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Polish-Jewish relations during the war An interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Jan T. Gross
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Extract

For the last two hundred years, with the exception of a brief interval between the two World Wars, Poland has been either partitioned, or occupied, or governed by proxy. Squeezed between Russia and Germany Poles took nourishment and continuity as a historical nation from remembrance of things past whenever their sovereignty as a political nation was curtailed or abolished. Lately these efforts were inspired by a conviction that even if present day institutions could not be changed, a half-way victory over totalitarianism's attempts to destroy social solidarity would still be won if the community's history were rescued from the regime's ambition to determine not only the country's future but also its past. Thus, the wonderful intuition—that totalitarianism must destroy all context of social reality independent of its own dictate and acquire a copyright not only on what is but also on what had been—came to the Poles not because they read Orwell's 1984, but because for well over one hundred years they nurtured the idea of the Polish nation against all the odds of nineteenth century geopolitics. Once before, when they had lost their national sovereignty, the Poles had locked in on their past spiritually and it worked: Poland was resurrected. But since the Second World War, despite the dogged persistence of the Poles to reclaim their past, to go beyond, revise, and correct the government-approved version of their history manifested during every mass upheaval in the Polish People's Republic, there was never a temptation to reopen the subject of wartime Polish-Jewish relations.

Type
Research Article
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , November 1986 , pp. 199 - 214
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1986

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References

(1) Jan Józef Lipski'S monograph entitled Workers' Defence Committee was published by the University of California Press in 1985 and it offers a wonderful portrait of Lipski's intellectual and political biography, as well as an aperçu of the entire milieu of the progressive Polish intelligentsia. My point is to take under scrutiny the views of a most enlightened individual from a libertarian, courageous, and unprejudiced milieu. In addition to the article ‘Two mother countries, two patriotisms’ Lipski addressed the issue of Polish-Jewish relations during the war in two speeches delivered originally at important anniversary celebrations. In March 1981 at the Warsaw University, where a symposium was organized in connection with the thirteenth anniversary of the so-called ‘March (1968) Events’ Lipski read a long paper entitled ‘The Jewish Problem’; two years later he spoke at the fourtieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. All three texts, plus a few other essays on contemporary Polish politics, came out together recently (1985) in a book distributed by an inde pendent publishing house, Myśl, entitled Dwie ojczyzny i inne szhice. The substance of all three Lipski's statements on Polish Jewish relations during the war is the same. Indeed, he uses occasionally identical phrasing. All quotes are from the 1985 Myśl edition.

(2) Lipski, , Dwie ojczyzny, 1985: 113–114Google Scholar.

(3) Ibid. p. 34.

(4) Ibid. p. 37.

(5) Ibid. p. 36.

(6) There is interesting evidence pointing out that the rescuers themselves did not perceive the risks involved as inordinately high. Nechama TEC interviewed several Poles who assisted Jews during the war for her book When Light Pierced Darkness. Christian rescue of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland (New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. In their opinion the risk of falling victim to random Nazi violence was so high that it almost equalized the presumed ‘calculable’ risk of repression for actually breaking the German-imposed rules. ‘There was no guarantee whatsoever that one would survive, regardless of whether one followed the German directives or not’ (Tomasz Jurski). ‘I felt threatened with and without the Jews. I could have been caught by the Germans during a raid for no reason at all’ (Stefa Krakowska). Paradoxically, this may have induced people to violate German injunctions: ‘if one could be punished for anything at all, or nothing, then one might as well do something worthwhile’ (Stach Kaminski). ‘in fact’, as yet another rescuer, Roman Sadowski, perceptively observed, ‘maybe those who were engaged in some kind of anti-Nazi activity were less likely to be caught because they were more cautious, more aware. We were prepared and trained’ (Tec 1985: 171). I have analyzed the paradoxical effects of random Nazi violence in a paper entitled ‘Terror and Obedience. A society under occupation’, published in this journal, vol. XX (1979), pp. 333–342Google Scholar.

(7) Scharf, Rafael, Szczypiorski, Andrzej, Polacy i Żydzi—podsumowanie dyskusji, Kultura [Paris, Institut Littéaire], no. 11 (1979), pp. 124, 125Google Scholar.

(8) Ibid. p. 124.

(9) Lipski, ibid. pp. 105 and 106.

(10) Milosz, Czeslaw, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 84Google Scholar.

(11) Here follow two passages produced somewhere in the middle of the Polish political spectrum, not by the radical right or even the nationalist press—published in the periodical Poland (Polska) originating in a milieu of Sanacja sympathizers, and in a brochure put out by the Labour Party (Stronnictwo Pracy). This is what we read in the December 17, 1942 issue of Poland, in an article about prostitution entitled ‘The ways of the Volksdeutsche’:

Hitlerite periodicals and propaganda publications constantly speak of Jews as criminals against humanity, they put out many well deserved accusations against them, they condemn the Jews ruthlessly for depravation and demoralization of the young generation as pornographers and pimps […] And yet an interesting phenomenon ought to be registered. Jews have been locked behind walls in Polish cities or bestially murdered. One would think then, that this scourge and immoral occupation would disappear from our cities, just as Germans had assured us. But this horrible and debasing occupation was taken over very eagerly in our cities from the Jews by the Volksdeutsche […] who are not different from the Jews at all, they only emulate their ways. It is inconceivable for a decent Pole to have anything to do with these practices. Let us make sure that this horrible activity remains the exclusive domain of the chosen nations—the Volksdeutsche and the Jews. It is their privilege.

While the Labour Party brochure, which tackled a much more ambitious topic— ‘The everlasting essence of the spirit of Russia’ (Odwieczna treść ducha Rosji)—offered the following analysis:

[…] in Russia, which was exhausted by war, Jews have entered upon the stage. With quick, expert glance of hardened business people they determined that their chance had come. They decided that Russia offers the best opportunity to carry out the bloody assault awaited for centuries against Christianity and the Western culture […] Judaism began to shape up the new face of the spirit of Bolshevik Russia. And though Poland entirely rejected this nefarious system the danger persists, because the source of epidemics is so close.

(12) Quoted after Engel, David, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: the Polish government in-exile and the Jews, chapter 3, p. 32 (in manuscript)Google Scholar.

(13) See my Polish Society under German Occupation. The Generalgouvernement, 1939–1944 (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 184–186Google Scholar, for references to archival sources containing relevant documents.

(14) See note 13.

(15) See note 12.

(16) As in this brief episode from the life of a ten-years-old Jewish boy:

No sooner had I stood by the river when some boys came along, somehow noticed that I was a Jew and, in order to thorougtlty convince themselves that I was, three of the rascals jumped me. They pulled down my trousers and started shouting at the top of their voices: ‘Jew, Jew, Jew’. Then they grabbed me, twisted my arms behind my back and started deliberating whether to drown me or to hand me over to the German police. I took advantage of a moment when one of them loosened his hold of me, kicked him, and ran away.

There weren't any socially marginal people involved in this encounter, or scum, just children. Indeed the Polish boys got a thrashing at home when their parents learned about the episode from a woman the Jewish child told about it, and who knew his father (Bartoszewski, Wladyslaw and Lewin, Zofia eds.), Righteous among Nations: how Poles helped, the Jews, 1939–1945 (London, Earlscourt Publications, 1969), pp. 411–412Google Scholar.

(17) Hochberg-Mariańska's, Maria introduction to Dzieci Oskarżaja (Children are accusing) (Krakow, Centralna Żydowska Komisja Historyczna w Polsce, 1947Google Scholar). See also Tec'S, Nechama memoir Dry Tears: the story of a lost childhood (New York, Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

(18) See for example Tec'S, When Light Pierced Darkness, especially pages 58, 59 and chapter 10Google Scholar.

(19) Namier, Lewis, 1848: The Revolution of the Intellectuals (New York, Doubleday and Co., 1964), p. 58Google Scholar.

* Lecture delivered at Oxford University on November 30, 1985.