra (Warsaw, 1935); Kovets mada’ lezekher mosheh shor (New York, 1945), pp. ix—xiii; Y. Gruenbaum (ed.), Encyklopedia

Galuyot (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1953), i. 303-4; J. Guzik, ‘Moshe Schorr’, in S. K. Mirsky (ed.), Ishim udemuyot behokhmat yisra’el be ’eiropah hamizrahit lifnet shekiyatah (New York, 1959), 207-22;

R. Zakharti, ‘Moses Schorr and Meir Balaban: Forgotten Eastern European Jewish Historians’ (MA

thesis, Central European University, Budapest, 1998); J. Goldberg, ‘Moses Schorr—Pionier der Erforschung der Geschichte der polnischen Juden’, Judaica, 2/51 (1995), 83-96; ‘Shorr Moshe’, in Kratkaya evreiskaya entstklopediya ( Jerusalem, 2001), x. 289-90.

2 The Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt, founded in 1893, existed until 1938.

The Case of Moses Schorr 427 at the universities of Vienna, Lwow, and Berlin. In 1898 he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Lwow. In 1899 Schorr became a teacher of Jewish subjects at Lwow’s Jewish Teachers’ College, and in 1910 he

began to teach Semitic languages and history of the Ancient Near East at the University of Lwow in the capacity of privat-dozent.®? He became a professor in 1915. In 1923 he was invited to the post of rabbi of the Great Synagogue (‘Wielka’ in Polish) in Warsaw on Tiomackie Street.* In 1925 he also became a professor of

Semitic studies at Warsaw University—one of the few Polish Jews who were allowed to take such a position. In 1928 Schorr became one of the founders of the Jewish Studies Institute in Warsaw,” where he taught Tanakh and Hebrew, and at one time served as rector. As a historian, Schorr researched the communal organizations and institutions of Polish Jewry® and studied the history of the Jews in his native city of Przemysl.”

His work in the area of Semitic studies focused on attempts to regulate life through law in ancient Babylonian society (producing titles such as ‘Ancient Babylonian Legal Documents’ and ‘Sources in Ancient Babylonian Civil and Procedural Law’).® For his scholarly contributions, Schorr was elected to the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Krakow. He received several awards for scholarship. Schorr was a member of the Rabbinical Council of Warsaw, chair of the Warsaw

Committee for Aid to Victims of the Crisis,? chair of the state commission on qualifying examinations in Jewish Law for secondary school teachers, and deputy chair of several national and Warsaw-based Jewish social, charitable, and cultural organizations. Though he was not formally a member of any party, Schorr was by conviction a Zionist. ° The title refers to an adjunct teacher at an institution of higher education, who, although he did not have an official post, could give lectures.

* The Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street was built in 1878 and destroyed by the Nazis on 16 May 1943, following the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Services in the synagogue were

slightly Reform-oriented, to the extent that the Orthodox tradition allowed. Sermons were read in Polish. ‘There was a choir, but it was made up of men only. There was an organ as well, but it was played only during weddings. The synagogue was attended mainly by the liberal intelligentsia and the

middle and upper layers of society. > Instytut Nauk Judaistycznych. ° ‘Organizacya Zydow w Polsce od najdawniejszych czaséw az do r. 1772’, Kwartalnik Historyczny, 13 (1899), 485-520, 734-75; ‘Vnutrennyaya organizatsiya evreev v Pol'she’, Knizhki Voskhoda (St Petersburg), 9 (1900), 138-63; 11 (1900), 94-115; 12 (1900), 21-46. In addition, Schorr’s ‘Tsentral’nye s’ezdy evreiskikh obshchin v Pol’she’ was published in Knizhki Voskhoda, 1 (1901), 61-80; 2 (1901),

36-59. " ZLydzi w PrzemySlu do konica xviii wieku (Lw6w, 1903). 8 Altbabylonische Rechtsurkunden aus der Zeit der I. babylonischen Dynastie, iii (Vienna, 1907-10); Urkunden des altbabylontschen Zivil- und Prozessrechts (Leipzig, 1913).

” The Central Jewish Aid Committee (Tsentraler Yidisher Hilf-Komitet) was formed in 1926 to assist victims of the economic crisis. , The committee gave loans to ruined merchants and entrepreneurs for the purpose of starting new businesses, tried to prevent their eviction for non-payment of rent, and provided assistance in the form of food and clothing. Over the course of its existence (until 1938), the committee assisted 23,000 families.

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