May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles
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As historian Szyja Bronsztejn points out, not all of the conflicts and quarrels between Jews and non-Jews were as a result of national differences or anti-Semitic motives.304 In particular, it would be unfair to characterize all, or even most, altercations between Polish and Jewish school boys as anti-Semitic assaults. ‘We played together … in school and sometimes near the house too. And as it is between youths, fights resulted. That’s how we played near here.’ Later the same man related how the Catholic boys would elbow a Jewish boy between them in school. When asked if the Jewish youth fought back, he replied: ‘Of course! He was no coward! It was normal. Normal youths. Normal like everyone else.’ … There were fights between the proste and balebatish, and sometimes between Jews and goyim: ‘It would all start with insulting songs and would be returned with insulting songs. Then the fighting began until their parents stopped it.’305 I looked up and saw Tadek Kadril, one of the few Christian friends I had made. In our early years we had thrown rocks at each other, a custom often indulged in by the Jewish and Christian boys of Radom. But later, when we grew older and entered school, we became good friends.306 The following accounts make it clear that ordinary Poles were not the feared, anti-Semitic ruffians that they are often portrayed to be and that many of the incidents were merely the kind of bullying that is commonplace among children everywhere. Jews youngsters could also initiate such incidents and could hold their own, and suffered no consequences on that account. Two or three meters separated Grandmother’s yard from that of Mr. Zychlinski. Close to the fence grew a big nut tree whose large branches overhung Grandmother’s yard. My brother Leon and his friends threw stones into the branches trying to knock down the nuts, then the children picked up the nuts from both sides of the fence. One day a stone fell on Mr. Zychlinski’s son’s head, injuring him. When Mr. Zychlinski complained to my father, Father shook it off saying, “Why does your son walk where stones are being thrown?” Citizen Lajbus Fryde announced, “Your son is fighting with shkootzim!” Father’s answer was, “Do you want the shkootzim to beat up my son?”307 I was also fiercely protective of my sister. She knew that in spite of my size, I could be tough and dauntless. Once when I overheard a bully at school taunt Gita with cries of “Christ killer,” I went after the boy and knocked him down. After I threw the first punch, the boy on the ground cried, “Stop! I take it back!” Reluctantly, I backed off, warning him that I would meet any further comments of that nature with a far stronger response.308 Sometimes when my friends and I swam in the river we were attacked by gentile boys who threw stones and called us “dirty Jews.” We always fought back and after we had beaten them, they would run off to the surrounding fields.309 The first prime minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, recalled his childhood among non-Jewish children in Płonśk, a small town northwest of Warsaw, as follows: “Somebody would perhaps throw a stone, or start an argument, and very often it was the Jews who started first. We used to get the upper hand.”310 In his memoir, he elaborates on Polish-Jewish relations in his hometown and on interaction between rival gangs. I personally never suffered anti-Semitic persecution. Plonsk [Płońsk] was remarkably free of it, or at least the Jews felt well protected in the cocoon of their community life. Nevertheless, and I think this very significant, it was Plonsk that sent the highest proportion of Jews to Eretz Israel from any town in Poland of comparable size. We emigrated not for negative reasons of escape but for the positive purpose of rebuilding a homeland, a place where we wouldn’t be perpetual strangers and that through our toil would become irrevocably our own. … The number of Jews and Poles in the city were roughly equal, about five thousand each. The Jews, however, formed a compact, centralized group occupying the innermost districts while the Poles were more scattered, living in outlying areas and shading off into the peasantry. Consequently, when a gang of Jewish boys met a Polish gang the latter would almost inevitably represent a single suburb and thus be poorer in fighting potential than the Jews who even if their numbers were initially fewer could quickly call on reinforcements from the entire quarter. Far from being afraid of them, they were rather afraid of us. In general, however, relations were amicable, though distant.311 The foregoing corrects the distortions of Celia Heller and her book, On the Edge of Destruction, where she misrepresented Poland’s Jews as living in constant fear of Polish street violence, and of being largely defenceless against it when it did occur. A Pole from Krasnystaw recalled that when he and his friends were playing ball and it happened to land in the courtyard of a Jew, the Jew punctured the ball and shouted at the Polish boys.312 Norman Salsitz’s depiction of his Jewish boyhood in Kolbuszowa, a small town in southern Poland, is equally instructive. As he notes, “We were no community of angels; no one group had a monopoly on mischief.”313 Less-than-innocent pranks and hooligan antics on the part of Jewish youth were frequent occurrences. Their behaviour does not demonstrate a fear of Poles, and had these acts been perpetrated by Polish youth they would doubtless be labeled as “anti-Semitic.” A Jew from Naliboki recalls how he and a friend glued the rabbi’s beard to the desk in the cheder when he fell asleep.314 Other examples include: Some of the things we did I certainly can’t account for, but the fact remains that they were tolerated, sometimes even encouraged. A week before the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur came Selichot, an entire night given over to prayer before the arrival of these days of awe. What we children did on this night, however, was something quite different: we stole fruit off the trees and out of the orchards of the townspeople and peasants. Why we did it no one seemed to know. The Poles, of course, knew of this practice and tried their best to protect their property. Dogs were set upon us, and if Poles caught up with us we could expect a beating. But year after year it was the same all over again. Instead of actually taking fruit, too often we just managed to break off the tree limbs and ruin what was on them. … Boys were boys and some manner of mischief was to be expected. Most of it was relatively harmless. An opportunity developed each time a wagon driver sped through town. There was one peasant in particular, the proud owner of a pair of uncastrated horses … who was our favourite target. On those occasions when he sped by us we’d go running after him, loudly shouting “Mister! Mister!” Finally catching his attention, we caused him to rein in his horses, assuming that we had something important to tell him. After great effort he finally came to a stop and turned to us for our vital information. “We wanted to let you know,” we said, “that your wheels are turning.” We laughed heartily, thinking how great a joke it was. Rarely was the peasant amused. In the summer peasants also stood [in the town market area] selling wild strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries that they brought along in heavy, thick baskets. ... Somr berries never were sold but instead were filched by youthful raiders, myself included. My friends and I missed few chances to sneak up to the baskets and run off with a handful of berries. Why did we do it? The berries we enjoyed, of course, but there can be no denying the thrill that stealing the berries brought us, especially when peasants gave chase for a short distance in a vain effort to retrieve what was rightfully theirs. ... Snatching berries didn’t bother me as much as the large number we crushed when we made our grab.315 Young Polish pranksters and ruffians could also expect rough treatment from Jews. Polish children on their way to school in Wielkie Oczy encountered a group of Jews who were upset over a slogan that had been painted on the fence of a Jewish baker: “Jews to Palestine.” When one of the children read it aloud the Jews quickly encircled and started to beat the terrified Polish children.316 In Lwów, a small group of Polish high school students was ganged up on and assaulted by a much larger group of Jewish youth.317 When a group of Polish ruffians tried to force some Jewish teenage boys off a park bench in Płock, a group of young Jewish men from the Maccabee Sports Club were alerted. “Carrying wooden clubs (designed for exercising), they came over to the park and confronted the gang. The Maccabees beat up these thugs, some of whom were taken to the hospital and the rest to court.”318 When a group of young men drafted into the army organized a “bachelor party” in Tomaszów Lubleski, and got drunk and started beating up Jews, “We … didn’t take to kindly to it, so we organized … defense. And when they started beating up Jews, … they got their portion, and they stopped it.”319 Another account mentions the exploits of Eliakim, a brawny Jew from Wołkowysk whose occupation was hauling wood: the gentile draftees used to cheer themselves with a “little” vodka, and from time to time, they would come into town and fall upon the stalls of the Jewish merchants in the marketplace, and at times like these Eliakim would show them the brawn of his arm, and he would inspire the Jews with his display of courage, returning the fight to its perpetrators, and these unruly [drunken soldiers] would be scattered all over.320 Throughout Europe, in the interwar period sporting events often became the scene of ethnic rivalry.321 (They remain so today in countries like Scotland, England and Italy.322) When “Betar” won the 1938 regional soccer championship against “Junak,” the Polish team in Drohobycz, according to a Jewish source: The spectators pulled out knives after the match. There were wounded on both sides because we had our own scum too. Such as Fischel, who was built like the wrestler Zbyszko Cyganiewicz and loved to beat anti-Semites.323 Matches involving only Jewish teams sometimes also degenerated into raucous, uncivil events.324 Ethnic rivalries did not only impact Poles and Jews, but also other national groups. Kopel Koplanitzky recalls the following incident that occurred in Łachwa, Polesia: In the summer of 1938 … It was a Sunday … Suddenly, there was an explosive sound of shattering glass. Immediately after that, we heard a voice call out in the street: ‘Jews to Palestine.’ Moshe looked out the window and saw one of Lahwah’s Pravoslav [Orthodox] residents, drunk as a skunk, breaking windows of Jewish homes and spewing hatred … Moshe was brave. He ran to the cabinet, grabbed a two-kilogram weight and, half naked, went into the street. He smashed the head of the Gentile, whose name was Goza, with the weight. Goza’s friends dragged him home, drenched in blood. This was an usual incident, but it cooled our relations with the local Byelorussian population.325 Tuvia Bielski, a volatile man who was prone to violence, recalls his experiences in his village of Stankiewicze near Wsielub and in the army:
“That day I gave him such a beating that we did not see him for two weeks.” When a Polish soldier whom Tuvia suspected of being slightly retarded called him a dirty Jew, he grabbed the man by the collar and ordered him to stop. The Pole continued … and Tuvia reached for a knife. He hit the man over the face with the handle of the knife and let him go only after the soldier, whose face was covered with blood, became silent. Several soldiers witnessed the scene. … This incident was followed by several hearings before different superior officers. Each time Tuvia defended himself saying that as a Polish citizen he could not tolerate anti-Semitic abuse. … the case was dismissed.326 [Retold, this story goes as follows:] When he asked a cook if he could have a schmeer of chicken fat for his bread, the man responded: “Get out of here, you scabby Jew.” Without a moment’s thought, Tuvia grabbed the man with his right hand and pummeled him with his left. He shoved him against a table and grabbed a large knife—which, despite his anger, he refrained from using. Instead, he picked up a chair and smashed it across the cook’s face. … The incident was subject to a thorough investigation. Tuvia described [with exaggeration] his pride in serving in the army and defending his country. The cook’s insult was directed not only at him, he said deftly, but at the Polish Army itself. “I am prepared to protect the honor of my uniform.” No action was taken.327 Ben Shedletzky from a small near Warsaw recalled a similar experience: When a fellow Polish soldier said, “Jew, clean my rifle,” Shedletzky hit him with his own rifle, breaking his collar bone and sending him to hospital for 12 days. “I didn’t know a Jew could hit that hard,” the soldier later told a military hearing which cleared Shedletzky of charges. The Polish soldier became Shedletzky’s best friend and later helped save his life.328
Mosshke Millstein is standing at Shlomo’s booth on the sidewalk. The two big shots get close to him. He remains standing fearlessly. … The corporal is angered by the ‘Chutzpah of the Zyd [Żyd]’ and begins to hit. Moshke immediately gives each of them a blow from the right and the left, as it needs to be … a group of ‘the guys’ detain Szustak, preventing him from fleeing, and he is given his just deserts … Szustak is not seen in the street for a while.331
Jews were quite capable of picking fights and defending themselves when confronted, as the following accounts from Kosów Lacki and Częstochowa demonstrate: The driver who took me to the railroad station the day I left was part of a group of Jewish toughs in our little town who didn’t know fear. They loved a fight with goyim and sometimes even among themselves. (Their filthy language alone could kill.) These drivers prided themselves on their muscles, rudeness and standing up to anybody.333 They [Endeks] attacked the Jews, and they didn’t let themselves. … When a Jewish team played a non-Jewish team, a radical team, they always came a fight broke out. So the Jews always won the fight. Because they have tough guys, good boxers, good fighters, they always could, they beat up any attack.334 It should be noted that when there were signs of impending violence in towns, local authorities and police generally took steps to prevent it.335 When violence erupted the police contained it, often resorting to shooting at the demonstrators, and the culprits were prosecuted and punished.336 On a number of occasions suspected Polish instigators and participants were mistreated by the police and even killed.337 When brawls broke out between Poles and Jews at universities, initiated for the most part by Polish nationalist students, the school authorities did not hesitate to take disciplinary action against all those involved in such activities.338 Yet despite all these tensions, according to official Polish sources, some 8,400 Jews who had emigrated from Poland to Palestine chose to return to Poland in 1926–1938.339 Quite a few Jews who left for America also returned. In the small town of Kolbuszowa, there were ten such Jewish families—a clear indication that many Jews did not believe that life was unbearable for them in interwar Poland.340 The 1930s witnessed a marked increase of violence on the part of radicalized elements of society. This was true for many European countries. By far, the largest, most violent and most deadly demonstrations and confrontations were those organized by the socialists and communists.341 Ukrainian nationalists embarked on outright terrorism against the Polish State and were also known to attack Jews.342 The Jews were no exception to these disturbing developments. Violent confrontations were by no means the prerogative of criminal elements, such as the bloody fighting between rival underworld gangs of Litvaks and “locals” in Warsaw and Łódź or the fighting that pitted Jewish criminal elements against Jewish workers in Lublin.343 Street brawls and altercations involving various political, social, linguistic, and even religious factions, disrupting each other’s meetings, and ransacking their opponent’s premises, shops and even synagogues—all these were constant features of everyday Jewish communal life, in both cities and shtetls.344 A bitter 1921 campaign against the appointment of a non-orthodox rabbi to the Warsaw rabbinate resulted in protests by the Agudah in synagogues, study houses and streets, culminating in a mass demonstration of 15–20,000 Hasidim in front of the Gmina building.
The radicalization of the political landscape in the 1930s was a cause for concern, as “nationalism loomed ever larger as a decisive political determinant of Jewish destiny and hence an unavoidable horizon of Jewish political life.”347 The explosive growth of the He-halutz pioneer movement and, at the other end of the political spectrum of Zionism, the dramatic growth in popular support for right-wing Revisionist Zionism, the former’s bitter opponent, gave rise to increased friction and violence in the Jewish community.348 Historian Hillel Halkin provides example of the bitter conflict between the different factions of Zionism in the early 1930’s: Groups of demonstrators interrupted and heckled both men. Violent brawls were frequent. In Warsaw, Ben-Gurion was attacked with Revisionist stink bombs and bricks; in Brisk [Brześć], Jabotinsky was stoned by a Labor Zionist mob. The level of invective was fierce. Jabotinsky called the Zionist Left “lackeys of Moscow.” Ben Gurion referred to him as “Vladimir Hitler,” an epithet given resonance by the brown-shirted squadrons of Betarniks who accompanied him everywhere. (It was actually pure coincidence that both Betar and the Nazis wore brown for their marching colors, which had been chosen for the Betar uniform long before Hitler’s rise.) Nor did it help that Achimeir and Hazit Ha’am, in which Jabotinsky frequently published, praised the Nazis for their anti-Bolshevism and cult of the leader while condemning only their anti-Semitism. Jabotinsky was irate over this.349 Such violence could take on lethal forms, such as the knifing to death of Dawid Siedlarz in Radzyń Podlaski by Jewish communists.350 Violence on a purely personal level was also not uncommon.351 Jews who flaunted their secularism could find themselves roughed up by religious Jews. The Warsaw Yiddish daily Haynt reported, the day after Yom Kippur, 1927, that when a group of Freethinkers, some with lit cigarettes, came out onto a street in the Jewish quarter, “On account of this provocation, a serious battle occurred between the ‘demonstrators’ and the religious passers-by. Water was dumped from a window on Karmelicka Street onto the heads of the Freethinkers.”352 Religious Jews were attacked by Zionists. On October 12, 1933, 40 Zionists stormed the synagogue in Mielec, where 150 Orthodox Jews were praying. They threw stones, smashed windows, and basically demolished the interior of the edifice. The brawl spread onto the adjoining streets, where windows of homes were broken including the rabbi’s.353 As historian Samuel D. Kassow has observed, violence was part and parcel of ordinary shtetl life: Contrary to popular perceptions, the shtetl saw its share of violence and chicanery. Chaim Grade’s account in Tsemakh Atlas of a local balebos’s hiring thugs to destroy a library accords with real-life accounts of violence during kehillah elections, disputes over new rabbis and funerals, and arguments over taxes. Grudges and grievances often interrupted Sabbath prayers and even led to fights in the synagogue. Incidents such as that which occurred in Mińsk Mazowiecki in the 1930’s, when the local butchers assaulted a respected Zionist delegate to the kehillah after he raised the meat tax to pay for the local Tarbut school, were not uncommon. Bribery to fix elections of new rabbis was rampant, and the disgruntled party often brought in its own candidate, thus leading to serious conflicts that split families and friends. … An incident in Głębokie on Yom Kippur in 1932 was not atypical. In that case, a conflict arose in the Starosielsker minyan over who would lead the musaf (additional) prayers. When Rabbi Menakhem-Mendl Kuperstock began to intone “Hineni he-ani,” a fist fight broke out. His opponents, still draped in prayer shawls, ran to adjoining synagogues to rally reinforcements. A mass brawl ensued, and as Polish police arrived en masse to quell the fighting, the leader of the pro-Kuperstock faction was seen escaping through a window. Twenty-five Jews, including many of the prominent community leaders, faced a public trial, which ended in suspended sentences. The editor of the local [Jewish] newspaper had pleaded with the opposing parties to settle their differences before the trial began. For a time it seemed that he had succeeded, but as soon as the court session started, charges and countercharges—in a broken Polish that caused waves of laughter from the spectators—began flying back and forth. In Mińsk Mazowiecki, a sharp battle over the rabbi’s position went all the way to the Polish Najwyższy Trybunał Administracyjny (Supreme Administrative Tribunal).354 Yüklə 2,16 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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