The Jews in the Band: The Anders Army's Special Troupes

In august 1941, two months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Stalinist government freed General Władysław Anders from the Lubyanka prison; issued an amnesty for the Polish citizens it had deported from Kresy, Poland's eastern territories; and allowed Anders and the officers he quickly assembled to recruit an independent army on Soviet soil, known as the Polish Army in the East (Armii Polskiej na Wschodzie; APW) or the 'Anders Army'. This fighting force would evolve into the closest equivalent to a Polish national army, the moving magnetic centre of a huge diaspora of Polish citizens in the Middle East. Though recruiting conditions in the USSR were terribly difficult, Anders and his staff clearly appreciated, on their own terms, the national and international significance of this massive undertaking. In the remote, poor towns of Buzuluk, Totskoe, and Tatishchevo, located near the Kazakhstan border, the new army administration struggled to house thousands of emaciated, sickly recruits, who had trekked from logging camps in the far north and collective farms in central Asia where they had been assigned to forced labour. The Anders administration worried about the disappearance of over 20,000 experienced officers on whom they were depending as leaders and trainers: they would not know until 1943 that they had been massacred by the Soviet secret police in April 1940. The recruiters were also dismayed by the high percentage of Jews from Kresy, men whom the Stalinist government had first amnestied. Most of Anders's top officers were right-wing National Democrats, and they denied admission or de-enlisted self-identified Jewish Polish citizens for various reasons, angered by what they maintained was general Jewish collaboration with the Soviets and guided by their antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as speculators, cowards, and incapable of fighting.¹ In consequence, only 5 to 6 per cent of Anders Army soldiers were Jews, despite the fact that a third to a half of all deported Polish citizens were Jewish according to Harvey Sarner.²

Yet the Anders administration deviated from this last pattern in two cases, admitting Jewish doctors (approximately 60 per cent of the medical corps) and, most remarkably, issuing special invitations to touring Polish show troupes, made up primarily of acculturated Jews, to form two embedded theatrical revue units.³ In the latter case, the army chose to overlook the fact that the artists touring the USSR had collaborated with the Soviet authorities: they could not have survived otherwise. By late 1939 the eastern Soviet-held city of Lwów was crowded with the stars of Warsaw's best cabarets, members of Poland's finest swing bands, and local performers who had not managed to flee before the Soviet army invaded eastern Poland. To remain in German-occupied territory meant automatic persecution and probable death for most of the performers; even non-Jewish minorities in these troupes were deemed dangerous in Nazi eyes because of their close association with Jewish writers and performers. Hungry, afraid, and trapped in Lwów, writers, composers, actors, and musicians readily accepted the offers made them by Soviet cultural commissars who wanted 'to promote Polish culture' on the road.⁴ Insofar as they were able, they used their new connections to save those left behind. Composer Henryk Wars, admired by Soviet writer Aleksey Tolstoy and composers Isaak Dunaevsky and Aram Khachaturyan, used his influence to increase the number of musicians in his orchestra and to rescue his wife Karola and children Robert and Danusia from the Warsaw ghetto.⁵

National stars

Why did the Anders administration decide to spend precious resources on these particular Jewish recruits? I will speculate about their motives by drawing on the memoirs of performers and soldiers and the articles, reviews, and editorials published in the Polish-language wartime newspapers subsidized by the British army. First and foremost, these Jewish recruits represented the greatest performers of modern Polish popular music and comedy. They included the nation's best jazz composers, among them Henryk Wars, Jerzy Petersburski, Henryk Gold, and Alfred Longin Schütz; star comedians Kazimierz Krukowski, Ludwik Lawiński...