August 2017 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

The limited involvement of Poles in the local and regional market, apart from the activities of the rural co-operative, which from 1918 were heavily protected by the Roman Catholic Church and the Polish national authorities, can be traced to the lack of a Polish trade network to realize an efficient supply and distribution of merchandise and information. One major advantage of the Jewish merchant was that he had access to such contacts and information, and that, as a rule, he knew his customers. The extent and importance of the local Jewish networks is clear from the accounts of Jewish informants. First, through marriage bonds Jews were able to activate a family network that reached far beyond the confines of the local community. Jewish informants gave examples of how, in setting up one business or another, within or outside Jaśliska, mostly relatives were consulted or involved in some other way. Secondly, generations of experience in trade laid the foundation for numerous contacts in the professions and with the main trading centers; hence, for example, the large number of Jewish companies that specialized in exploitation of local forests and that were run by local Jews with expert contacts outside the region, in Kraków, and even outside the country, in Slovakia.

It should be noted that during the inter-war years Poles also entered the sector of moneylending. Mortgage deeds in the real-estate registers show that debtors and creditors were Poles as well as Jews. However, in contrast to Poles, who often were indebted to Jews (with debts sometimes exceeding 200 złotys), the Jews themselves were rarely indebted to Poles as richer relatives or co-religionists were quick to help them out.⁴²⁶

One often encounters bald claims like the following in Jewish memorial books as well as many Jewish memoirs: “The [Polish] Government levied heavy taxes upon the Jews and decreed harsh laws against them.”⁴²⁷ “I later discovered that podatki were in fact punitive tax demands, levied arbitrarily by the tax authorities against Jewish concerns.”⁴²⁸ There is no truth to the claim that the Polish authorities enacted anti-Jewish laws, imposed harsh, arbitrary or punitive taxes on Jewish businesses, or waged an economic war on the Jews.⁴²⁹ (The latter is something that the British have historically excelled at in relation to “colonials” and Americans in relation to their Native and Black populations.⁴³⁰) Indeed, many Jewish firms received lucrative government contracts,⁴³¹ contrary to the claim of Western historians who allege “a government-backed boycott of all Jewish business establishments.”⁴³² A resident of the border town of Łunin, in Polesia, where there was a large military base, recalled: “Jewish craftspeople, tradespeople and storekeepers made their income catering to the Polish officers and their families.”⁴³³ A Jew whose parents owned a grocery near a military base in Chełm states that “the entire clientele was mostly military families.” He added, “All of my friends … were Poles. There were few Jews where we lived.”⁴³⁴ In Bolesławiec, a small town near the German border: “My father’s business was cap making. … A lot of the caps were made to order as part of uniforms for fraternal organizations, the military, police and firemen.”⁴³⁵

On the other hand, Jewish businessmen would band together to thwart new Polish businesses from springing up. Jewish glaziers in Łódź and suburban Dobra banned together to drive the newcomer Polish glaziers out of business.⁴³⁶ Pressure was exerted by the Jewish community in Dubno, Volhynia, on a Jewish proprietor to renege on the lease of his business premises to a Polish milk co-operative which wanted to operate their own store. It was explained to him that business was the exclusive domain of the Jews, and that the community did not welcome Christian intruders in this near monopoly on local trade.⁴³⁷ A Christian shopkeeper recalled asking a Jewish wholesaler from whom she acquired merchandise for a rebate on the goods he supplied to her: the Jewish merchant replied categorically that he gave rebates only to Jews.⁴³⁸ It must be noted, however, that even among Jewish businessmen, cutthroat practices were used frequently. Thugs were hired to block the entrance to competitors’ shops and shops of competitors’ were demolished. Fishmongers got together to form a cartel to illegally raise the price of herring, and paid “damages” to producers who closed down their smokehouses.⁴³⁹

Many established business practices followed by Jews were foreign to or disrespectful of Poles, or had a prejudicial impact on them, and this further complicated interaction.⁴⁴⁰ Peasants in particular were considered to be easy prey for sharp trade practices.
There were also several horse traders in Działoszyce. … At the end of the summer, when the harvest was over, the farmers tried to dispose of their aging horses rather than having to feed them all winter long, knowing they would not be able to do much work in the spring. The horse traders bought these aging horses, too. More than once it happened that they bought back a horse that they had sold the farmer a few months earlier, its teeth having been sharpened, and its coat groomed to make the animal appear younger. These horses, everyone agreed, were not suitable for work, and would be killed off before long. The unfortunate animals, frail and limp, were led to a valley near Działoszyce, where they were killed and then skinned. As it turns out, the dealers made a handsome profit on their carcasses.⁴⁴¹
The exploitative nature of Jewish-Polish commercial relations is illustrated by the following account concerning Rabbi Moshe Mendel Walden, an author and bookseller in Kielce:
It once happened that a Polish priest entered his store. He wanted to purchase a Hebrew bible from him. At first Mosze Mendel was frightened: “what did a priest want with his shop?” he said to himself, and his heart pounded in his chest as in the “Gazlan”. He was probably there as part of a plot. However, it became clear immediately clear that the “heathen” had come to do business, and harbored no bad thoughts. The word “biblia” which came from the priest’s mouth frequently calmed him and the fear left him entirely.

Via a small window that connected to the kitchen, he called his wife Sara. She wiped her dirty hands on her apron and appeared before the priest. The women usually know the national language more than the men do. In the market, they come into contact with the peasant women who bring their produce to the city and the Jewish women learn their language from them.

She understood the priest’s desire without any delays. In a pile of old books that were heaped out of order in a corner of the shop, she found the “biblia” and handed it to the priest. In answer to the priest’s question the woman mentioned a round sum: a silver ruble. The priest did not bargain, paid the ruble, took the book and went on his way voicing a parting to the couple who stood astounded in the shop.

It had never happened that a buyer had given them the entire price that they asked of him; a price—by nature went continually down until it reached a level from which it was not possible to lower it any further. And who was the innocent who would pay the full price?

From that time, Mosze Mendel understood a principle in life. He had always been troubled by a serious question: “why do the Jews choose to dwell among the gentiles? Why don’t they pack up their things and move to the land of Israel, the land that has only Jews?” Now he found the answer: a Jew cannot make a living except from “Goyim”.

From then on, whenever a Jew entered his shop to buy a prayer book for daily or holiday use or such things and took a long time to bargain, Reb’ Mosze Mendel would say: “Oy Va’voi for me and my wares if my customers were only Jews; happily there are gentiles among my customers as well; priests come to my shop! Say what you will, but I will tell you, you can’t make a living from Jews, bounty and income come from the heathens!”⁴⁴²

Historian Richard Lukas notes that, as they had done for centuries, Jews did business with each other and distrusted Jews who developed relationships with Polish Gentiles.⁴⁴³ A Jew from Kraków recollected:
“It is true that the Poles did have the government on their side, which sometimes made things difficult for us. On the other hand, we had tradition on our side. In the big cities Jews tended to have significant trading advantages for the simple reason that they had been at it longer. …

“It is also true that though my father was assimilated, all the executives in his factory and ninety percent of his workers were Jewish. I remember once my mother, who was something of an intellectual, challenging him about this, telling him that he was being discriminatory. He said he felt easier working with Jews and that was all there was to it.”⁴⁴⁴

A well-to-do resident of Stołpce, in northeastern Poland, recalled:
My father’s loyalty to the Jewish community carried over into the way he ran his business. The managers of my father’s factories were always Jews. The workers were drawn from the local Polish population. … In every one of the factories, there was a little provisions store that sold the basics … Shopping at this factory store saved them a trip into town, but the prices were high. My father made a considerable profit from these stores. So he was making money on anything and everything. And he paid very little in official taxes. If you had connections with the right Polish officials—and bribed them heavily enough—you were basically taken care of.⁴⁴⁵
When Christian and Jew did try to break down the barriers that separated them, the outcome was not always a happy one, as Józef Lewandowski relates. Around 1934, his father, an upholsterer in Konin, went into partnership with a Polish upholsterer, his friend Mr. Bogusławski:
“… the worthy gentlemen failed to take account of social considerations. Father became unacceptable to the Orthodox Jews, Bogulawski non-kosher to some of his Catholic customers. Both went beyond the limits imposed by unwritten but harshly binding statutes. Rich folk such as landowners and industrialists could join forces, but not the poor masses. After a few years they split up.”⁴⁴⁶
Generally, such isolation enjoyed the support of Jewish society, as evident in its press and the attitudes of its communal organizations and rabbis. When a Jewish shopkeeper in Ejszyszki hired a Pole to transport his goods by truck, thus bypassing the more inefficient and costly Jewish wagon drivers, an open “revolt” broke out against this “traitor” which gained the support of the rabbi.
So what was the revolt? They couldn’t force him! On shabbes, everybody came to synagogue. They used to block the aron kodesh [the “Holy Ark” where the Torah scrolls are kept in the synagogue—M.P.] and they wouldn’t let you take out the Torah to read the Torah. And right away they came up on the bimbah [pulpit] and said: “We are not going to let you read the Torah because this, this, this and this. We have a family to support! I worked for him three, four, five, ten years. I have four, five kids to support. All of a sudden he hires a goy? That’s not right!”

So then the rabbi was mixed up in it, and he’d talk to them, you know: “That’s not right, you shouldn’t do it, he has a point” … And that was the problem solved.⁴⁴⁷

On the economic front, a network of free loan societies (gmiles khesed kases) sprang up all over Poland, developed by the Joint Distribution Committee and supported by Jewish communities in America. Interest-free loans were made available to “just about anyone who needed money to get through a particularly difficult time. Hundreds of loans … were made at one time or another to tailors, cobblers, carpenters, butchers, peddlers, farmers, labourers, and especially storekeepers.”⁴⁴⁸ As long as they weren’t non-Jews, that is Poles.⁴⁴⁹ In the assessment of one historian, these free loan societies, which were to be found in practically every Jewish settlement in Poland, “had am impact far out of proportion to the small loans they were able to give.”⁴⁵⁰ They more than compensated for any any ill-effects suffered by Polish boycotts. But there was more. The Jewish Economic Committee in the province of Lublin urged Jewish bankers not to extend credit to Polish businesses, Jewish property owners to refuse to lease premises to Christian merchants, and Jewish employers to hire Jews first and foremost and to lay off Polish workers.⁴⁵¹

Mark Verstandig wrote about another widespread phenomenon: avoiding military service.⁴⁵²

Jews had a negative attitude to military service in the Polish army … To get out of military service, many 21-year-olds underwent a regime of self-inflicted torture. For months they hardly slept or ate, so that when they stood before the commission they were “skin and bone”. The morning before the call-up they drank several capfuls of freshly roasted coffee, specially brewed at four to five times the normal strength, so that when they appeared before the doctor their hearts were pounding as if they had been running a marathon. With their emaciated appearance, their abnormal heartbeat gave them a chance of being excused from military service, especially if an intermediary had previously slipped the doctor one or two hundred US dollars. … Conscription indicated that the family had insufficient means to pay for exemption. In our circles it also attracted general censure because the army was regarded as a rough, corrupting environment.⁴⁵³
This phenomenon has a long history. Nahum Goldmann describes a subterfuge used by Jews to avoid serving in the Tsarist Russian army. He noted that the authorities were “exempting only sons from military service, and in Jewish communities it was the rabbi who kept the birth register. So when a father had three sons they were each entered under a different name; in my family my grandfather was called Leibmann, my father Goldmann, and my uncle Szalkowitz!”⁴⁵⁴ Numerous memoirs refer to the interwar period:
In 1937 I was called up. Many Jews dodged service at that time, but I went. It was what my father wanted, too. He said I would learn to fight, and that could prove useful later on in Palestine.⁴⁵⁵
To understand this properly, it should be pointed out that, before the war, Jews had an unwilling relationship with weapons. They all made efforts not to be drafted—they paid bribes, underwent special diets, in order to dodge military service.⁴⁵⁶
The three-month period leading up to the mobilization of our town’s young men into the Polish army was called the “period of torment” in local slang. … And you realized [the young Jewish men] were determined to go from 150 pounds down to 100 in order to escape serving in the Polish army. … release from conscription was not necessarily won by those who had tormented themselves, but by the young men whose parents had paid off the official conscription committee’s doctor.⁴⁵⁷
When it came to enlisting in the Polish army, however, it was a different matter. Some of the eligible youth would starve and exhaust themselves in an effort to lose weight and escape recruitment.⁴⁵⁸
Every spring, the Polish government would dispatch two commissions to our town [Opatów]: one commission was a military veterinarian who inspected horses for remounts; the other selected eligible young conscripts. …

A small number of men would go to great lengths to avoid enlisting in the army. There were certain people in the town who specialized in disabling people so that they wouldn’t be accepted by the draft board. One man’s specialty was giving people a hernia; another man would chop off your index finger, the one used for pulling the trigger. Some people had their eardrum perforated. Others drank tea made from tobacco, because nicotine made the heart race or beat irregularly. … Of course, with such disabilities you were not accepted into the army.

Some of the young men chose to torture themselves to lose a lot of weight so they would look emaciated. They deprived themselves of sleep and food and caroused at night. They loved to play pranks when everyone else was sleeping. They turned the signs upside down or changed them around …⁴⁵⁹
This was the year [i.e., 1937] I was to be called to serve in the Polish army, a situation which created problems for my father. First of all, he had become dependent upon me, and second of all, being a smart man, my father predicted the oncoming war. He decided to do everything in his power to see that I avoid serving time in the army. He went to a special complex to lose weight and arrived at the stage in which he was unable to do any physical work. Then he went for a government medical examination which decided that he could not support his children. I thus became the only provider for our family. I realized later what a personal sacrifice my father had to make to accomplish the task of keeping me out of the army.⁴⁶⁰
… when Art was called up for his army service. He stopped eating regular food and consumed almost nothing but pumpkin seeds. To lose weight, he jogged for miles every day and stopped sleeping at night, so that in addition to looking emaciated, he would look anemic. Art did whatever he could to get a rejection. Before Art went to Pinczow [Pińczów], my father went to the Gerer Rebbe to pray that Art would not be accepted. … Luckily for Art, he was rejected.⁴⁶¹
While some Jews joined the Polish Army, most did their best to avoid it. … Many who faced the draft … sought all kinds of devices to avoid military service. Some found ways to lose weight, others put sand in their eyes. I also had no interest in serving in the Polish Army. Already somewhat overweight, I aksed our doctor for advice. He suggested increasing my daily intake of food and recommended a certain diet. In addition, I went to a vaction resort known for helping people gain weight and it worked. When the army doctors examined me I was excused and told to come back in a year. When I returned, I had gained even more weight, so I was placed in the category known as “to be drafted only in case of war.”⁴⁶²
There were many more such cases: some Jews even maimed themselves to avoid being drafted.⁴⁶³ The practice of attempting to bribe officials sitting on draft boards became widespread.⁴⁶⁴ Moshe Weisbrot, a well-to-do resident of Lublin, “devoted his time to getting Jewish boys out of the army. He bribed the Draft Board, ordered to disable the young man in some way, and collected fees.”⁴⁶⁵ Jacob Avigdor, a medical doctor and chief rabbi of Drohobycz, prided himself on his accomplishments in helping young Jews avoid their military service or—as he put it—“ransoming of captives.” The rabbi’s son son recalled:
Being a chaplain with the rank of Major in the Polish Army, my father had many acquaintances among the Polish officers. …

I remember yeshiva students and Rabbis’ sons coming to Drohobycz for pre-conscription medical examinations. As the time approached, they would fast and resort to all sorts of devices to lose weight in order to be rejected as physically unfit. By using his connections, my father, of blessed memory, helped hundreds of young men to get out.⁴⁶⁶

The leadership of the Łomża yesivot opened a school, the Petach Tikvah, in Mandatory Palestine, as early as 1926, which enabled the Jewish men sent there to dodge the Polish draft.⁴⁶⁷

Tellingly, those who shirked their civic responsibility thought nothing of turning to the Polish authorities in their hour of need. The author Ruth Prawer Jhabvala recalled how her father had left Poland after World War I to avoid being “conscripted by the Polish army, in which no Jew wanted to serve. They were the worst anti-Semitic country in the world. Worse than Germany at that time.” (While many Jews propagated such views and even led an international campaign against Poland, they overlooked the fact that during the civil war raging in Russia at that time at least 100,000 Jews were killed by various Ukrainian, Russian and Belorussian factions, both nationalist and Bolshevik, including the Red Army.) That author then went on to remark, without realizing the incongruity of her statement, that when her father was arrested by the Germans in the early 1930s he was able to secure his release through the intervention of the Polish authorities, as a citizen of Poland.⁴⁶⁸

It turns out, however, that most of those who actually served in the Polish army did not encounter real abuse. Moshe Yudewitz, who became a corporal during his military service and assigned to head a unit of 12 soldiers, reported that “Generally speaking, I did not encounter any anti-Semitism.” Once, he quarrelled with a junior Polish soldier who called him “You Jew pig,” and shouted back, “You Polish pig!” Yudewitz then reported the incident to his commander.
The soldier was called into the office to give his version. He did not deny any part of my version. He was chastised by the captain for not only insulting a Jew, but a Polish patriot, a devoted soldier of the Polish defense forces, and a corporal who carried on his uniform the hard-earned distinction of an eagle. … The soldier was confined to the barracks every weekend for two months.⁴⁶⁹
One must bear in mind that during the Second World War, Blacks served in segregated units of the American army, much to the dismay of the British Allies.

Many young Jews simply left Poland, often illegally, rather than serve in the army.⁴⁷⁰ It is surprising to learn how effective these efforts at avoiding the draft were. Although there may well have been demographic factors at play as well accounting for part of the shortfall, according to information gathered by official sources, in 1930 Jews accounted for a mere 3.2% of all military conscripts, whereas their share of the population stood at almost ten percent. In the latter part of the decade their participation in the military increased to 5.95% in 1936, 6.54% in 1937, and 6.07% in 1938.⁴⁷¹ Avoiding the draft continued in the immediate postwar years, as a number of Polish Jews have confirmed.⁴⁷² (Unlike the case in the United States at the time, the Polish army was not segregated racially or ethnically.)

As for the motives, a Jew who, by his own admission, had not felt anti-Semitism in his native Wilno and was conscripted in early 1939 stated vehemently: “First, I didn’t ‘join’ the Polish Army. Why join the Polish Army? I hated Polaks and wouldn’t join. I was drafted. I was twenty-one and physically okay so they drafted me into the Polish Army.”⁴⁷³ Another Jew from Wilno, then a Marxist in decline but after the war a writer and researcher for the BBC and Reuters (specializing in, and educating Westerners about, Eastern European affairs!), was even more vocal about his abhorrence of the prospect of serving in the Polish army, invoking multiple layers of prejudice and all the venom he could muster to support his “enlightened” views:
… even if Poland were to fight against Germany, I had no wish to join her army and serve under anti-Semitic, sword-rattling officers and arrogant, semiliterate NCOs. …