January 07

Start Making Sense: The "Elaborate Nonsense" of Poles, Jews, and the Holocaust
by Mordecai Drache
p. 3 of 3

Strzembosz’s description of the repugnant and violent actions of some Jewish communists under Soviet occupation would not necessarily be offensive if he placed them under a larger historical context that, besides recognizing the rock-and-hard-place in which Jews found themselves politically, also acknowledged that a pre-Holocaust Polish Jewish population of 3.3 million would be comprised of factions whose politics and relations to Soviets varied widely. Throughout The Neighbors Respond, whether the commentator is Strzembosz or Cardinal Jozef Glemp – the primate of Poland infamously known for his construction of huge crosses as Auschwitz – the charge of “pro-Bolshevik attitudes” arises over and over again.

Glemp’s and Strzembosz’s ignorance, though not justifiable, is perhaps understandable when one considers that they are living in a country in which “anti-Zionist” purges of the late sixties from academia and government sent 35,000-40,000 of Poland’s remaining Jews packing. The constrained environment in which academics, journalists, and writers were living since the end of World War II would make it very difficult for controversial ideas of any type to be aired, but what of the following statement by George Steiner in his overall positive review of Neighbors in The Guardian Weekly:

The current primate of Poland, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, has made no secret whatsoever of his distaste for Jews… To this must be added the Polish conviction, not altogether unjustified, that Jewish intellectuals countenanced and were, though briefly, participant in the coming of Marxist and Soviet Despotism.

Hence, Jews in the annals of historiography, even in the pages of a progressive, respected British left-wing weekly, come up against the exact same charge. Even if one questions some of Gross’s assertions and methodologies, as indeed I do, having to read about Jewish-Soviet collaboration again and again is grating. The Polish Jewish population was too large to be homogenous with any ideology, including communism, which on the whole was marginal in pre-Holocaust Polish society.

Fear and Loathing in Poland
In Gross’s recently published book Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, he deals head-on with zydokommuna or "Judeo-Communism." Zydokommuna is, in fact, the title of the sixth chapter. There is a sense of urgency in Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz, in which Gross wants to dispel, once and for all, the myth of Jewish/Soviet collaboration. Given that the accusations come from respected historians, a revered cardinal, and finally a book reviewer in The Guardian, it is understandable why.

Quoting sociologist, Jaff Schatz, Gross places the number of communists in Poland as ranging between 20,000-40,000. By electoral count, communists number 1.5 per cent in 1922, 4.1 per cent in 1928, and back down to 2.5 during 1930. Based on numerical data from the 1930s, culled by the same sociologist, Gross puts the number of Jews involved in communist groups as “22 to 26 per cent” of communists as a whole, approximately 7,500 Jews at the most. This means Jewish communists consisted of approximately 1/5 of one per cent of the Jewish community as a whole. While it is true that Jews occupied certain positions of authority among communists due their higher education – maintaining seat in the central committee and the party "teknika, the apparatus for production and distribution of propaganda materials” – this particular demographic of highly literate in that particular department might well have inflated Jewish numbers among communists in the Polish imagination.

I question Gross’s proposition that the number of Jewish communists were this low, simply because there is so much literature on Jewish involvement in the left-wing activities of the day. Besides mainstream Communist movements in which Jews could participate, there were the Bund, a secular Jewish labor movement which emphasized Yiddish culture as well as socialists as well as the Labor Zionists combining Zionism and socialism. There was also notable Jewish involvement amongst anarchists. Whether Gross is correct or not about how he interprets these numbers, it is important to note that the most vocal proponent of Jewish-Soviet collaboration, Tomasz Strembosz (and Gross' main academic opponent), never quotes statistics at all, never considers demographics, and never quotes studies about how many people voted for communists. Instead, he constitutes his methodology by relying on diaries and letters colored by anti Semitic prejudices that kept Jews out of civil administration for years. If, according to several Polish historians, Gross’s methodology needs to be placed under a magnifying glass, the same thing undoubtedly needs to be said for Strembosz as well.

As for post-war Poland, Polish historians rightly state there were some communists of Jewish origin who behaved viciously. In addition, there is a stormy sea of irreconcilable and contradictory studies available on Jewish involvement in post-war Poland. After wading through the dizzying array of statistics of communist involvement by ethnicity – which after the Holocaust numbers at most a few hundred Jews within many tens of thousands – Gross concludes, rightly, that the activity in which he himself is engaging is nothing more than “a numbers game,” one he is forced to play due to the loud and consistent charges of Judeo-Communism. Given that the pre-Holocaust Jewish population reached over three million people, the number of Jewish communists in post-war Poland’s “apparatus of oppression” means nothing. Perhaps that’s the reason for choosing as one of his epigraphs a quote from Hannah Arendt to open Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz:

Thus, prima facie, all this looks like elaborate nonsense,
but when many people, without having been manipulated,
begin to talk nonsense, and if intelligent people are
among them, there is usually more involved than
just nonsense.

The overall subject of the Fear, as its subtitle makes clear, is post-war anti-Jewish hatred, the expressions of which were as follows: the refusal of the courts to hear complaints brought forth by Jews attempting to repossess property; the beatings of Jews as well as non-Jews mistaken for Jews on trains; the torment of Jewish students in public schools; fear of retribution and violence experienced by Christian Poles (by their non-Jewish neighbors) who had hidden Jews, including children; and pogroms in cities such as Kielce in which the alleged charge was ritual murder – hearkening back to the medieval era in which claims that the blood of Christian children was used for making matzah were popular. Through it all, communists were for the most part indifferent, believing that taking a stance against anti-Semitism would be politically isolating. Many Catholic priests defended or did not speak out against the charge of ritual murder.

The ultimate irony was that in Kielce, after the post-Holocaust Jewish population left in fear for their lives, local Christians helped themselves to leftover foodstuffs in a building that had housed Jews. This food included matzah. A woman who lived next door to the building remarked in an interview on how good it tasted. The filmmaker asked her:

'And what about the blood of Christian children that people
believed Jews were using to produce matzoh.' The lady smiled
again with a chuckle.

Thus, for Gross, the blood libels, as well as the charge of Judeo-Communism, are nothing more than excuses, cover-ups for the shame that many Poles felt in either collaborating actively with Nazis, or standing by and letting it happen. In the end, the full number of Jews killed after the Holocaust in Poland was 500-1500. Gross concludes that:

The Jews who survived the war were not threatening just
because they had availed themselves of Jewish property
that its rightful owners might come back to claim it. They
also induced fear in people by reminding them of the
fragility of their own existence, of the propensity of
violence residing in their own communities, and of their
own helplessness vis-a-vis the agents of pseudospeciation
who now invoked class criteria for elimination from public
life.

The Fragility of Memory and Moral Behavior
Fear is a much better book than Neighbors. The latter, which does not truly explore the relationships between Jews and Christians in Jedwabne as they changed under Soviet and German occupation, is somewhat flat and two-dimensional. In contrast, Fear is psychologically penetrating, asking and attempting to answer more complicated and disturbing questions about the “moral economy” of a people, the Poles, during a period in which they too lost a great deal, particularly in human resources through the murder and deportation of intelligentsia, clergy, and lawyers, as well as economically.

A fair and final analysis must conclude that in totalitarian societies hierarchical layers or strata are constructed essentially to pit victimized groups against each another. As in Jane Goodall’s studies on a "civil war" amongst wild chimpanzees, Gross is describing “pseudospeciation." The Nazis and the Soviets exploited rivalries and prejudices by conferring crumbs of privilege and benefit to particular parties that they preferred over others though still viewing their "favorites" with contempt. Nazis did that the same for the Poles by letting them claim Jewish property. Soviets did so by allowing a select group of Jews employment opportunities previously unavailable to them in civil institutions. In both cases, blood was still spilled among the so-called privileged groups, marking the term “collaboration,” be it Polish-German or Soviet-Jewish, appear ever more simplistic and unfair.

In the midst of all of this controversy, one anecdote in Fear stands out, in which a Polish woman, a maid, hides her former employer’s Jewish children in a village just outside of Cracow. Forced to bribe neighbors who would gladly snitch on her and see the children killed, she devises an ingenious plan to save the children whom she loves as her own.

I put the children on a cart, and I told everybody
that I was taking them out to drown them. I rode
around the village, and everybody saw me and they
believed, and when the night came, I returned with
the children…

If those in the village who were not committing ugly acts of extortion sided with the woman they would still – with good reason – fear that the entire village could be burned by the Nazis as a form of reprisal, an event that would kill even more people, including children. This is one reason why people pressured her to give up the Jewish children she was hiding. Gross’s version of what happened in Jedwabne may have rankled Polish readers; however, I cannot help but wonder if it was the following passage that was the real slap in the face for many Poles:

…we are left with a frightening realization that the
population of a little village near Cracow sighed with
relief only after its inhabitants were persuaded that
one of their neighbors had murdered two small Jewish
children.

In such situations, there are very few people, regardless of religious or ethnic background, who can maintain the high level of bravery evident in this woman. Her action did not just save two Jewish children, but potentially an entire Polish village on which the Nazis might have enacted collective punishment. The difficulties faced by everyone in the village do not mean it would have been right to sacrifice the two Jewish children, but ultimately show the kind of impossible moral choices that Poles had to make, even while many did indeed take advantage of their situation.

This point does deny that some or perhaps most of the villagers were guided by anti Semitism. However, given the situation in which they found themselves, and as emotionally difficult as recognition of it may be for many of us who are Jews, perhaps we should allow a little bit of room to ask what most people, regardless of religious or ethnic background – including Jews – might do in the same or a similar situation. While I sympathize with many of Gross’s ideas, and am awed by (and grateful for) the systematic way he dismantles the “elaborate nonsense” behind Zydokomuna, some of his moral pronouncements in Neighbors, like the one above, are a little too neat to capture the climate of fear during the period described.

This said, it becomes all too clear in Fearthe reasons why Jewish survivors and Poles who helped Jews were (and are) such threats to the collective memories of all of the communities involved. As Gross eloquently and brilliantly proves, they have reminded the majority of Poles of the fragility of their own moral behavior. Meanwhile, the “Righteous among Nations” in Poland – Poles who hid Jews like the woman above – did something extraordinary beyond defying the Nazis. They saw through the artificially created strata of "pseudospeciation" – joint Nazi-Soviet oppression – and let their humanity shine through. Without using the term “elaborate nonsense,” they recognized “elaborate nonsense.” And regardless of our respective religious and ethnic backgrounds, there are precious few of us who do that. This constitutes the real lesson within the controversy engendered by Gross' work, not who collaborated with whom.