Jews in pre-war Poland

[4thskorpion]

This is what Karski actually wrote:

This what David Engels says about what Karski actually wrote:

The 'sanitised' version i.e. the one that plays down Polish anti-semitism appears quoted for obvious reasons.

[michael mills]

I would like to comment on the sections of Karski's 1940 report quoted by wm.

First the second-to-last section, the one beginning "The attitude of the Jews toward the Poles....", and ending with the words "almost always magnifying [the extent of] such intervention".

That section of the original version of Karski's report continues as follows:

They are attempting to play upon the growing conflicts between the Polish police or other vestiges of the Polish civil service and the broad masses of society, almost always standing "on the side of the people", and in the end, "the Germans, and the Germans alone, will help the Poles to settle accounts with the Jews".

That version alarmed the Polish Government-in-Exile, since it feared that any hint of co-operation of the Polish population with the German occupiers would displease the British and French and perhaps cause them to withdraw support.

Accordingly, the Government-in-Exile required Karski to revise a number of sections of his report. The revised version of the above section reads as follows:

They are attempting to play upon as many and various conflicts as possible within Polish society and in addition - probably not assuming the fact that the mass of Polish society is not anti-Semitic - except to win its sympathy through [the claim] that......."the Germans, [who have] only recently at last [accomplished this], will help the Poles to settle accounts with the Jews".

Here Karski has added a statement that the mass of the Polish population is not antisemitic, which is missing from his original version. he is obviously trying to tone down the danger that Poles might cooperate with the German against the Jews.

[4thskorpion]

That version alarmed the Polish Government-in-Exile, since it feared that any hint of co-operation of the Polish population with the German occupiers would displease the British and French and perhaps cause them to withdraw support.

Exactly.

The Polish government in exile also tried, unsuccessfully at times and to their embarrassment, to surpress all anti-Semitic utterances and publications from the nationalists in the London based government and in the homeland for the reasons highlighted.

[wm]

It was an internal report, internal memos are amended all the time. We don't why they did it in this case.
Maybe because the truth was too painful, or maybe it wasn't all the truth.

What it's never mentioned is the unreliability, shallowness of that report. In fact, as a source it lacks the big picture entirely.

It was written three months after the war started. That period was totally unrepresentative of the entire occupation. The country was still in chaos.
The Jews were treated brutally but there were no ghettos, concentrations camps, gas chambers.
They could live and travel freely, their way of life wasn't affect much.
In fact it was the Poles that held the short end of the stick, they suffered more, they were more severely prosecuted.

It was written by a twenty five year old man, a nobody, without any qualification for writing reports of such depth and magnitude. After all he was a courier for the fledgling Polish Underground, a person who delivers messages.
When he wasn't delivering messages he was listening to foreign radio news and making notes for his superiors.
In fact he didn't want to write anything. As it happened, at that time the Polish Government in France had almost no reliable information from Poland, the messages Karski delivered weren't much helpful either so they grilled him, the messenger, on anything he knew. And the report was born.

He wrote a lot about a massive Nazis efforts to win the Poles over. But did it in fact happen? Or it were just routine, opportunistic propaganda without clearly defined political goals. Their goal was to enslave not to win over. Do we have today any examples confirming what he wrote?

A typical Varsovian Pole was constantly hungry, lice-ridden and slept with two others in one room. He didn't care about high politics, low politics, Jews, Aryans - he was simply waiting for the end of that hardship. His dislike-list was long and included his former rulers, the intellectuals, the British, the French.

The end result, when it really mattered, was that a Jew should have been afraid of Polish criminals, some rabid anti-Semites but not the people - because the people didn't care, were passive, looked the other way.

[4thskorpion]

Karski's reports given to the Polish government in exile were in turn relayed to the wider world and were highly influential in mobilising support for the Polish cause. Maintaining this support was seen as vital to the interests of the Poles especially support from the U.S. with its large Polish-American population and of course it's highly influential Jewish population so any hint of Polish anti-semitism in the homeland or within the exiled government was naturally suppressed, hence the editing of Karski's original report highlighting the condoning if not tacit approval of the solution of the "Jewish question" within Polish society by the German occupiers. If this report was an internal "for-your-eyes-only" report it would not have need sanitising.

[wm]

His later writings were influential, not this one.

Debriefings of couriers were done routinely, although in this case he was asked by the deputy prime minister Władysław Kot to add something about Jews in his report - the reason why he wanted that is unknown.
Some speculate it was because he was pro-Jewish and his wife maintained close contacts with Jewish intellectuals so he more interested in this subject that the others. Karski wrote himself he wasn't prepared for that.

Karski was one of many couriers, the main difference is he was a good writer, his writing was clear and informative. After all he was a diplomat in his earlier life. The other couriers were frequently more comfortable with a gun than with a pen.

There were never any problems with the support of the Polish-American population, Poland could always count on their support no matter what. Even today the US vote solidly right (through out-of-country voting, the UK vote libertarian).

As to the Jews, their pressure on the the Polish government-in-exile was inappropriate and bad politics.
Poland lost a war, its army was destroyed, and then another in France, emotions were running high all the time, and in a midst of all of that the British (and later American) Jewry was trying to force their will, and threatening to poison Polish-British relations (later Polish-American) if refused.

I would be much better to let the sleeping dogs lie, and wait for the end of the war as Ze'ev Jabotinsky proposed.
Those interventions in Poland's internal matters coupled with clumsiness of the Polish Government did a lot of damage. It wasn't a good time for politics as usual.

[4thskorpion]

Debriefings of couriers were done routinely, although in this case he was asked by the deputy prime minister Władysław Kot to add something about Jews in his report - the reason why he wanted that is unknown.

Please provide your source for the above statement?

Karski was one of many couriers, the main difference is he was a good writer, his writing was clear and informative. After all he was a diplomat in his earlier life.

This is slightly contradictory to your previous post below:

It was written by a twenty five year old man, a nobody, without any qualification for writing reports of such depth and magnitude.

As to the Jews, their pressure on the the Polish government-in-exile was inappropriate and bad politics.

Exactly what pressure were the Jews putting on the Polish government in exile other than to curb anti-semitism in the Polish forces stationed in Great Britain?

[wm]

The source is Andrzej Żbikowski, Karski.

Karski was a diplomat, but inexperienced one. He started his first job as a minor official in the Foreign Ministry at the beginning of 1939.

British MPs made several anti-Polish statements in the House of Commons in 1940 - about some Polish publications (published privately), and alleged anti-antisemitism.

In the Sikorski Museum there is a report concerning itself with the Jews in the Polish Army (PRM.36.3) and it says many Jews were avoiding military service not because of antisemitism, about which they didn't have personal knowledge, but because they didn't want to serve at all.
For example in Fulham the Army called up 465 people. 60 didn't show up, including 58 Jews. In Norwood - 32, in this 27 Jews. Threatened with revoking of their citizenship they usually responded they didn't care.
The report concludes that those people were opportunists who exploited their Polish nationality to get them to safety, and didn't care about anything else.

[4thskorpion]

The source is Andrzej Żbikowski, Karski.

Karski was a diplomat, but inexperienced one. He started his first job as a minor official in the Foreign Ministry at the beginning of 1939.

British MPs made several anti-Polish statements in the House of Commons in 1940 - about some Polish publications (published privately), and alleged anti-antisemitism.

In the Sikorski Museum there is a report concerning itself with the Jews in the Polish Army (PRM.36.3) and it says many Jews were avoiding military service not because of antisemitism, about which they didn't have personal knowledge, but because they didn't want to serve at all.
For example in Fulham the Army called up 465 people. 60 didn't show up, including 58 Jews. In Norwood - 32, in this 27 Jews. Threatened with revoking of their citizenship they usually responded they didn't care.
The report concludes that those people were opportunists who exploited their Polish nationality to get them to safety, and didn't care about anything else.

Having quoted from a Sikorski document PRM.36.3 can you please show the source. Why would the Polish forces admit to anti-semitism in its ranks knowing how this issue would be viewed externally? Does the document also discuss the Jew soldiers in the Polish forces in Scotland who left their posts and asked to enlist with the British army to escape anti-semitism by the Poles?

[wm]

It is an internal document, they didn't admit anything. It was written in 1940, Scotland was much later.
They said the Jews were generally avoiding the draft, and it was a cause for concern because it seemed they were given support in this by some Jewish organisation.
It should be add that in 1940 Ignacy Schwarzbart visited several Polish military camps, interviewed soldiers and officers, and expressed his satisfaction about the situation in the army.

[Piotr Kapuscinski]

Documentary on Jews from Żabno (near Tarnów) featuring Shoah survivors describing their pre-war life and WW2 experiences:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2hCH5ANJBE



From this documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2hCH5ANJBE#t=333

"(...) My brother Jolek was a real genius. He studied at the Technical University in Lvov. This was at Mrs Goldman's shop - the Germans came and took 7 people: Ignacy's brother-in-law, Roza's husband and Meszygene Duvett and a few more. Then they went to Jolek. Jolek spoke excellent German. They asked him what he did. He answered: "I'm a student." They asked him where he studied. He told them: "At the Technical University." They said: "You're studying at the polytechnic in Lemberg and still expect to live!?" They came right out with it. We didn't know that. They took him to Dabrowa forest. Him and all the others. Who could imagine they could take strong, young people and shoot them? How do we know he was killed? Because one of them escaped. He came back and told us. They didn't just kill them. I can't even speak about it... They didn't just shoot them, they tortured them. His hands were white. So they broke his hands. They broke his hands. And then they shot him. How can you forget it? (...) The worst thing is we know we're now the last generation of witnesses. (...)"

And another fragment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2hCH5ANJBE#t=768

"(...) They occupied the whole market square and gathered everybody there. What did I see? I saw women wearing just shirts, children, almost naked. The Germans drove them into the market square with their bayonets. I remember one of them hit my Mom in the back with his rifle butt. It caught me, too. Since then I've been blind in one eye. My friend's cousin was in the market square. She held a child in her arms. A baby. The baby was crying, it must have been hungry. The soldier guarding us went over to her. He said something. I saw him approaching. And he suddenly hit the baby in the head with the rifle butt. Blood spurted up. The poor mother didn't know what to do with the baby. The baby was dead. She was holding it. Then she collapsed, holding the baby. You cannot imagine all the crying and screaming. They loaded all those people on trucks and brought them back to the railway station. From that moment everyone thought about escaping from the town. (...)"

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Lecture "The Whole Jewish History in One Hour" by David Solomon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUlM2a2tsOM#t=3350

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Today Polish-Jewish reconciliation is on its way, as Jews are once again, like centuries ago, fleeing from the West to Poland:
(Tsarfat = Jewish name of France):

https://www.facebook.com/yiddele.memory ... nref=story

Yiddele Memory wrote: Visiting my first apartments in Warsaw (considering leaving antisemite Tsarfat)

Severyn Ashkenazy, Holocaust survivor from Tarnopol, claims: "Poland is the safest place in Europe for Jews today" (23.09.2014):

http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/ar ... jews_today

I survived the Holocaust in a sub-cellar in Tarnopol (Ternopil), a city now located in western Ukraine that once had a thriving Jewish as well as Polish population.

Before coming to the U.S., I grew up after the war in France when philo-Semites like Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Pierre Mendès France, the country’s second Jewish prime minister, were luminaries.

Jewish origins have been an important part of that nation’s genius from Montaigne to composers as different as Giacomo Meyerbeer and Jacques Offenbach; to painter Camille Pissarro; to the inventor of sociology Emile Durkheim; to the writer Marcel Proust; to the philosopher Henri Bergson; to the actor Sarah Bernhardt; to the movie superstar Jean-Pierre Aumont; to the groundbreaking writer Georges Perec; to the multitalented Serge Gainsbourg … to mention only a few.

Today I am under the impression that France has forgotten about its Jewish cultural roots. The televised events from the streets of Paris and Marseilles fill me with sadness and consternation.

In the middle of July 2014, thousands of Muslims, along with anti-Semitic French Catholic demonstrators, walked through the center of Paris shouting “death to the Jews”. They burned cars, vandalized Jewish stores and, as reported by the press, a number of them, armed with knives, threw stones and bottles at the Isaac Abravanel Synagogue not far from the Bastille.

I read that the polls indicate that as many as 40 percent of French Jews hide Jewish symbols. It is not surprising, as so many incidents of anti-Semitism happen daily in France.

It is not better in other parts of Western Europe. A bomb was planted in the new synagogue in Wuppertal, Germany; swastikas were painted on stores in the Jewish quarter of Rome; Israeli soccer players were attacked in Austria. These are but a few examples of the daily realities faced by European Jews.

It is not just a one-time eruption of anti-Semitism by Muslim immigrants caused by the actions of Israel in the Gaza Strip. The hatred of Jews in Western Europe has been growing for many years. More and more, it is expressed by elites and the educated middle class. (...)

[michael mills]

I find it difficult to believe that substantial numbers of Jews are moving from Western Europe to live in Poland, it just seems so implausible. I might be convinced by hard data showing that such a movement is in fact taking place, ie not just the experience of a single person.

The general trend is for people to move from Eastern Europe to the wealthier West, eg the large numbers of Polish tradesmen who went to work in Britain. (When I visited Ireland in 2010, I saw Polish shops there).

France has the largest Jewish community in Europe, and it is fully integrated into French society, generally at the middle-class or upper middle-class level. I doubt that they would have any desire to leave France to move to Poland, despite the over-hyped attacks on Jews, the frequency of which has been greatly exaggerated.