What follows is the whole of chapter 5 of Jews and the
Poles in World War II by Stefan Korboński, a Polish
national hero who, far from being an antisemite is
recognised by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among
Nations for his work to help Jews during the war.
Korboński describes how the Communist regime in Poland for
10 years after the war was run by Jews. It was the
darkest period of the communist era, the period of “the
midnight knock at the door, arbitrary arrests, torture,
and sometimes secret execution”.
A similar situation obtained in Hungary, Czechoslovakia
and Romania.
THE JEWS IN POSTWAR
POLAND
After the unexpected attack of June 22, 1941,
the German armies reached within a few months the
suburbs of Leningrad in the north, those of Moscow
in the center, and the banks of the Volga at
Stalingrad. The Germans failed, however, to cross
the Volga and cut off the main line of communication
between the north and the south of Russia. Several
months of heavy fighting culminated in the battle of
Stalingrad and the surrender of a 300,000-strong
German army on January 31, 1943. it was the turning
point of the war and the beginning of the German
retreat. The Soviet army reached the Polish border
on January 3, 1944, near the town of Sarny.
Stalin remembered well the goals of the October
Revolution of 1917, which included entering Poland
as the gateway to the defeated and rebellious
Germany and the utterly exhausted France, with a
view to spreading the Communist revolution over all
of Europe. The first step was the establishment of a
Communist government in Poland. and for that purpose
a Provisional Polish Revolutionary Committee was
formed in Bialystok. already seized by the Red Army.
The committee, intended as the first Bolshevik
government of Poland, included J. Marchlewski, E.
Prochnjak, E. Con, and J. Unszlicht. The Communists
under-rated the strength of the very recently
restored independent Poland, a sovereign state since
November II, 1918. In August 1920 the Soviet army
under Marshal Tukhachevski was defeated in the
battle of Warsaw by the improvised Polish army
commanded by Joseph Pilsudski. The first cavalry
army of Semyon Budienny was smashed and fled in
disarray. There was on Budienny’s staff a young
political commissar by the name of Stalin, who was
charged with guarding the Communist orthodoxy of the
troops. The memory of his desperate flight, chased
by Polish lancers, left a deep scar in Stalin’s
mind.
The defeat near Warsaw put an end to the Soviet plan
for a Communist Europe, and a peace treaty between
the Soviet Union and the independent Polish
government was signed on March 18, 1921, in Riga. It
remained in force until the day of September 17,
1939, when the Red Army broke the treaty of Riga by
invading Poland. They repeated the invasion on
January 4, 1944, when they entered Poland again in
pursuit of the German army in retreat.
As soon as Stalin saw that victory over the Germans
was within his reach, he revived the master plan
which had failed in 1920. He knew that the Germans
would leave Poland and be replaced by Soviet
soldiers under his command, ready to establish a
government of his choice. They would not encounter
armed resistance as in 1920, and Poland would be
taken over. Yet appearances had to be observed for
the benefit of the Western Allies, and that’s why
Stalin formed on June 10, 1943 in Moscow a “Union of
Polish Patriots” whose members were handpicked by
Stalin and were under his orders. Ever since the
Soviet defeat of 1920 Stalin hated the Poles. He
proved it by ordering the execution of four thousand
Polish officers, mostly reservists, who had been
taken prisoner in 1939 and whose graves were
discovered at Katyn in 1943. Ten thousand other
Polish officers were sent to the arctic north of
Russia, by the White Sea, never to be heard of
again. Most of them were educated men, civil
servants or professionals in civilian life. Stalin’s
aim was to decapitate the Polish nation by
exterminating its leadership.
To realize his plan of seizing total control of
Poland, Stalin formed two teams: one to satisfy
appearances and the Western Allies, the other to
actually rule Poland. The first was headed by the
Polish Communist Wanda Wasilewska and the other by
Jacob Berman, whom Stalin knew well.
The choice of Berman was connected with his Jewish
origin, which exonerated him from suspicions of
Polish patriotism and advocacy of Poland’s
independence. Stalin regarded the Jews as
cosmopolitans whose loyalties would be to Zionism
rather than the country of their residence.
As the situation developed, the Polish Patriots’
Union was converted on July 21, 1944, to the “Polish
Committee for National Liberation,” which formed in
Moscow on June 21, 1945, the Provisional Government
of National Unity. Out of the twenty-one members of
the cabinet, seventeen were Communists or their
supporters. Among the four Democrats was Stanisiaw
Mikolajczyk, a Polish peasant leader and former
prime minister of the Polish government in exile in
London, who had returned to Poland.
The Jews in the Communist Political
Police
The head of
the second team, Jacob
Berman, who was a Soviet citizen, was
camouflaged in the secondary position of
undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office and
later at the Office of the Cabinet, from which he
exerted control over all branches of the government.
He had a direct telephone line to the Kremlin and to
Stalin himself. That telephone was used on one
occasion, after office hours, by William Tonesk, a
Polish American who described the event in his
interview published in the New York Polish Daily of
June 9, 1987.
The principal instrument of Berman’s power was his
total control of the Ministry of State Security,
which began under Stalin’s instructions-to liquidate
all centers of possible opposition, often by simply
murdering persons suspected of advocating Poland’s
independence, especially former members of the Home
Army, which fought the Germans during the
occupation.
During the electoral campaign preceding the election
of January 19, 1947, the agents of the political
police, known as “Bezpieka” (an abbreviation of the
“Security”) murdered 118 activists of the only
independent parties, the Polish Socialist Party and
the Peasant Party. The list of their names was
published in Stefan Korbonski’s book In the Name of
the Kremlin. The names of ten additional members of
the Peasant Party and four of the Polish Socialist
Party killed by the Communist political police were
published in the periodical Zeszyty of the Paris
Kultura.
The relations between Berman and Stalin are
described in the interview he granted to Teresa
Toranska, which is published in her important work
Them. It describes the intimate, sumptuous parties
in Stalin’s dacha which lasted from 10pm until dawn.
On one occasion, when no women were present, Berman
waltzed with Molotov, while Stalin turned the
gramophone and changed the records.
Berman’s career ended in 1957, when he was expelled
from the “Polish United Workers Party” (the
Communist Party) by the Bezpieka secret police on
charges of “serious infractions of legality”. The
infractions consisted of the false imprisonment,
torture, and murder of thousands of people.
The team assembled by Berman at the beginning of his
rule consisted of the following dignitaries, all of
them Jewish:
1. General
Roman Romkowski (Natan Grünspau-Kikiel), was
vice-minister of State Security, He was a member of
the then-illegal Communist Youth Organization and
was trained in the Komintern “Lenin School.” As
vice-minister of State Security, Berman’s confidant
supervised the departments of investigation,
training, and invigilation. He also managed the
secret treasury of the Politbureau, controlled by
Jacob Berman, Hilary Mine, and Boleslaw Bierut, a
Russified Pole promoted by Stalin. Bierut had served
many years as an international agent of the
Komintern.
Romkowski alone had access to the three huge
built-in safes which contained millions of dollars
in cash, gold bars, and diamonds. Romkowski often
interrogated prisoners personally, among them Stefan
Korbonski. He was active in the faking of the
election of January 19, 1947, and conducted the
investigation of Wiadyslaw Gomulka, of which more
will be said later. He was delegated to Budapest in
connection with the case of Laszlo Rayk and to
Prague in connection with that of Slansky; both
Communist leaders were executed for allegedly
departing from the party line. After the accession
of Gomulka to power, Romkowski was expelled from the
Communist Party in April 1955, arrested, and
sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment for the
“infractions” at the Ministry of State Security.
2. General Julius Hibner, born David Schwartz, was a
Communist who had served in the civil war in Spain
in the years 1936-1938. I-fe was aide to the
minister of State Security, charged with the Border
Defense Corps and the Internal Security Corps. In
1951-1956 he was commander of the internal military
forces and in 1956-1960 vice-minister of the
interior.
3.
Luna Brystygier was director of the fifth
department of the Ministry of State Security. Joseph
Swiatlo (Licht), a colonel of the security police
who defected to the United States on January 5,
1953, testified as follows about Brystygier:
The official duties of her department include the
prosecution of foreign and non-Soviet influences in
the Polish political parties other than the
communist one, in trade and youth associations. Luna
Brystygier is a chapter unto herself. She is now
over fifty, rather the worse for wear, as she had a
full and eventful life. She started her career in
Lwow, at the time of the entry of the Soviet army in
1939. As the former wife of Dr. Nathan Brystygier, a
Zionist activist in the pre-war period, Luna had all
the required contacts and connections. Immediately
after the arrival of the Red Army in Lwow in 1939
Brystygier started denouncing people on such a scale
that she antagonized even some communist party
members. That was the beginning of her feud with
colonel Rozanski, now the director of the
investigation department of the “Bezpieka” political
police. At that time she, Rozanski and Borejsza
(Rozanski’s brother) competed in denouncing people
to the NKVD (now known as the KGB). There was sharp
rivalry between them in that area. Eager to win,
Brystygier wrote to the NKVD. a report accusing
Rozanski of being a member of a Zionist family. It
was true that his father Dr Goldberg was, before the
war, editor of the Zionist newspaper “Haynt.”
Rozanski knew about that report and I recall him
complaining: “just think, comrade, that ... squealed
on us. But comrade Luna forgets that I have had a
longer career in the NKVD than she.” Rozanski did
have a long record of work for the NKVD and that is
why he still holds his job.
After the entry of the Red Army in Lwow Brystygier
conducted her activity as an informer by organizing
the so-called Committee for Political Prisoners.
That committee was instrumental in helping the NKVD
to capture party deviants and that was how
Brystygier finished off some of the comrades. She
has now a very strong position at the “Bezpieka”
headquarters. They call her the vice-minister of
State Security. The reason is quite simple: during
her stay in Russia Brystygier was, for a long time,
simultaneously the mistress of Berman, Minc and
Szyr. The first two have especially strong
commitments to her. That is why whenever Brystygier
wants to carry through anything in the Ministry of
State Security, even in opposition to her ostensible
bosses Radkiewicz and Romkowski, she always has her
way. Many times Radkiewicz did not even have the
time to submit a proposal to Bierut when Bierut
himself or Berman called him and said: “listen, you
have on your desk such and such. Why didn’t you tell
us about it?” They knew everything before it was
referred by Radkiewicz, because Brystygier tells
them these things at night. Beautiful, eh comrade
Thomas? But it is through you and your closest
collaborators, Berman and Minc, that she wields such
power.
4. Colonel
Anatol Fejgin was director of the tenth department
of the Ministry of State Security, his job was the
tracing and liquidation of all Western influences
and the collection of damaging material about Party
members, with the exception of Bierut. After the
arrest of Wladyslaw Gomulka in July 1951 (he was
released in December 1954) and the defection to the
West on December 5, 1953, of his deputy, the colonel
of security police Joseph Swiatlo (Licht), Fejgin
was arrested in April 1955 and sentenced to fifteen
years in prison.
5. The security police colonel was in his youth a
member of the Union of Young Communists He joined in
1942 the army formed in Russia by Berling and was
assigned to security work, where he met his old
friend from the Communist organization, Romkowski.
He was transferred to the Ministry
of State Security (the equivalent in Poland of
the KGB) and appointed deputy director of the tenth
department headed by Colonel Anatol Fejgin.
Because of his connection with Romkowski, Swiatlo
had actually a stronger position than Fejgin, with a
direct line to Moscow and the right of access to
Stalin’s right hand, Rena himself. Two massive steel
closets in his office contained material which
incriminated every important personality from Berman
down and was kept for purposes of blackmail. in 1953
Swiatlo realized that he knew too much to get out
alive from his position, and during a visit in West
Berlin he defected to the United States on December
5, 1953, and was in Washington D.C. on December 23,
1953.
During ten months of interrogation Swiatlo revealed
everything he knew. His revelations, presented by
Radio Free Europe editor Zbigniew Blazynski, were
broadcast to Poland by RFE in about two hundred
sections and had there the effect of a nuclear bomb.
As a result, the Ministry of State Security was
liquidated on December 7, 1954, and Romkowski and
Fejgin were expelled from the Communist Party and
eventually sentenced to fifteen years in jail. The
director of the department of investigation at the
Ministry, Colonel Joseph Rozanski was arrested at
the same
6. Colonel Joseph Rozanski (Goldberg),
a former clerk in a Warsaw law office and a veteran
Communist, was the director of the investigation
department of the Ministry of State Security. He
handled in 1945 the case of Stefan Korbonski, the
former Delegate of the Polish government in exile in
London, recognized by the Allied governments. The
Delegate - a post held at the time of the Warsaw
Rising by Jan Stanislaw Jankowski - was the head of
the Polish Underground State, controlling the entire
resistance movement and the Home Arms’. Korbonski
and his wife Sophia were arrested in Krakow at night
on June 28, 1945.
Rozanski kept them in the building of the Ministry
of State Security and did not use torture, which was
his favorite method of extorting confessions. He
used instead exhausting all night interrogations and
threats of summary execution. This relative leniency
was no doubt because of the Opinion of the supreme
authority, Jacob Berman, who said: “Korbonski was
the only one in that reactionary gang who tried to
save Jews.” Charged with abuse of power and
extensive use of torture, Rozanski was first
sentenced in December 1955 to five years of
imprisonment and then to fifteen. He was held in
luxuriously appointed quarters and released ten
years ahead of time. It was rumored that he settled
in Israel.
7. Colonel Czaplich (fictitious name) who headed the
third department of the Ministry of State Security,
was charged with the prosecution of the Home Army,
the organization of resistance against the Nazis
during the war. He was nicknamed “Akower"__a Jewish
version of the initials “A.Ic” of the Home Army. He
displayed somewhat less cruelty than the other
Bezpieka bosses.
8. Zygmunt Okret was the director of the archives
department of the Ministry, in charge of records and
personal files.
The above dignitaries were far from being the only
Jewish officials of the Ministry Victor Klosiewicz,
a Communist and member of the Council of State,
stated in his interview conducted by Teresa
Toranska: `Accounts had to be settled in 1955 and it
was unfortunate that all the department directors in
the Ministry of State Security were Jews.
The reason was Stalin’s decision not to use Poles,
whom he did not trust, but a more cosmopolitan
element. The situation was aptly described by Abel
Kainer in his essay The Jews and Communism, in the
political quarterly Krytyka:
The archetype of the Jew during
the first ten years of the Polish People’s Republic
was generally perceived as an agent of the secret
political police. It is true that under Bierut and
Gomulka (prior to 1948) the key positions in the
Ministry of State Security were held by Jews or
persons of Jewish background. It is a fact which
cannot be overlooked, little known in the west and
seldom mentioned by the Jews in Poland. Both prefer
to talk about Stalin's anti-Semitism (the “doctors”
plot, etc.). The machine of communist terror
functioned in Poland in a matter similar to that
used in other communist ruled countries in Europe
and elsewhere. What requires explanation is why it
is operated by Jews. The reason was that the
political police, the base of communist rule,
required personnel of unquestionable loyalty to
communism. These were people who had joined the
Party before the war and in Poland they were
predominantly Jewish.
Hence the hierarchy: Stalin in Moscow at the
pinnacle, issuing orders to Berman orally during his
visits and all-night feasts or by direct telephone
line; Berman assigning duties to the directors of
the various departments of the Ministry, every one
of them Jewish. Since the Ministry of State Security
exerted at the time the power of life or death, it
held Poland under a reign of terror in the years
1945-1955, at the cost of many lives. Accurate
statistics are lacking, but it is well known that
thousands perished in prison under torture and
maltreatment, for example, the chairman of the
Council of National Unity, Kazimierz Puzak. Some
were simply executed, such as Wladyslaw Kojder and
Narcyz Wiatr, who were commanders of the Peasant
Battalions resistance against the Germans. The
victims of the reign of terror imposed by Stalin and
carried out by his Jewish subordinates during the
first ten years after the war numbered tens of
thousands. Most of them were Poles who had fought
against the Germans in the resistance movement. The
Communists judged, quite correctly, that such Poles
were the people most likely to oppose the Soviet
rule and were therefore to be exterminated. That
task was assigned to the Jews because they were
thought to be free of Polish patriotism, which was
the real enemy.
Other Prominent Jewish Personalities
Aside from leadership in the Ministry of
State Security, which played a role analogous to the
Gestapo in Hitler's Germany, the Jews also held
leading positions in other government departments of
the Communist regime.
Hilary Minc, an economist and a Communist veteran
who had spent the years 1939-1944 in Russia and was
well known by Stalin, was second in rank only to
Jacob Berman. He was the economic dictator and the
author of the Three Year Plan. Minc was vice-premier
and member of the Politbureau from 1944 to 1956,
when he resigned and admitted his “errors and
misjudg ments.”
The third of the group ruling Poland was Roman
Zambrowski, born Rubin Nussbaum, who held in turn
several dominant political positions. In 1947 he was
deputy speaker of the Seym (parliament) and its
actual master over the ineffectual speaker Wiadyslaw
Kowalski. When Stefan Korbonski spoke in the Seym on
February 21, 1947, on the subject of a proposed
amnesty bill, criticizing sharply the persecution of
former members of the resistance against the Germans
and demanding a full amnesty for all resistance
fighters, the deputy speaker Zambrowski responded
with a speech in which he caricatured Korbonski's
appeal as "an incredible provocation."
Another senior dignitary was Tadeusz Zabludowski,
the ruthless director of the Office of the Press,
Publications and Entertainments, which was in fact
the office of censorship. He banned the publication
of parliamentary speeches, such as that of Korbonski
regarding the amnesty, and exerted total control
over every publication, including books and theater
performances as well as films and radio programs. He
was assisted by Julia Minc, the wife of Hilary Minc,
who headed the Polish News Agency, which was awarded
the monopoly in the distribution of news and the
management of the press. She was later succeeded by
Stanislaw Staszewski, whose family was exterminated
in the Holocaust. He was a Communist of long
standing.
An important role was also played by Roman Werfl, a
Communist since his youth and a talented journalist,
who was successively the editor of such periodicals
as Nowe Widnokregi, Glos Ludu, and Nowe Drogi. He
was the director of the “ICsiazka I Wiedza”
publishing house, which enjoyed a monopoly of book
publishing. Leon Kasman was the editor of the
official Party organ; he had been a Communist
already before the war.
One of the dominant figures in the field of
publishing and propaganda was Jerzy Borejsza,
brother of the secret police colonel Joseph
Rozanski, who set the policy of the press and its
goals.
He was assisted by “general” Victor Grosz and was
promoted during the war in the Soviet Union from
enlisted man to general for political services. He
was the head of the political education department
of the Polish army and was charged with the
Communist indoctrination of the troops.
An important role was also played by Eugeniusz Szyr,
a veteran of the Spanish civil war and a member of
the “Union of Polish Patriots” formed in Moscow. He
held the office of vice- premier.
Key positions in the Communist Party were held by
Arthur Starewicz, secretary of the central committee
of the Party, also a member of the Union of Polish
Patriots, generally known as “The Muscovites.”
A different role was assigned to Adam Schaff, a
prewar Communist and a scholar and professor. He
dedicated himself to the spreading of Marxist
philosophy and published numerous works on the
subject.
The Jews in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs
The key positions in the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs were held by Jews, often with assumed Polish
names. Wincenty Rzymowski, a Pole, served as front
man, with the title of minister, but the actual
control was in the hands of vice-minister Zygmunt
Modzelewski. The office of the ostensible minister
of foreign affairs was later held by such
insignificant figures as Stanislaw Skrzeszewski, who
was a school teacher in Krakow before the war, as
well as others, including Stefan Werblowski, greeted
at the airport on his return from abroad by a
delegation of Jewish officials, Marian Naszkowski
and others. The control of the ministry was in the
hands of Mieczyslaw Ogrodzinslcj, who adopted a
Polish name as did his colleagues.
An important diplomatic role was played by Julius
Katz-Suchy, Poland’s delegate to the United Nations,
and Manfred Lachs, who served as chairman of the
legal committee of the UN Assembly and was later
appointed a member of the International Tribunal in
The Hague. There were many ambassadors and
consuls, among them Henryk Strasburger and
Waclaw Szymanowski; Consul Tadeusz Kassern, who
became disenchanted with the system and committed
suicide; Eugene Milnilciel, ambassador in London;
Ludwik Rajchman, head of a Polish economic mission
to the United States, and many others. In addition
to the key personalities mentioned here, a very
heavy proportion of the senior and middle-level
officials were also Jewish,
The Jews in the Ministry of Justice
Henryk Swiatkowslcj, a Christian Pole, served
as the figurehead with the title of minister. The
Ministry of Justice was actually under the control
of Leon Szajn, the vice-minister pre-war president
of the leftist Association of Legal Aides and
war-time member of the Union of Polish Patriots
sponsored by Stalin in Moscow. After the war he was
assigned to the Democratic Party, kept by the
Communists to ensure appearances of pluralism for
the benefit of the West. He soon became the
secretary general of that party, as well as
vice-minister of justice. His principal assistants
were Stefan Rozmaryn and the prosecutor Jacob
Sawickj, together with Colonel Stefan Kurowski, who
represented Poland at the Nuremberg trials of the
Nazi leaders. All of the above were Jewish. When
Savicki wanted to send to Nuremberg Stefan Korbonski
as witness, Kurowski refused to allow him to testify
personally. Korbonski’s testimony, concerning mainly
the mass street executions, was presented by the
Soviet prosecutor Smirnov and figures in volume 7 of
the “Trial of the major war criminals before the
International Military Tribunal.” The German
governor Frank was sentenced to death and hanged.
Stefan Kurowski ended his career as the chief
justice of the Supreme Court, which counted several
Jewish judges, among them Mieczyslaw Szerer.
The leader of the defense counsels was attorney
Maslanko, the dean of a team of political defenders
whose only function was to induce suspects to
confess to real or fictitious crimes, after which
the defenders confined themselves to asking for
lenient sentences. The Ministry of State Security -
Bezpieka, the Polish equivalent of the KGB -
expected the lawyers to help the prosecution, not to
defend the accused. The director of the
investigation department, Rozanski, made it clear
that a defense counsel’s duty was to collect
evidence against the accused. Judges, eager to stay
on the right side of the secret political police,
would call Rozanski to ask him what sentence he
would suggest for a person charged by his office.
Rozanski replies were laconic: “five years ... ten
years ... life ... death.”
The Jews in Parliament and the Political
Elite
The Jewish contingent in the Seym was headed by the
vice- speaker Zambrowski, mentioned earlier. He was
assisted by Boleslaw Drobner, a pre-war member of
the Polish Socialist Party, which was not
pro-Communist. Asked in the parliamentary lobby by
his old friend Milcolajczyk how he managed to get on
the Communist bench, Drobner replied: “1 did time in
a Soviet jail and I don’t want to do so again.”
Other Jewish members of the prewar Socialist Party
who joined the Communists were Dorota Kluszynska,
Alfred Krygier, and Julian Hochfeld, an eager
convert.
Among other members of the ruling Jewish-Communist
elite were: Stefan Zolkiewski, minister of education
in the years 1956-1959, who made Communist
indoctrination the first priority; Ludwik Grosfeld,
former minister of finance of the government in
exile, who after his return to Poland joined the
Communist National Council; Emil Sommerstein, a
prewar member of parliament, appointed minister for
war reparations; the eminent poet Julian Tuwim, who
returned to Poland from the West in 1946 to become
an enthusiastic champion of Communist rule;
Wladvslaw Matwin, one of the founding members of the
Moscow Union of Polish Patriots, who held several
important positions, among them that of editor of
the chief Communist press organ, the Trybuna Ludua
(Tribune of the People); Anthony Aister,
vice-minister of the Interior; Stefan Arski,
well-known journalist and senior official of the
Communist Party; Isaac Kleinerman, head of the
office of the presidium of the National Council;
Jacob Prawin, Party activist; and Ozias Szechter, a
veteran Communist.
The major part of that leadership group of Jewish
prominence came to Poland from Russia, where it had
fled during the war. It exerted totalitarian rule
over Poland from 1945 to about 1955 and the “Polish
October” of 1956. To ensure its control of the
country, it jailed the leading non-Jewish Polish
Communists, such as Wladyslaw Gomulka, Zenon
Kliszka, Marian Spychalski, General Gregory
Korczvnski, General Waclaw Komar, and Marshal Michal
Zvmirski, and many others.
The October events of 1956 resulted in a change of
guard, when the non-Jewish Communists such as
Gomulka seized power and sent to jail Roman
Romkowski, Anatol Fejgin, and Joseph Rozanski, as
well as many of their associates.
The Jewish elite which played a dominant role in the
Communist rule of postwar Poland found its epilogue
in the exodus of 1967-1968. The Kracow Tygodnik
Powszechnw published in its issue of March 20, 1988,
excerpts from an article in the Communist periodical
Nou’e Divgi that describe the events of March 1968.
Between the second half of 1967
and that of 1968, 341 officers of Jewish origin were
dismissed from the army. They were also ousted
from the communist party … In Warsaw, 483 persons
were removed from senior official positions. 365 of
them from the ministries and central agencies. 49
from academic posts and 24 from the press and
cultural institutions. ... Six ministers and
vice-ministers were removed from office, 35
directors and department heads ... about 70
professors and lecturers ... by mid 1969 over 20,000
Jews emigrated from Poland.
The cause of that exodus was found far away from
Poland. It was the overwhelming victory of the
Israeli army in the six-day war with Egypt and other
Arabic neighbors. It was greeted in Poland with joy
and loud cries of “Our Jews smashed the Soviet
Arabs!” That reaction was reported to the highest
levels of the Kremlin, not by the silent Soviet
Jews, but by the Polish ones, which was enough to
cause their expulsion. In contrast, the Soviet Jews
were kept in Russia as hostages of the West. That is
how the events were interpreted in Poland. In
the United States and western Europe the departure
of the Jewish Communist dignitaries from Poland was
met with a storm of protests, among them that of a
thousand American professors. Stefan Korbonski
commented on them in a letter published on July 13,
1968, in the New York Times:
To the Editor:
The well justified protest of
1,000 professors against the present anti-Semitic
purge in Poland (advertisement July 2) does not pay
sufficient attention to the fact that the Polish
people are not taking any part in this purge which
is occurring inside the Communist Party, since the
prevailing majority of the purged people are its
prominent members.
The Polish people, who do not
have any say in this matter or others, consider it
purely a family affair of the present “owners of
Poland.” And, if nobody sheds tears at the dismissal
of such dominant figures of the Stalinist period as
Roman Zambrowski, Stefan Zolkiewski, Juliusz
Katz-Suchy. Stefan Staszewski and Prof Mam Schaff,
it is not because they are Jews, but because they
are Communists rejected by the Polish people in the
same way as Gomulka and his clique, or General
Moczar and his secret police.
Stefan Korbonski
Washington, July 2, 1968
The writer was a member of the Polish Parliament in
1947, representing the anti-Communist Polish Peasant
Party.
The ten years of Jewish rule in Poland could not be
easily forgotten. It was an era of the midnight
knock at the door, arbitrary arrests, torture, and
sometimes secret execution. Most of those
responsible for that reign of terror left Poland and
upon arrival in the West represented themselves as
victims of Communism and anti-Semitism - a claim
which was readily believed in the West and earned
them the full support of their hosts.
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