Poland

   Following the end of World War I in November 1918, the Versailles Treaty created the Second Polish Republic. The new state, however, was obliged by the League of Nations to sign a treaty that protected the ethnic and religious rights of minorities. Poland’s independence had followed a bitter war from 1918 to 1920 against the Soviet Union that was accompanied by anti-Jewish riots. Although Poland promised to abide by the treaty provision that prevented it from discriminating against minorities, anti-Semitism was an everpresent factor in daily life in Poland. Polish anti-Semitism stemmed from the large number of Jews in the country’s population. Jews constituted 10 percent of the population, 30 percent in the cities. Poles claimed that Jews played an inordinately large role in Polish economic life at a time when there was a drive on the part of Polish politicians for the “Polonization” of the nation’s economic life. Jews were subsequently barred from the civil service and restricted in the professions and certain sectors of the economy. In May 1926, Jozef Pilsudski staged a military coup and established an authoritarian regime that lasted until 1935. Pilsudski’s regime showed little interest in encouraging anti-Semitism, but upon his death in 1935, life for the Jews of Poland was radically altered. Against the background of a severe economic depression, the government encouraged anti-Jewish attitudes as a means of strengthening Poland’s internal cohesion. Jewish economic concerns became targets of boycotts, and the government actively encouraged the emigration of the Jews as a means of reducing the country’s Jewish population.

   On the eve of the German invasion in September 1939, a large number of the Polish population supported the move to deprive the country’s 3.5 million Jews of the right to live in Poland. Polish Jews, however, had few places open to them, inasmuch as restrictive immigration laws throughout much of the world prevented them from finding a viable refuge. Following the German occupation of Poland in September 1939, Polish government institutions dissolved but were reestablished as an underground organization by the Polish government-in-exile, which was based in Great Britain.

   The attitude of the Polish underground toward the Jews was one of ambivalence, with prewar anti-Semitic attitudes often governing the response of the Polish underground to Jewish pleas for assistance, as in the case of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Notable exceptions were the Zegota underground organization and the efforts of individual Poles who risked their lives to save Jews. The Germans organized Poland into separate districts with specific objectives in mind. Western Poland was set up as the Warthegau, and the Germans expected to “Germanize” the area by resettling ethnic Germans (Volksdeutsche) on land vacated by Poles and Jews. By the end of 1939, about 90,000 Jews and Poles were expelled from the annexed area into the General-Gouvernement. Ultimately, a total of about 900,000 persons, not counting the Jews who were deported for extermination, were replaced by 600,000 Germans from other parts of Poland and other countries of Eastern Europe. In addition, approximately 400,000 from Germany’s annexed territories were resettled in the area. Under the treaty between Germany and the Soviet Union that was signed in August 1939, the eastern part of Poland fell under Soviet occupation.

   The unannexed area of central Poland, the General-Gouvernement, was used to place Jews in ghettos prior to their deportation to the death camps. Of the 3.5 million Jews who lived in Poland in September 1939, about 310,000 survived: 30,000 in concentration camps, 30,000 in Poland, and approximately 250,000 fled to the Soviet Union. It is estimated that about 15,000 out of 3.2 million Jews, or less than half of 1 percent, were saved by the Poles. At the end of the war, the German occupation of Poland was followed by the Soviet Union. Although the Poles had suffered more than 3,000,000 killed at the hands of the Germans, anti-Semitism continued to inform a large percentage of the Polish population. Some Poles identified Jews with the Soviet occupation. Others continued to view Jews with the traditional anti-Jewish bias that was associated with church teachings. Polish animosity toward the Jews came to a head in the town of Kielce, where a pogrom was directed toward some 150–250 Jewish Holocaust survivors who had returned to their homes. On 4 July 1946, the riot, which took the lives of 42 Jews, broke out after a Polish woman charged that the Jews were killing Christian children and drinking their blood. This event convinced Polish Jews that life was unsafe for Jews in Poland and many of them left the country. More recently, tensions between Poles and Jews surfaced when in 1984 Carmelite nuns sought to establish a convent in a vacant building that bordered the Auschwitz death camp. The controversy mirrored the unresolved issues between Polish Jews and non-Jews regarding the Holocaust. For Jews, the Auschwitz death camp has become a symbol of the approximately six million Jews who died in the Holocaust. But the death camp also has meaning for Poles inasmuch as the camp was initially created to eliminate the Polish intelligentsia. More than 270,000 of the Polish political and cultural elite were killed in Auschwitz. The conflict was temporarily resolved in 1987 when an agreement was reached to remove the convent and to create, instead, a center for information, education, meeting, and prayer. But then a series of inflammatory events occurred that threatened the settlement. This included the repudiation of the 1987 agreement by Polish Primate Cardinal Glemp and the attempt by a group of American Jews, led by Rabbi Avi Weiss, to enter the convent by force. Finally Pope John Paul II intervened and agreed that the convent must be moved, and supported the construction of a new center. The resolution of the conflict was achieved but not before it dealt a blow to Polish–Jewish relations. The controversy revealed that despite the absence of Jews in Poland, anti-Semitism continues to resonate among segments of the population and informs, for many, their understanding of the Holocaust.