Essays on Hitler's Europe

Poles and Jews

No issue in Holocaust literature is more burdened by misunderstanding, mendacity , and sheer racial prejudice than that of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II. In his Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (on this book, see the chapter titled “Memories of Hell” in this volume), Tzvetan Todorov describes the fundamental disagreements between Polish Christians and Polish Jews during the war. Why did the underground Polish Home Army offer so little help to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943? The reason, Todorov believes, is less the certainly existing anti-Semitism in the Polish ranks than the two communities’ traditional isolation from each other and also the pro-Soviet position of many of the Jewish fighters. The Home Army was just as hostile to Stalin as it was to Hitler, Todorov writes, and the Hashomer organization, which was the nucleus of the Ghetto revolt in 1943, was unconditionally pro-Soviet. Because of events during and after the war, many Poles will forever associate all Jews with“Jewish communism.”For the most part, however, the Polish Jews were not Communists. One hundred and twenty thousand of them served in the Polish army in 1939, and some thirty thousand were killed in battle. There were some eight hundred Jews among the Polish reserve officers murdered at Katyńand other sites on Stalin’s orders.1 Many Jews, for their part, tend to view P O L E S A N D J E W S This is part of an article that appeared in the June 26, 1997, issue of the New York Review of Books, under the title “Memories of Hell.” Because the essay discussed Polish-Jewish relations , there was an inevitable flurry of letters, mostly accusing Poles of terminal anti-Semitism . In my reply, published in the September 27 issue of the journal, I complained about the mutual prejudices and the irresponsibility of some of the American media in casting hasty judgment on Poles who, next to the British, were the only nation to fight against the Nazis throughout the war and who were nearly wiped out in the process. 163 the Poles as unredeemable anti-Semites, despite the fact that the ancestors of most Jews in Poland in 1939 were invited there by the Polish nobility and were given extraordinary privileges. There are more trees at Vad Yashem in Jerusalem dedicated to the memory of Polish helpers of Jews than all other such memorial trees combined.2 Several documentary collections exist on the sufferings of Jews in Poland under Nazi rule. Two of the best are The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto (edited by Alan Adelson, translated by Kamil Turowski ; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Am I a Murderer? Testament of a Jewish Ghetto Policeman (edited and translated by Frank Fox; Boulder co: Westview Press, 1996). Their authors, both young men, died before the Nazis withdrew. David Sierakowiak, the author of Five Notebooks, died of starvation in the Lodz Ghetto in 1943, when he was nineteen. Calel Perechodnik , a member of the Jewish police force in 1943 in the Otwock Ghetto, not far from Warsaw, killed himself at age twenty-seven, during the great 1944 Warsaw Uprising, after contracting typhus and being discharged from the Polish Home Army. His book is not a diary but a memoir written while in hiding after the ghetto was destroyed and most of its inhabitants killed. Both Sierakowiak and Perechodnik were rich boys, well-educated and familiar with many languages. Although starving, Sierakowiak conscientiously did his homework on Cicero and Ovid for the ghetto school; in fact, he was indignant that the ghetto still lacked a university. A convinced Communist, he studied Lenin’s What Is to Be Done and other Marxist-Leninist tracts. While he was serious, honest, and mature for his years, Perechodnik was beset by emotional contradictions. Frank Fox, the young policeman’s translator and editor, describes him as “by turns mordant and sentimental, accusatory and self-pitying , sardonic and sorrowful.” Before the war he had belonged to a Zionist organization but was also an ardent Polish patriot. Like Sierakowiak, he remembers the period of the German attack on Poland in September 1939 as one of great fraternity between Poles and Jews; in fact, he claims that before the war he never encountered any manifestation of Polish anti-Semitism. Unlike many later memoirists, who could only recall their prewar family lives as idyllic , these two young men utterly disliked their fathers...