Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War

Discussions on the Holocaust and 20th Century War Crimes. Note that Holocaust denial is not allowed. Hosted by David Thompson.
Post Reply
michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

Polish-Jewish Relations during the Second World War

#1

Post by michael mills » 28 Jan 2005, 23:26

The following excerpts are from the book "Poland, 1918-1945: An Interpretive and Documentary Histroy of the Second Republic", by Peter D Stachura, Professor of Modern European History and Director of the Centre for Research in Polish History at the University of Stirling.

The first excerpt concerns Jewish collaboration with the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland in 1939. It was that collaboration that confirmed the image of "Jewish Bolshevism" and thereby created the stimulus for the massacre of the Jewish population after the German invasion of those territories in 1941.

Page 136 (all omissions in the text marked by ...... are by Stachura):
Document 102

Accounts of the reaction of the Jewish population of the Eastern Provinces to the arrival of the Red Army, September 1939:

'When the Bolsheviks entered Polish territory, they were very mistrustful of the Polish population, but fully trusted the Jews. The more influential Poles and those who before the war had held important positions were deported to Russia, while all offices were given mostly to Jews.......As soon as the Russians arrived, the Jews had shown their contempt for the Poles and often humiliated them. The coming of the Bolsheviks was greeted by the Jews with great joy. Now they felt proud and secure....and were condescending and arrogant toward the Poles....There were many Jews who took every opportunity to tell the Poles, with special pleasure, that their time was over, that now nothing depended on them, and that they had to obey the Soviet authority.'

'The Red Army entered Wilno on 19 September to an enthusiastic welcome by the Jewish residents, in sharp contrast to the Polish population's.........Particular ardour was displayed by leftist groups and their youthful members, who converged on the Red Army tank columns bearing sincere greetings and flowers.......Someone shouted, "Long live the Soviet Government!", and everyone cheered. You could harly find a Gentile in that crowd.'

'When the Jews of Kowel were informed that the Red Army was approaching the town, they celebrated all night. When the Red Army actually entered, the Jews greeted it with indescribable enthusiasm.'

'In Ciechanowiec, a band of Jewish Communists erected a triumphal arch bedecked with posters bearing general greetings and messages such as "Long live the Soviet regime".'

'In Bialystok, the Red Army marched into a city decorated with red flags......Jewish youths embraced Russian soldiers with great enthusiasm.....Orthodox Jews packed the synangogues and prayed with renewed fervour.'

Source: Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, Undergound Archive of the Warsaw Ghetto; and the Polish Educational Foundation in North America, The Story of Two Shtetls, Bransk and Ejszyszki (Toronto: 1998), Part Two, pp. 183-4
Here is what Stachura himself says, in his comments:

Page 131 (emphases are by me):
Poland was unique among the countries overrun by the two totalitarian powers in that she did not furnish any quislings or anything that came close to the relatively large-scale, systematic colaboration so often found elsewhere. The only noteworthy exception came as regards the Soviet invasion, which was facilitated by the warm welcome accorded the Red Army by substantial sections of the non-Polish population in the Eastern Provinces, especially by many Jews. Their relief at not falling into the hands of the anti-Semitic Germans is understandable, but that was not the most important reason for their welcoming response. These Jews had felt, wrongly, that they had been persecuted viciously by the Polish State before the war and now took the utmost pleasure in seeing it collapse. The empirical evidence for this interpretation is incontrovertible.

At the same time, while some lder Jews and the small percentage of Jews in that part of Poland which had been assimilated looked on with disquiet at, or, more likely, tacit approval of, the Soviets' presence, ypounger Jews, who were either committed Communists or had nurtured a sympathetic affinity with the ideology, regarded the invading Red Army as liberators. They saw an unprecedented opportuniy to wreak revenge on the Poles. Consequently, they became zealous collaborators with the Soviet security apparatus and administration, eager to participate fully in the campaign that was unleashed to effectively 'de-polonise' the Eastern Provinces. This meant, in practice, that this substantial Jewish element became conspicuous in the NKVD-directed terror regime that prevailed for the duration of this first period of Soviet Occupation. Ethnic Poles were the primary target group, though much smaller numbers of Ukrainians, Byelorussians and even some Jews also suffered.

The most striking features of the Red terror was[sic! ] analogous to the pattern in Nazi-occupied Poland: the mass murder of Polish 'bourgeois class enemies', including army officers, clergy, civil servants and professionals of all kinds, the descration and looting of churches, confiscation without compensation of property, and mass deportation (some 1.7 million) in the most inhumane manner imaginable to the Gulag: barely a third of them survived. Soviet law, bureaucracy, schooling and other facets of everyday life were firmly established. In short, the corollary of 'de-polonisation' was the almost total bolshevisation of the Eastern Provinces. It is little wonder that when the Germans arrived in summer 1941, some Poles, in their ignorance of what lay ahead, were quietly grateful that the 'socialist paradise' had departed with the retreating Bolsheviks.

User avatar
Benoit Douville
Member
Posts: 3184
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 02:13
Location: Montréal

#2

Post by Benoit Douville » 29 Jan 2005, 20:29

The Polish-Jews relation have always been tough in poland, even today and you wonder why so many Jews decided to emigrate to Poland, I know that they were persecuted in Western Europe and the birth of towns and the development of commodity money relations favored the settlement by Jews in Poland but still why the Jews choose Poland a Catholic country. The text that you posted concerning the Jews collaboration with the Red Army and also the Jedwabne tragedy of July 1941 is a proof of the tough relation between the Jews and the Poles.

Regards


michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

#3

Post by michael mills » 30 Jan 2005, 00:35

Here is Stachura's assessment of the relationship between Poles and Jews at the time of the resurrection of the Polish state in 1918 and in the inter-war years, which set the background for the conflict between Poles and Jews during the Second World War leading to the radical elimination of the Jewish population which, although implemented by the German occupiers, was the inevitable consequence of that conflict.

Pages 84-89 (emphases are by me):
First, they [the Jews] were overwhelmingly unassimilated: at most, only about 8 percent spoke and regarded themselves as 'Polish', while the rest keptthemselves apart from Polish society as much as possible and spoke Yiddish or, much less often, Hebrew. Second, they were urban-based,with major cities such as Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Wilno and Lwow having between 25 and 40 percent of their inhabitants Jewish, while in small towns (Shtetlekh), especially those in the Eastern Provinces, the percentage could be as high as 90. Third, their economic activity was concentrated in the small artisan trades, finance, banking and insurance, and in some liberal professions, notably medicine, publishing and the law. Fourth, they enjoyed, as an overall average, a higher per capita income and thus paid proportionately more taxes than ethnic Poles. Finally, and perhaps most important of all, they had opposed through a well-organised lobby at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 the re-creation of an independent Polish state. When that endeavour failed, they were instrumental in having the Minorities' Treaty drawn up as a guarantee of legal and constitutional rights with particular reference to Jews and imposed on Poland as a mandatory part of the peace settlement for her.

A large majority of Jews who subsequently and unwillingly found themselves in the Polish State after 1919 maintained a hostile or at best a negligent, apathetic attitude thereafter. Thus, degrees of Jewish anti-Polonism combined with a long-established Polish anti-Semitism, intensified by Endek agitation and certain developments involving Jewish opposition to Polish independence and Jewish relations with the German occupation authorities in Poland in 1914-18, to constitute an unpromising basis for longer-term relations. Already at the end of the First World War, therefore, both sides tended to perniciously regard the other as alien, antagonistic and even inferior.

These attitudes were strengthened, unfortunately, by several developments in the early postwar years. Poles resented reports that appeared in the international press about alleged pogroms, such as those reputed to have taken place in Lwow in November 1918 and Pinsk in April 1919. When it emerged from reliable sources, which included American officials in Warsaw and a team of investigators led by Henry Morgenthau (1891-1967), that virtually all these reports were exaggerated, distorted or simply fabricated, Polish anger at the Jews responsible seemed to be justified. There was, as a corollary, a widespread perception among Poles that many Jews, especially those in the Eastern Provinces, welcomed and in some cases actively supported the advance of the Bolsheviks into Poland in 1920, thus reinforcing Polish fears about Jewish disloyalty.

It was also unhelpful, to say the least, that the pro-Soviet Communist Workers' Party of Poland was attracting, especially to its political and ideological leadership cadres, a substantial Jewish following. The influx into Poland by 1921 of some 600,000 Jews - 'Litvaks' - from Russia who had no affinity whatsoever with Poland and her traditions, exacerbated the situation.

[My comment: Stachura gives the impression that those 600,000 Jews came to Poland. In fact, Poland came to them. They were inhabitants of Russian Provinces such as Polesie, Volhynia and Podolia that had not formed part of Congress Poland before the First World War, but were annexed by Poland in 1921.]

Furthermore, the Bloc of National Minorities, which was created largely by the efforts of an arch-critic of the Polish State, the General Zionist leader Yitshak Gruenbaum (1879-1960), to contest the national elections in late 1922, was seen as an affront by ethnic Polish opinion, especially on the Right. When Gabriel Narutowicz was elected President of Poland shortly afterwards, thanks to the bloc's votes tipping the balance, the outrage on the Right threatened to plunge Poland into a civil war. The Jews were widely blamed for once again stirring up trouble.

That the history of Polish-Jewish relations was not uniformly negative was underlind by the pioneering agreement (Ugoda) reached in July 1925 between the government of Wladyslaw Grabski and leading representatives of the Jewish Parliamentary Club, including Leon Reich (1874-1929) and Ozjasz Thon (1870-1936). Both sides had their own particular reasons for trying to put past differences behind them and forge a more fruitful understanding for the future. As the country settled down after the manifold traumas of the early postwar era, the government, having introduced significant financial reforms in 1924, was eager to attract the goodwill of potential financial investors abroad, particularly from Jewish business circles in the United States, and sought to demonstrate, therefore, that it was indeed possible to put Polish-Jewish relations on a more harmonious footing. For their part, the Jewish leaders in Poland could appreciate the many advantages for their community as a whole which might follow such an agreement.

Concessions to Jews under the Ugoda included: Jewish businesses and workshops observing Saturday as the sabbath were to be allowed to operate for longer hours on Sundays, more favourable tax and credit facilities were to be made available, more equitable representation for Jews in governmental financial and other agencies as well as in the junior officer ranks of the army, goovernment help to facilitate Jewish emigration to Palestine, attendance of Jews at religious services in schools and the army was to be easier, and various political restrictions on Jews dating from the partitionist era were to be scrapped.

Certain influential circles in government doubted the value of this agreement and gave it only lukewarm backing, but it was principally sabotaged before long by the Jews themselves, specifically by those such as Gruenbaum who had been vehemently opposed to talking to the government in the first place and who denounced the agreement as a cynical Polish ploy and for not going far enough, anyway. By the end of the year, the Ugoda was effectively a dead letter, and thus the most encouraging opportunity for a Polish-Jewish rapprochement was missed. It was never to reappear in the lifetime of the Second Republic, despite the advent to pwer in 1926 of the philo-semitic Pilsudski and the fulsome support given at first to the Sanacja regime by the Jewish community. Although the regime acceded to Jewish demands for the reorganisation of their local self-governing bodies, the legal recognition of Orthodox religious schools (cheder) (which led to the Agudath Yisrael joining the governments's BBWR [ = Non-Party Bloc for Co-operation with the Government] organisation), and the abolition of discriminatory legislation dating from the tsarist era, relations soon deteriorated: the Jews wanted more concessions, which Pilsudski was unwilling to give because he remained unconvinced of the Jews' loyalty to the state.

The failure of the Ugoda and the Jewish-Pilsudski relationship should not disguise the fact, which is conveniently ovelooked by critics of the Second Republic, that the Jews enjoyed not only the normal protection afforded by the laws and the constitution, but also far-reaching freedoms to express themselves in many important sectors of their daily lives. They had many of their own cultural and academic organisations, an extensive press publishing numerous daily and weekly newspapers and peridoicals in Polish, Yiddish and Hebrew throughout the country, and Jewish schools, charities, hospitals, cemeteries, orphanages, senior citizens' residential homes, and sports clubs. Jews worshipped in thousands of synagogues, had their own rabbinical colleges, political parties, parliamentary and Senate deputies, and occupied a substantial, if, from the early 1930's, declining number of places at university and other institutes of higher education; even so, there remained until the introduction in many universities in the mid- to late 1930s of the numerus clausus and 'ghetto bench', a disproportioantely high number of Jewish students. Assimilated Jews were able to make important and frequently distiguished contributions in their chosen field of expertise, whether in the economy, the arts, sciences, literature and professions. Particular pieces of legislation which aroused Jewish opposition, such as the Sunday Rest Law (1919) and a Bill to outlaw the ritual slaughter of animals (1937), either were implemented in a lax and unthreatening fashion or they failed to reach the statute book altogether. In short, far from suffering murderous discrimination and persecution, as is so often claimed, the Jews of Poland were allowed to develop into the most creative, dynamic and innovative Jewish community in the whole of interwar Europe.

This assertion is not to deny, of course, that anti-Semitism existed in Poland, just as it did in every other European country. Unlike Nazi Germany, Hungary, Fascist Italy and Romania, however, Poland never enacted any specific anti-Jewish legislation, despite the pressures arising from the Depression and the rise of an Endek-inspired Polish nationalism in the late 1930s. Anti-Semitism in Poland was invariably of a non-violent type, and based, not on racism, but on traditional Christian attitudes, economic and cultural concerns as, for example, August Cardinal Hlond (1881-1948) pointed out in a widely circulated pastoral letter he issued in 1936. He justifiably condemned those Jews who and those Jewish organisations which promoted atheism, pornography, prostitution, white slavery, freemasonry, usury and Bolshevism. A political dimension to anti-Semitism was indeed furnished by the Endecja and its allies, but it should not be forgotten that many Poles and Polish parties and organisations opposed anti-Semitism in any form. They included the radical left-wing parties, the Democratic Party, the radical wing of the Peasants' Party, some trade unions and many academics and members of the liberal intelligentsia.

Many Jews became impoverished during the Depression, it is true, but so also did millions of Poles, who could not look to international aid of the sort provided by Jewish relief agencies from the United States. On the other hand, the economic crisis threw into sharper focus some of the disadvantages and restrictions that the Jews did undoubtedly suffer, including their ineligibility for public employment benefits and their heavy tax burden. They were also virtually excluded from employment in the civil service, state-owned industry, the army (except the medical and legal branches), the school-teaching profession and the administration of public transport; moreover, in the late 1930s, they were increasingly denied entry to professional organisations. The situation convinced some Jews, particularly the Revisionist Zionists led by Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), that their future lay in a setting-up, with the help of the Polish Government, of a Jewish state in Palestine. But discussions about a scheme of mass voluntary emigration came to nothing.

For more and more Poles, the brutalising impact of the Depression exposed acutely their resentment of the Jews and the anti-Polish attitudes expressed by many of them. Large parts of the Jewish press, as well as many Jewish political leaders and Jewish groups, became outspokenly critical of Poland. They whined about, and usually exaggerated their problems, which they attributed to Poles, and ridiculed the state, patriotism and the cherished beliefs, traditions and values of Poles, who reacted to this onslaught with understandable unease and resentment.

It is difficult to take due account of all the pertinent and complex developments which shaped the Polish-Jewish symbiosis before 1939 and reach a conclusion acceptable to all. However, it is as clear as anything can be that the overall situation of the Jews was far more propitious than is usually credited. Anti-Semitism existed, but it was not nearly as widespread, nor as profound and significant, as has so frequently been claimed. Both Poles and Jews were caught up in a range of circumstances which was bound to create difficulties for their relationship, particularly as the Polish State was handicapped in so many diverse ways. It may not have fulfilled all its legal and constitutional obligations, but it would only be fair to say that it did as best it could. The same, however, cannot be said of the Jews as a whole. Far too many of them were either stubbornly hostile or sullenly apathetic towards the republic.

Like the German and Ukrainian minorities, the Jews incessantly demanded recognition and fulfilment of their rights and complained bitterly and often about what they did not have, when they should have been devoting at least as much time and energy to thinking about and actually performing their duties and responsibilities as citizens. That they were not compelled to do so was perhaps a failing of the state, for there is much evidence to suggest that it too often adopted a liberal, patient and flexible attitude towards these intransigent minorities when a trougher approach was called for. But even Pilsudski, whose attitude to the minorities was influenced above all by the demand that they show loyalty to the state, declined to pursue a suitably aggressive course of action when they did not. Consequently, those who have criticised Polish policy for not, as a solution to the minorities issue, ceding territory, or granting autonomy, federalism, or more assitance to their cultural aspirations, and so on, miss the point entirely.

David Thompson
Forum Staff
Posts: 23722
Joined: 20 Jul 2002, 20:52
Location: USA

#4

Post by David Thompson » 30 Jan 2005, 01:24

Michael -- Does Stachura footnote the quoted portion of the text, or is it just a rant?

michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

#5

Post by michael mills » 30 Jan 2005, 04:44

Stachura's book is dicvided into a number of thematic sections:

1. Independence regained.
2. Consolidation.
3. Society and the economy.
4. Politics.
5. The ethnic minorities.
6. Culture and education.
7. Foreign policy.
8. Occupation and resistance.
9. The Jewish Holocaust and the Poles.
10. Defeat in victory.

Each section consists of two parts, a number of extracts from documents, and an introduction by Stachura commenting on the material contained in the documents.

The documents are all fully sourced. Stachura's comments are not footnoted, since they are based on the documents, and represent his interpretation.

I do not think comments on documents made by the Professor of Modern History and Director of the Centre for Research in Polish History at the University of Stirling in the United Kingdom can fairly be written off as a "rant", even if one disagrees with his interpretation.

Anyone who disagrees with Professor Stachura's view of the relations between Jews and Poles is free to offer material supporting different views. I myself do not agree entirely with Professor Stachura's approach, since it obviously rests on a Polish nationalist position.

His book is published by Routledge, 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York.

Although I do not now much about the publishing firm Routledge, I strongly doubt that it is some sort of fringe, neo-Nazi outfit.

User avatar
Benoit Douville
Member
Posts: 3184
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 02:13
Location: Montréal

#6

Post by Benoit Douville » 30 Jan 2005, 05:52

Here is a site concerning the history of the Polish-Jews relations but unfortunately it stop in 1939.

http://polishjews.org/history.htm

Regards

walterkaschner
In memoriam
Posts: 1588
Joined: 13 Mar 2002, 02:17
Location: Houston, Texas

#7

Post by walterkaschner » 30 Jan 2005, 07:06

Here is a somewhat different, and perhaps more balanced view of the relationship between Poles and Jews during the inter-war years, taken from M. B. Biskupski, History of Poland (Greenwood Press, 2000) at 85-7
Perhaps the most insoluble, and doubtless the most tragic, minority problem of interwar Poland was that of the Jews. The Jews of the Second Republic were the remnant of the huge Jewish community of the Commonwealth, who constituted at one time as much as 80 percent of all the world's Jewry. In the reborn state, the Jews accounted for between 8 and 10 percent of the population. [footnote omitted] Although there had been a considerable wave of adoption of Polish culture since the late nineteenth century, the vast majority of Polish Jews were not culturally assimilated. They had a highly characteristic distribution pattern: overwhelmingly urban, they were heavily concentrated in commerce and industry as well as the liberal professions, and virtually invisible in agriculture, thus the inverse of the majority population. In addition, the Jews were disproportionately concentrated in the cities of central and eastern Poland; in the centers of the eastern borderlands, such as Pinsk, Grodno, and Brzesc, they were the majority of the population.

Polish-Jewish relations began to show signs of serious deterioration in the late nineteenth century when nationalism began to spread among the Poles along with a new socioeconomic profile. This placed the Jews in an impossible position. For four generations there had been no Poland, and the Jews had had to accommodate themselves to new masters, the partitioning powers. Throughout the long nineteenth century there was no Poland for the Jews to assimilate to, just a persecuted and dangerous patriotic movement which was of dubious attraction. Hence, over the decades, some Jews retained their loyalty to a lost Poland, but the majority Russified or Germanized or tried to be left alone. To the Jews, this was a matter of survival, especially in ferociously anti-Semitic Russia; to the Poles, it was a failure to be patriotic. Most Jews combined a profound sentimental attachment to their ancestral Polish homeland, without the patriotic loyalty to a Polish state. When Poland was reborn, the Poles could exult in the re-creation of their country, but what did it mean for the Jews? Many Jews had joined Polish political movements, especially Pilsudski's Polish Socialist Party, but none were members of Dmowski's endecja, which was more powerful among ethnic Poles. Far more were part of the Russian Marxist movement which, being without Polish or Russian patriotism, was a safe haven for Jews. Although there was a sentimental basis of support for Poland among the Jews, inevitable after more than six centuries of residence in the country, to most Poles, the failure of the Jews to react like Poles to independence rendered them suspect. During the Polish-Russian War, much of which was fought over the most heavily Jewish areas of Poland, the fact that the Jews usually adopted a neutral position between Polish and Bolshevik armies enraged the Poles who reacted with outbursts of violence and began to regard all Jews as secret Communists. Anti-Semitic outbursts at Wilno, Lwów and Pifisk made many Jews associate Polish rule with brutal antiSemitism.

In the Second Republic, increasingly under endecjainfluence, the Jews were triply targeted: a distinct minority and therefore an element of weakness to the Dmowskiite worldview, competitors for control of the modern portions of the economy (i.e., commerce and industry), and assumed sympathizers with the hated enemy to the east, the Soviet Union. The fact that perhaps half of the membership of the Polish Communist party, and even more of the leadership, was contributed by a Jewish minority of 10 percent unfortunately only enforced this suspicion.

It appears that many Polish Jews saw in Communism an ideology of universal brotherhood, and looked upon the Communist party as an instrument of transplanting to their country the highly idealized Soviet pattern. In a country as anti-Russian and anti-Communist as prewar Poland, the pro-Communist sentiments of many Jews were eagerly exploited by the native anti-Semites, who tended to identify Jewishness with Communism. [footnote omitted]

As the Polish economy deteriorated during the Great Depression and the rise of Hitlerand the collapse of the League of Nations in the 1930s underscored the fragility of Polish security, Polish society became increasingly concerned about unity and safety. Thus the Jewish situation deteriorated, especially after Pilsudski's death in 1935. Although Poland never passed anti-Semitic legislation, discrimination against Jews was widespread in administrative practice, including restriction to institutions of higher learning. Public outbursts of anti-Semitism, including economic boycotts and occasional street violence, were quite frequent in the late 1930s. It was a sad last chapter in the ancient tradition of Polish-Jewish cohabitation in the lands of the old Commonwealth.
I know nothing of the author except that he is a Professor of History at a rather obscure college in upstate New York, but would guess from his name that he is of Polish ancestry.

Regards, Kaschner

szopen
Member
Posts: 814
Joined: 21 May 2004, 16:31
Location: poznan, poland

#8

Post by szopen » 30 Jan 2005, 12:00

Benoit Douville wrote:The Polish-Jews relation have always been tough in poland, even today and you wonder why so many Jews decided to emigrate to Poland, I know that they were persecuted in Western Europe and the birth of towns and the development of commodity money relations favored the settlement by Jews in Poland but still why the Jews choose Poland a Catholic country.
The problem with your thesis is that for most of Jewish hsitory in Poland they enjoyed far more liberties than in most of other countries in Europe. They were not required to wear any specific marks, which was noted with disgust by guests to Poland; they were under protection of law; they had their own institutions; many were allowed to gentry. That's why your question "why Poland" can be quite simply answered by Jews themselves, who used to say "it's better to live on dry bread in Poland than in luxuries elsewhere".

The problems arised in XVII century, after the Deluge, and even more during XIX century for the reasons painted by quoted authors. It's quite strange that they not mention accidents like in Grodno, where communist militia, mostly Jewish, was shooting to Polish army.

OTOH we can't forget great many of Jewish-Polish patriots, who were giving their blood in every Polish uprising. Jewish graves are next to Catholic crosses in graves at Monte Cassino. If I had a single Jew amongst my ancestors i would be as damn proud of him as of any of others.

michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

#9

Post by michael mills » 30 Jan 2005, 23:48

Mr Kaschner,

Thanks for posting the excerpt from Biskupski's book. That is the sort of exchange of views that I like to encourage.

In my view, Stachura, writing from what appears to be a Polish nationalist viewpoint, tends to downplay the degree of anti-Jewish discrimination in Poland, and Biskupski provindes a useful corrective. For example, while both Stachura and Biskupski point out that there was no official anti-Jewish legislation in Poland, Biskupski balances that apparent benevolent stance by pointing to the fact of widespread unofficial discrimination, boycotts and some violence, that was winked at by the Government, in a way that Stachura does not.
In the Second Republic, increasingly under endecjainfluence, the Jews were triply targeted: a distinct minority and therefore an element of weakness to the Dmowskiite worldview, competitors for control of the modern portions of the economy (i.e., commerce and industry), and assumed sympathizers with the hated enemy to the east, the Soviet Union. The fact that perhaps half of the membership of the Polish Communist party, and even more of the leadership, was contributed by a Jewish minority of 10 percent unfortunately only enforced this suspicion.
The above passage contains an error of historical interpretation, in that it links the views of Dmowski, founder of Endecja, to the supposed sympathy of Jews for the Soviet Union.

Dmowski was primarily anti-German and pro-Russian. Before the First World War, he had promoted the idea of Poland remaining linked to the Russian Empire as an autonomous kingdom with the Tsar' as its monarch, and expanding to incorporate the Austrian provinces of Galicia and Silesia and all German territory east of the Oder.

Even after the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, Dmowski remained primarily pro-Russian, although as a Catholic and a nationalist he never sympathised with Communism. For Dmowski, the Soviet Union was never the "hated enemy in the East" (that was the Pilsudskiite view), but rather a potential ally against Germany.

Dmowski was strongly anti-Jewish because he regarded the Jews of Poland as fundamentally pro-German and hostile to the Polish state. That view was reinforced during the First World War, when the Jews of Russian Poland welcomed the German occupation, preferring it to the former Tsarist rule which had been oppressive toward Jews.

Even after the National Socialist assumption of power in Germany, Dmowski continued to regard the Jews of Poland as pro-German and anti-Polish. In his mind the Jews were opposed to National Socialism, not to Germany itself, and once Hitler fell from power the Jews of Poland would revert to their normal pro-German attitude and would work for Germany against Poland.

Dmowski's view of the Jews as pro-German may seem strange to us today, given our knowledge of the vast massacre of Polish Jewry perpetrated by the German occupiers (Dmowski himself died on 2 January 1939, so he never witnessed it), but it was quite rational at the time in terms of his ideology, and was based on reality.

walterkaschner
In memoriam
Posts: 1588
Joined: 13 Mar 2002, 02:17
Location: Houston, Texas

#10

Post by walterkaschner » 31 Jan 2005, 00:58

Here is yet another view, written by a Professor at Boston University, apparently of Polish extraction, which tends in part, to confirm that of Szopen above, and also suggests an additional basis for the increase in anti-Semitism in Poland in the 1930s:
Various ethnic groups played a crucial part in the national [Polish] economy. In 1931, for example, the Jews, who by that time constituted slightly over 10 percent of the total population, made up 58.7 percent of those engaged in commerce and 21.3 percent of persons in industry. They also figured prominently in the liberal professions, with nearly half of the doctors and lawyers of Jewish extraction. This resulted in a sharp competition with the non-Jewish Polish intelligentsia and the evolving middle class. Germans also constituted a prosperous group in both agriculture and industry. The social structure of the new state was thus a source of tension throughout the years preceding World War II.

One of the main problems of the interwar period was the spread of anti-Semitism, a phenomenon rooted apparently in the economic competition between the native, non-Jewish middle class and the Jews. According to Erich Goldhagen, a Jewish-American historian, this type of anti-Semitism was of an "objective" variety: it represented mainly a manifestation of hostility "born of a genuine conflict of interests between the Jews and their host people," mainly merchants, traders, artisans, as well as professional people, involved in fierce competition with corresponding groups among the Jewish population. [Footnote omitted.]

During the interwar period Poland had the highest percentage of Jewish population of any country in the world, and "subjective," ideological anti-Semitism was not lacking. But neither the intensity nor the scope of the Polish anti-Semitic movement ever reached the proportions of similar trends in neighboring countries, such as Romania (with its large Iron Guard Fascist party) or Hungary (with its Arrow Cross), where there were far fewer Jews. Polish Fascist groups belonged to the lunatic fringe and never amounted to much. The sporadic outbursts of anti-Semitism were repressed by the government. Until their extermination by Hitler, the Jews of Poland played a considerable role in all fields of activity. They occupied numerous high positions not only in the economic, professional, and scholarly fields, but also in the state administration (including the cabinet post of minister of industry and trade, held by Henryk Floyar Reichman) and in the army, where there were a few generals. ( Bernard Mond was commander of the Cracow military district, and Jakub Krzemiński held several high military and civilian posts.) Jews were prominent in the artistic and literary world ( Julian Tuwim, Antoni Slonimski, Józef Wittlin, and Boleslaw Lesmian are examples), some of them enjoying high official favors, including membership in the Academy of Literature. A flourishing center of Judaic studies was located at Wilno until World War II. Highly placed representatives of world Jewish organizations often praised the liberal policies of the Polish government with regard to Jews.[ Footnote 4.] When Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933, many Jews sought shelter in Poland. Jews continued to play influential roles in Poland until the 1930s, when the situation began to change for the worse.
______________________________

Footnote 4. Describing a conference of the Federation of Polish Jews in Great Britain, held in July 1933 in London, with the objective of assessing the situation that had arisen in Germany, a Jewish paper reported a speech by its president, Mr. Nahum Sokolow, who said: "The Polish Republic was as liberal and hospitable as it was possible to be in the present circumstances, and he would like to give expression on that occasion to the appreciation of the Jewish people of the attitude of the Polish government to the Jews.... The Chief Rabbi [of Britain] said that for centuries Poland had no more loyal friend than the Jews.... And the reason was not far to seek" ( "Federation of Polish Jews, Well-attended Conference," The Jewish Chronicle [ London], July 21, 1933. p. 12).
M. K. Dziewanowski, Poland in the Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 1977) at 88-9.

Mr. Mills emphasized the following statement in the excerpt from Professor Stachura's book which he kindly provided:
Finally, and perhaps most important of all, they [the Jews] had opposed through a well-organised lobby at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 the re-creation of an independent Polish state.
Although the Jews had a substantial representation at the Paris Peace Conference ("Comité des Délégations Juives auprès de la Conférence de la Paix" or Committee of Jewish Delegations to the Peace Conference), I'm not sure that it was all that well organized in terms of political goals, given the extreme tensions between the Zionists and the Diaspora nationalists. Moreover, I have some serious doubts as to the accuracy of that statement as it regards the opposition of the Jewish Committee to the creation of an independent Polish state. The latter was specifically one of Wilson's Fourteen Points, and I find it hard to believe that the Jewish lobby spent any significant amount of what political capital it had in trying to overturn what was obviously a basic and crucial goal of the Americans and the French as well. My understanding has been that thr principal objectives of the Jewish Committee were to obtain support for a Jewish State in Palestine and to oblige Poland to agree to bind itself to a Minority Treaty which would guarantee the Jewish minority certain specific rights.

I can find no support for Professor Stachura's point in Margret MacMillan's recent Paris: 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (Random House 2003, paperback ed.) and I have mislaid and can't readily find my copy of David Vital's A People Apart which I acquired two or three years ago based on Mr. Mill's recommendation, and which as I recall covers the Jewish Committee's activities at the Peace Conference in greater detail. But I'll keep looking when I find the time.

Regards, Kaschner

User avatar
Benoit Douville
Member
Posts: 3184
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 02:13
Location: Montréal

#11

Post by Benoit Douville » 31 Jan 2005, 02:31

Szopen,

I agree with all you have said and on many occasion Jewish and Poles were fighting together. However, you can't deny the fact that antisemitism have existed and still exist in Poland and the relation between the Jews and the Poles is tough, I have talked with several Poles who told me that they cannot support the presence of the Jews when I was in your beautiful country. Other Poles told me also that things are beginning to change in Poland since the last 10 years and the relation between Poles and Jews are starting to get better and let's hope so.

Regards

michael mills
Member
Posts: 8999
Joined: 11 Mar 2002, 13:42
Location: Sydney, Australia

#12

Post by michael mills » 01 Feb 2005, 08:12

Mr Kaschner,

Thank you for your excerpt from the work of Professor Dziewanowski, which provides additional material for the debate.

On careful reading of that excerpt, I feel that it generally agrees with the point made by Professor Stachura, ie that the situation of the Jews in interwar Poland was far better than has often been portrayed.

Stachura goes further than Dziewanowski in trenchantly castigating the Jewish leaders for not recognizing the above fact, and for opposing the Polish Government. He even uses the word “whine”, which I highlighted to draw attention to this startling, almost Irvingesque, tone employed by a senior academic in the United Kingdom.

With regard to Stachura’s claim that the Jewish Establishment opposed the independence of Poland at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, I would refer you to the essay :Lucien Wolf and the Making of Poland: Paris 1919”, by Eugene C Black, in the book “From Shtetl to Socialism : Studies from Polin” , edited by Antony Polonsky ( London ; Washington : Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993).

At the Paris Peace Conference there was a bitter conflict between the Polish delegation, led by the nationalist Dmowski and the moderate Paderewski, and the Jewish delegation, dominated by Zionists and Nationalists from East Europe and led by Menachem Ussishkin, over the latter’s demand for what amounted to extra-territorial status in the new East European states, including Poland.

The essay by Black describes the efforts of Lucien Wolf, the leader of Anglo-Jewry, to achieve a compromise between Polish and Jewish nationalists.

The following excerpts from the essay reveal moves by Jewish leaders during the First World War and at the Paris Peace Conference that could be interpreted by Polish nationalists as running counter to their aim of resurrecting an independent Polish state. Emphases are mine.

Page 273:
Any Jewish agenda also had, in the first instance, to accommodate itself to great power wants and needs. The defeat of both Germany and Russia, not to mention the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, made possible the reconstruction of Poland. While Poland could be resurrected given this power vacuum, Polish survival depended upon Poland either coming to terms with its more powerful neighbours or somehow developing the capacity to maintain its independence. Polish nationalists sought the frontiers of 1772. So vast an appetite – reaching well into overwhelmingly German provinces in the north and west, White Russian and Lithuanian areas around Wilno, and White Russian and Ukrainian lands to the east and south-east – invited discontent, if not war, and squared ill with grand pronouncements about rights of national self-determination. Even in modified form, Poland would have to concede substantial minority guarantees before the nation could be reconstituted.
Making the resurrection of an independent Poland conditional on the grant of substantial rights to minorities, including the Jews, could easily be interpreted by Polish nationalists as an attempt to impede that resurrection.

Page 274:
When Russia granted ‘autonomous’ status to Poland [during the First World War], some 80 per cent of Russian Jewry, according to contemporary estimates, confronted ethnic Polish nationalism. Matters were bad enough under Russian overlordship, but Roman Dmowski’s Polish National Democratic Party, stridently anti-Semitic, asked the British and French governments to recognize it as the ‘government in exile’ of the Polish nation. Only those of the ‘Polish race’, contended the national Democrats, qualified for citizenship, and a ‘Pole’ had to prove that he had not been Jewish for three generations. Such a definition embarrassed the Foreign Office, now busily attempting to paint British policy in enlightened liberal terms. The national Democrats gave way and agreed to allow token ‘Jewish’ representation on the National Committee. That changed nothing. The National Democratic Party continued to pursue its publicly-avowed policy of ‘the forcible elimination or reduction of the Jewish population’, harassing Polish Jews and particularly preventing Jewish refugees and victims of the wartime ‘barbarous deportations’ from returning to Poland. Wolf’s Foreign Affairs Committee of the Anglo-Jewish Association, rebuffed on its resistance to Zionism, made Poland its principal European preoccupation by the summer of 1917. The Committee consulted ‘representative’ Polish Jews and began negotiations in London with representatives of the Polish Progressive Party and Polish State Council. Besides equal civil and political rights for Jews, the Anglo-Jewish Association sought guarantees for Jews as ‘a substantial nationality minority’ with cultural autonomy and proportionate political representation. Left politicians of liberal views on the Jewish question were a small minority. Dmowski’s Polish Nationalists, however, were another matter. Dmowski and Paderewski had failed to secure British support in 1915, at least in part thanks to Wolf’s well-orchestrated Conjoint Committee campaign in the London press, and the British government was moving closer to formal recognition. Lord Weardale discussed the problem with Balfour, at the request of the AJA, on 23 November 1917, and found the matter was still ‘under consideration’. That encouraged Lucien Wolf to have a long interview the following day with Lord Robert cecil. The Alliance Israelite took the same approach with the Quai d’Orsay. Keeping both the Petrograd Committee, composed principally of ‘moderate’ Jews seeking accommodation with the Russian government after the February Revolution, and the American Jewish Committee, created in 1905 to safeguard Jewish international interests, apprised, Wolf’s committee attempted to ward off British government recognition of Dmowski while securing government approval for a conference in some neutral country of representatives of Western Jewish communities and delegates from the progressive and Socialist parties in Poland.
The attempt by Jewish leaders to prevent British recognition of the Polish nationalist leader Dmowski in favour of Polish elements more favourable to the Jews could be construed from a Polish nationalist point of view as impeding the resurrection of an independent Poland.

Page 279:
Menachem Ussishkin, in particular, announced that the privileges of a separate Jewish nationality within the succession states was but the first step. Jewish Nationalism would ultimately federate all Jewish communities everywhere in the world in one Jewish nation, argued the ‘uncrowned King of Odessa’, with a claim to be admitted to the League of Nations on an equal footing with al other nations. He warned assimilating Jews that this Jewish Nationality ‘would set out to conquer them’. There were no French Jews, English Jews, or American Jews, ‘but only Jews in France, England or America, who eventually would have to join the universal Jewish Nationality’. The Americans, with Judge Julian Mack in the lead, argued that the Nationalists must be allowed their way regardless of how Western Jewry felt about their ideas, ‘even though we know they were mad and headed for self-destruction’.
It is easy to guess how Polish nationalists would interpret the ideology of the Eastern Jewish nationalists, as propounded by Ussishkin.

Note also the prescient comment by Judge Julian Mack that the Eastern Jews were mad and headed for destruction. The catastrophe that befell the Jews of Eastern Europe just over 20 years later proved Mack and his American Jewish colleagues right, although it would be difficult to find an American Jewish leader today who would admit that that catastrophe was largely the making of the Jewish nationalists like Ussishkin.

Page 285:
Baron Alexandre de Gunzburg sallied into Paris from Switzerland, having heard that Jewish delegations were in a state of disarray. The Baron shared the fears that Maxim Vinaver, one of the founders of the Russian Cadet party, also voiced to Wolf that dividing Jews among successor states with their unconstrained racial hatreds was a greater danger than having them under the rule of a greater Russia. Wolf demurred and reminded them in turn that should Kolchak and Denikin actually defeat the Bolsheviks, pogroms would be the order of the day.
Polish nationalists would no doubt interpret the views of Vinaver and Gunzburg as meaning that the Jews of Poland would prefer to be under the rule of a non-Tsarist, even Bolshevik, Russia rather than of an independent Poland.

Page 286:
By 17 June [1919], the Council of Five opted for the British formula on Minority appeals………………The next day, however, the Poles rejected the minority treaty ‘on the ground that it is an intolerable interference with the sovereign rights of Poland’………………..To recover the treaty, al influence had to be brought to bear on the Council to stand firm………...

.............................................The Council stood firm, although the Poles had brought their own delegation of Jews headed by Stanislas Natanson to plead the Polish nationalist case. The delegation was not heard, as it happened, until after the Council had reached its decision. The Council responded firmly to the Polish protest, ending ‘with what is virtually an ultimatum to Poland to sign it next Saturday when the main German Treaty will be signed’.
The above excerpts to my mind support Stachura’s contention that the Jewish Establishment did impede the movement toward an independent Polish state, making it dependent on satisfying their requirements for Jewish autonomy, and that through the machinations of Jewish leaders the Polish state was presented with a Diktat in regard to the question of minority rights.

Some of the footnotes to the essay are also interesting. For example, note 33 on pp. 292-293:
Sir Stuart Samuel had learned wisdom. At the Consistoire conference [at the headquarters of French Jewry], he had not opposed the Jewish Nationalists, but by this point he had shifted ‘to deprecate any Jewish political separatism in Poland’. Peace Conference Diary, 11 April [1919]. So had Headlam-Morley who, in uuter frustration, asked Wolf what Polish Jewish Nationalists actually wanted. When Wolf told him that Jewish extremists were as mad as Polish extremists and that there was nothing to choose between Dmowski and Ussishkin, Headlam-Morley said, ‘Well, they will all be murdered.’ Ibid, 14 April.
Headlam-Morley (a leading member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference) was spot on in his prediction that there would a future massacre of the Jews of Eastern Europe, and that the massacre would be caused by their own intransigence.

But who did Headlam-Morley think would murder the Jews?

Obviously not Hitler, who in April 1919 was an unknown corporal in the Bavarian Army, employed by his officers to spy on revolutionary elements in the ranks.

No, Headlam-Morley was predicting that Polish extremists would murder the Jews. And it was really only the German conquest of Poland in 1939 which prevented the murder being carried out by the Poles themselves, and placed that task in German hands.

walterkaschner
In memoriam
Posts: 1588
Joined: 13 Mar 2002, 02:17
Location: Houston, Texas

#13

Post by walterkaschner » 01 Feb 2005, 20:40

Mr. Mills, thank you for the very interesting exerpts from Eugene Black's essay, with which I had not previously been familiar. I hope that I may be able to locate a copy of Polonsky's collection of essays here in Houston, although the library resources to which I have ready access are somewhat lacking in that area.

But I can only submit that it would take a cast of mind bordering on paranoia to construe the position taken by some of the more radical Jewish representatives at the Paris Peace Conference as opposing the "re-creation of an independent Polish state", as Professor Stachura would have it. Of course if "independent" is interpreted as meaning free to abuse the Jewish minority at will, which may indeed be the way Dmowski and his wing viewed it, then I suppose Stachura may have a point. But radical and anti-Semitic as Dmowski presumably was, I can't believe that he was so irrational as to believe that the Allied Powers (and particularly Wilson and Lloyd George) would permit the new State of Poland, which after all was the child of their own creation and which ultimately embraced almost one-third of a non-Polish population, to exist without a firm and binding committment as to the fair treatment of its minority population - particularly in the face of Poland's open warfare with the Ukraine and in light of the fact that reports of Polish abuses of its minorities, and particularly Jews, were already flowing in in almost tsunami proportions during the their deliberations in Paris.

Here is a discussion of the situation from the American point of view, which strikes me - particularly the Jadwin and Johnson report - as probably a pretty fair analysis of the situation:
Much of the fighting on Poland's eastern frontiers in the early month of 1919 was partizan warfare. The participants were sometimes mobs, sometimes contingents of armed men, without uniforms and undisciplined. Civil authority did not exist, and hoodlums and criminals let loose from the jails carried on their depredations without restraint. The regions from Vilna to Lemberg, where the worst disorders occurred, contain the greatest concentration of Jews in Poland outside of Warsaw, and it was the Jewish corn-munities which suffered most. Such was the case at Lemberg in November, 1918, during the struggle for the town between mobs of Polish and Ukrainian sympathizers; in Vilna and Pinsk in April, during fighting of like character between Poles and Bolsheviks; and in Minsk under similar circumstances a few months later. Accounts of these affairs quickly spread abroad, greatly exaggerated, [footnote omitted] until it was widely believed that the new Polish government had organized pogroms against the Jews. The Jewish communities of other lands, notably of England and the United States, becoming greatly alarmed, held meetings of protest, drew up resolutions condemning the Polish authorities, and brought great pressure to bear, directly and through public opinion, on the officials of the Allies and the United States.[Footnote # 23] The protestations of the Polish government that it was not anti-Semitic, that the reports were distorted and exaggerated, failed to stem the rising current of hostile opinion. The atrocity charges did great damage to Polish prestige in world opinion and at the Peace Conference, and rival claimants to disputed territories did not fail to make use of the implication that the Poles were a barbarous and undisciplined race, unfitted to administer the border lands which contained other races as well as Jews.

Sensing the disastrous effect of these reports on the international standing of the young republic, and desiring to prevent further trouble for both Poles and Jews, Hoover asked Premier Paderewski to appoint an investigating commission. This the Premier did, but the feeling had gathered such headway that a Polish commission had little effect. A few weeks later Hoover suggested that Paderewski ask President Wilson to appoint an independent committee to investigate on the ground, to report its finding, on the basis of which the Polish government should take proper action, and to advise the Jewish community in Poland in regard to its relations with and interest in the new democracy. On June 2, 1919, Hoover wrote President Wilson, urging the appointment of such a commission.

The President appointed Mr. Henry Morgenthau, Brig. Gen. Edgar Jadwin, and Mr. Homer Johnson on this commission, which visited the localities in which the serious disturbances had occurred and endeavored to learn exactly what had taken place and fix responsibility. The British Government also appointed a commission headed by Sir Stuart Samuel for the same purpose. Mr. Morgenthau made his report in December, 1919. His conclusions are given in the following paragraph:

"Just as the Jews would resent being condemned as a race for the action of a few of their undesirable co-religionists, so it would be correspondingly unfair to condemn the Polish nation as a whole for the violence committed by uncontrolled troops or local mobs. These excesses were apparently not premeditated, for if they had been part of a preconceived plan, the number of victims would have run into the thousands instead of amounting to about 280. It is believed that these excesses were the result of a widespread anti-Semitic prejudice, aggravated by the belief that the Jewish inhabitants were politically hostile to the Polish State. When the boundaries of Poland are once fixed, and the internal organization of the country is perfected, the Polish Government will be increasingly able to protect all classes of Polish citizenry. Since the Polish Republic has subscribed to the treaty which provided for the protection of racial, religious and linguistic minorities, it is confidently anticipated that the Government will whole-heartedly accept the responsibility, not only of guarding certain classes of its citizens from aggression, but also of educating the masses beyond the state of mind that makes such aggression possible."

General Jadwin and Mr. Johnson submitted a separate report. Their conclusions were similar to Mr. Morgenthau's:

"By way of summary, we find that beginning with the armistice, about November 11, 1918, and for six months and more during the establishment of orderly government in Poland, many regrettable incidents took place throughout both Congress Poland and the regions, the future of which is still in doubt. The occurrences in Congress Poland were not so serious in number of deaths, but there have been violent collisions accompanied by riots, beatings, and other assaults, which are apparently traceable in large part to anti-Jewish prejudice. In every case they have been repressed by either the military or the civil authorities, but only after grievous results. In the territory occupied or invaded by Polish troops, civilian mobs have followed the soldiery, and the two elements have engaged in robbery of shops and dwellings, and, in cases where resistance was offered, in assaulting and killing the owners or occupants. The circumstances of some of these incidents have been aggravated by intoxication, due to the looting of liquor stores, with the usual adjuncts of criminal irresponsibility and mob rage. We believe that none of these excesses were instigated or approved by a responsible governmental authority, civil or military. We find, on the other hand, that the history and the attitude of the Jews, complicated by abnormal economic and political conditions produced by the war, have fed the flame of anti-Semitism at a critical moment. It is believed, however, that the gradual amelioration of conditions during the last eleven months gives great promise for the future of the Polish Republic as a stable democracy." [Footnote omitted]

The causes of the disturbances, it was generally agreed, were first, the disturbed and disorganized condition in the eastern regions where the number of Jews is greatest; second, the anti-Jewish feeling, which was partly the result of anti-Semitic propaganda of certain Polish groups, andpartly due to the belief that the Jews had sympathized with the ruling powers during the occupation and were now sympathetic to the Bolsheviks in their struggle with the Poles; and third, the attitude of Jewish political groups which were hostile to the Polish state and not satisfied with equality of rights with Polish citizens, but demanded a national autonomy within the state. [Footnote 25]

The publication of these reports, the stabilization of political conditions, quieted the agitation over the Jewish question; they did not solve it. The problems of the Jews and other racial or religious minorities retained an unfortunate prominence in the affairs of Poland and the other new states. The well-intentioned Minorities Treaties, [Footnote 26] which the Supreme Council required the new states to sign were an answer to the criticisms of territorial awards which seemed to violate the nationality principle and to Jewish demands for "emancipation," as well as an attempt to mitigate the friction which minorities engendered. Poland, like several other states, objected to the treaty because it was unilateral in its obligations. Poland had to assume obligations respecting Germans in her territories, but Germany was required to make no similar undertaking respecting Poles, and none of the Principal Allied Powers made any treaties whatever covering the treatment of their minorities.
___________________________________

Footnote 23. On May 21, 1919, a number of American newspapers carried advertisements in which it was stated that Jews were being slaughtered in Poland, that pogroms were being organized from Lemberg to Vilna, from Warsaw to Pinsk, and that the Jewish people had never been set upon by an enemy more merciless, more brutal, more determined, or more powerful. That evening Jewish leaders addressed a great mass meeting of protest in Madison Square Garden. The same day Mr. Goldfogle introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives, asking the President to cause steps to be taken to prevent a recurrence of massacres of men, women and children "in Poland, Rumania and Galicia."

Footnote 25. This Jewish nationalist formula was supported by the Zionists, and the right and left Jewish Socialists. The orthodox Jews advocated merely emancipation and equality of rights. The conflict, therefore, was not with "Poles of the Jewish faith," but with "Polish citizens of the Jewish nation."

Footnote 26. Polish representatives signed the Minorities Treaty on June 28, 1919, at Versailles. It provided that all inhabitants, whether citizens or not, are entitled to protection of life and liberty and to the free exercise of religion, and that all racial, religious or linguistic minorities are guaranteed equality in civil and political rights and the right to use their own language. They are given the right to organize their own religious, educational and charitable institutions and in districts where the minority is a "considerable proportion" of the population, instruction in its language is to be given in primary public schools. Besides Poland, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, Rumania, Greece, Armenia, Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary and Turkey signed similar treaties.
H. H. Fisher, America and the New Poland (The Macmillan Company, 1928) at 155-9. [I'm not sure of Fisher's credentials, but believe he was a Professor at Stanford University.]

And here is an excerpt from the diary of Stephen Bonsal ( who won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1945) and who was the assistant to Colonel House, President Wilson's right hand at the Paris Conference, which provides some insight into Domowski's anti-Semitism:
January 3,1919

Today, not for the first time, the Colonel turned Dmowski over to me for a talk on the tangled affairs of Poland. He stayed with me over an hour, and I trust the words he poured out and the facts that I extracted from him will prove helpful. He speaks equally well in French or English, as I learned when last year Smulski, the Chicago Polish leader, brought him to see me at the War College (Washington). Dmowski is regarded by many as in large measure responsible for the anti-Jewish feeling so noticeable among the great majority of the Poles, and indeed it was upon this subject I was told to "feel" him out.

Dmowski took it very well and, so it seemed to me at least, talked quite rationally upon the thorny subject. It is to be hoped that when he achieves power [he became minister of foreign affairs briefly in 1923] he will act in the same reasonable way. He points out, however, that there are distinctive features in the Jewish problem of Poland which are not met with in other countries. To begin with he asserts that the Ostjuden (Eastern Jews) are a peculiar, a most peculiar, clan and that their activities and characteristics are very trying to those who must live in daily contact with them. "We have in Poland more than one quarter of all the Jews of the world. They form 10 per cent of our population, and in my judgment this is at least 8 per cent too much. When there is only a small group of Jews in our villages, even when they are grasping storekeepers or avaricious money lenders, as they often are, everything moves along smoothly; but when more come, and they generally do come, there is trouble and at times small pogroms.

"We have too many Jews, and those who will be allowed to remain with us must change their habits; and of course I recognize that this will be difficult and will take time. The Jew must produce and not remain devoted exclusively to what we regard as parasitical pursuits. Unless restrictions are imposed upon them soon, all our lawyers, doctors, and small merchants will be Jews. They must turn to agriculture, and they must at least share small business and retail stores with their Polish neighbors. I readily admit that there is some basis in the Jewish contention that in days past it was difficult for them to own land or even to work the fields of others as tenants; that they were often compelled by circumstances beyond their control to gain their livelihood in ways which are hurtful to Polish economy. Under our new constitution all this will be changed, and for their own good I hope the Jews will avail themselves of their new opportunities. I say this in their own interest as well as in the interest of restored Poland. Now, and I fear for decades to come, Poland will be too poor to permit one tenth of its population to engage in pursuits which to say the least are not productive."

************************[irrelevant portion omitted]*********************

I reported Dmowski's views verbally to the Colonel and at his request I put them in writing. His comment was, "I am sure the Poles will try to do the fair thing, but it will be a long time before these religious and racial animosities subside. I agree with the President that before the Poles receive the charter of their independence they must make an iron-clad pledge to give fair and equal treatment to religious as well as racial minorities."
Stephen Bonsal, Suitors and Suppliants: The Little Nations at Versailles (Kennikat Press 1969, reissue of 1946 ed.) Chapter 7, " Among the Many Poles: Paderewski and Dmowski", page not identified.

Mr. Mills commented that:
Note also the prescient comment by Judge Julian Mack that the Eastern Jews were mad and headed for destruction. The catastrophe that befell the Jews of Eastern Europe just over 20 years later proved Mack and his American Jewish colleagues right, although it would be difficult to find an American Jewish leader today who would admit that that catastrophe was largely the making of the Jewish nationalists like Ussishkin.
Two or three years ago I was chided by Mr. Mills for never having heard of Menachem Ussishkin, and his criticism moved me to attempt to acquire just a modicum of knowledge about the fellow. From what little I've unearthed, he seems to have been an arrogant, hot headed, loud mouthed, and generally disagreeable sort of fellow who was a leader of the radical wing of the Russian Zionist movement. I have the impression that although certainly a Jewish nationalist, his primary interest was in establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, where he took up perminant residence around 1919. He may indeed have set the teeth on edge of individuals such as Roman Dmowski, but it seems to me too great a burden to lay on Ussishkin and his like-minded cohorts the blame for the catastrophe that the Third Reich caused to descend upon the Jews of Europe over 20 years later. Indeed, at least according to Bonsal's report in his diary quoted above, which I admit probably does not tell the whole story, Dmowski would have been delighted to see Ussishkin's dreams come true, and the bulk of the Polish Jews transported to Palestine.

One final comment. Mr. Mills wrote:
.... Headlam-Morley was predicting that Polish extremists would murder the Jews. And it was really only the German conquest of Poland in 1939 which prevented the murder being carried out by the Poles themselves, and placed that task in German hands.
It seems to me from the context that Headlam-Morley was in fact agreeing with Wolf that the Jewish extremists were as mad as the Polish extremists and there was nothing to choose between Dmowski and Ussishkin, and, in a fit of probably justified frustration, made the remark that they will all be murdered - Polish and Jewish extremists alike - by each other. Mr. Mill's reading, with all respect, is just too great a stretch for me to grasp. For whatever reason, Dmowski himself (except I think for a vey brief period as Foreign Minister) never held a position of power in the Polish government, and if Pilsudski suffered from anti-Semitism it must have been of the blandest strain, for as far as I'm aware no formal legislation was adopted during his lifetime, or thereafter by the regime of "The Colonels", which was designed to seriously oppress the Jewish minority in Poland, although there were apparently informal and unofficial measures which made life for the Jews increasingly difficult during the late 1920s and early 30s. Undoubtedly anti-Semitism was a significant problem in Poland between the wars, but it was overall far milder than the virulent variety which smouldered in Germany throughout the 20s and was ignited and burst into flame when Adolph Hitler finally came to power.

I am still rummaging through my library in search of Vital's A People Apart , which as I recall deals at length and brilliantly with this subject, and if I turn it up I shall return.

Sorry for the length of this post, but it's an interesting topic and prolixity is a notorious failing of my profession!

Regards, Kaschner

User avatar
henryk
Member
Posts: 2559
Joined: 27 Jan 2004, 02:11
Location: London, Ontario

#14

Post by henryk » 01 Feb 2005, 21:06

Moderator
Michael Mills
No, Headlam-Morley was predicting that Polish extremists would murder the Jews. And it was really only the German conquest of Poland in 1939 which prevented the murder being carried out by the Poles themselves, and placed that task in German hands.
Does this not contravene the civility rule?

David Thompson
Forum Staff
Posts: 23722
Joined: 20 Jul 2002, 20:52
Location: USA

#15

Post by David Thompson » 01 Feb 2005, 22:59

Henryk -- You asked:
Moderator
Michael Mills
No, Headlam-Morley was predicting that Polish extremists would murder the Jews. And it was really only the German conquest of Poland in 1939 which prevented the murder being carried out by the Poles themselves, and placed that task in German hands.


Does this not contravene the civility rule?
It doesn't contravene the civility rule, but whether the assertion is true is another matter entirely, and one which is open to informed debate here. For myself, I do not credit the assertion for lack of proof. It looks like an unsourced opinion to me.

Post Reply

Return to “Holocaust & 20th Century War Crimes”