May 2016 Traditional Jewish Attitudes Toward Poles

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.⁴¹² 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.⁴¹³
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!”⁴¹⁴

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.⁴¹⁵ 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.”⁴¹⁶

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.⁴¹⁷
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.”⁴¹⁸
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.⁴¹⁹

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.”⁴²⁰ As long as they weren’t non-Jews, that is Poles.⁴²¹ 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.”⁴²² 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.⁴²³

Mark Verstandig wrote about another widespread phenomenon: avoiding military service.⁴²⁴

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.⁴²⁵
This phenomenon is mentioned in numerous memoirs:
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.⁴²⁶
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.⁴²⁷
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.⁴²⁸
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.⁴²⁹
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 …⁴³⁰
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.⁴³¹
… 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.⁴³²
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.”⁴³³
There were many more such cases: some Jews even maimed themselves to avoid being drafted.⁴³⁴ The practice of attempting to bribe officials sitting on draft boards became widespread.⁴³⁵ 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.”⁴³⁶ 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.⁴³⁷

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.⁴³⁸

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.⁴³⁹

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.⁴⁴⁰
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.⁴⁴¹ 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 1938.⁴⁴² Avoiding the draft continued in the immediate postwar years, as a number of Polish Jews have confirmed.⁴⁴³ (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.”⁴⁴⁴ 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. …

Intellectually, of course, I had realized before that clerical, anti-Semitic, and semifascist Poles could never see Hitler’s war in the same light as a Western liberal or a communist would see it. [In this context it is worth recalling that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were staunch allies in 1939–41. M.P.]…

They [the Poles] hated the Germans for their brutalities, of course, but they hated the like people who, having been used to practicing brutalities against others, never dreamed that they might become the victims of similar treatment themselves.

They admire Hitler. He would lose the war, of course, because he did not have the Poles on his side, but he was an elemental force destined to clear Poland of the Jews and Europe of the rotten democracies [i.e., the very ones the Poles had supplied the Enigma machines and codes to in the summer of 1939] and the Communists, both under Jewish influence. …

I was intent on severing all bonds with the country of my birth; I could not admit for one moment the possibility of fighting in the war alongside Poles, who logically should have been in the same camp as the Nazis.⁴⁴⁵
Service in the military, which was mandatory, cannot—and should not—be equated with identification with the Polish nation.⁴⁴⁶ The contemptuous attitude of many Jews toward Polish statehood was even manifested on the eve of the German invasion in September 1939, and after the defeat of the Polish army by the Germans. A Jew from Lwów recalled the defeatist, mocking atmosphere in his affluent home (his father was one of the country’s major manufacturers of kilims):
That summer everyone was talking politics, but it was beyond me to comprehend the nature of the news. The names of our own Polish leaders were somewhat familiar … I had seen the streets full of patriotic slogans. One of them, “Strong, United, and Ready,” we joked about at home: “Strong to retreat, united to cheat, and ready to give up.”⁴⁴⁷
Yosel Epelbaum (Joseph Pell), a native of Biała Podlaska, recalled the alienation of the Jewish community and the mood in his family on the eve of the war:
Overriding everything was the fact that we never actually felt Polish … It was as if we were part of another nation—the Jewish people—that fate had set down in this godforsaken place. Of course we interacted with Poles. We needed them and they needed us for business. But we never truly mixed, certainly not socially. As a youth in Biała Podlaska, I would never think of entering a church or even the home of a Catholic. …

Although my two older brothers were of draft age, for some reason they were never inducted. I don’t know if they would have served. By this time no one in my family felt any loyalty to Poland or placed any trust in the judgment of its leaders.⁴⁴⁸

The following is the reaction of a Jew who served in the September campaign and returned to his hometown in Volhynia:
He spoke scornfully of the Polish cavalry on horseback, fighting the might of the German tanks … There was no sympathy for the Poles who were massacred, but grave concern for the millions of Jews who fell into German hands.⁴⁴⁹
Other extreme manifestations of anti-Christian bigotry were recorded by Dr. Abraham Sterzer from Eastern Galicia: “I received the traditional Jewish education in a ‘heder’ (religious school). Our rabbi insisted that we Jewish children spit on the ground and utter curses while passing near a cross, or whenever we encountered a Christian priest or religious procession. Our shopkeepers used to say that ‘it is a Mitzveh (blessed deed) to cheat a Goy (gentile).’”⁴⁵⁰ A Jew from Chmielnik conceded that, from a purely practical point of view, it was much more likely for Jews to cheat Poles than vice versa:
Well, it was mostly Jews who cheated Poles, because Jews were typical traders and when they dealt with peasants they were not always honest. It was Jews who were merchants, not Poles. A Jew would never do shopping in a Polish shop, mostly because they were not allowed to buy food in other than Jewish shops. So some Jews cheated.⁴⁵¹
As mentioned, Christian symbols were detested and to be derided, even publicly. The sight of Jews spitting when passing a roadside cross or deliberately avoiding a church was common in prewar Poland. A Jew recalled the stern admonition he received as a boy in Częstochowa: “My grandfather admonished me to stay away from the church, promising harsh heavenly punishment in the event I didn’t heed his warning.”⁴⁵² Leopold Infeld, born in Kraków, recollected that “He was warned that he would go blind if he gazed at Christian holy images.”⁴⁵³ Christian processions evoked fright among Jewish children: “we ran away as though from a fire.”⁴⁵⁴ A young Jewish boy growing up in Busk recalled: “We Jewish children also had a superstition that, if a priest or nun passed by while our mouths were open, our teeth would fall out.”⁴⁵⁵

  The Brzozów Memorial Book records the following testimony: